until now, staking $ZERO did two things for you. it paid you a share of the network's revenue in USDC, into a vault only you control. and if you run a worker, it bumped your cut of every job you serve from 70% to 80%. starting today it does a third thing. it gives you the product itself, free, every day.
how it works
there is a daily pool of free inference credits. it is split across everyone who stakes, in proportion to how much they have staked, and your share is spent automatically, before any of your paid credits, so you run for free until that day's allowance runs out. it refreshes every day at 00:00 UTC. nothing to claim, nothing to switch on.
no single staker can take more than 25% of the pool, so one whale cannot swallow it. the pool is 10,000 credits a day right now, and it grows as the network grows.
it goes to real users, not idle wallets
you only draw from the pool on days you actually use the network, and your $ZERO has to have been staked for at least a day first. stake that just sits there does not dilute the people who are really running prompts.
what this is really for
c0mpute is only worth anything if people use it. every prompt on the network is a real job that pays a real person running a GPU. this allowance exists to get more of those prompts flowing.
you stake $ZERO, you get the product for free, so you actually use it. that usage is real demand: it puts paid work in front of the people running the network, and it gives $ZERO a reason to exist beyond a chart. stake it, use it, more people show up, workers get paid, the token has a job to do. that is the whole point of this upgrade.
the honest part
this is a capped pool, funded by the same treasury that buys back $ZERO and pays out staker rewards. it is not infinite free AI, and we are not going to pretend it is. it is a real, bounded daily allowance that grows as the network earns more.
open staking →
more: the $ZERO token · docs · treasury · self-custody staking
$ZERO · powered by people, not data centers.