Gas Fees
Design Principles
The network charges a fee for writing credential metadata to the ledger. This includes:
Participant registration (writing institution's permissions to the chain)
Credential registration (initial issuance anchor)
Credential revocation (status updates)
These operations ensure that credentials remain discoverable, verifiable, and dynamically updatable over time. As such, they form a critical part of the network’s trust infrastructure.
Gas fees are designed as low-cost, high-frequency infrastructure primitives.
The pricing model is therefore optimized to:
Ensure frictionless issuance and revocation at scale
Prevent cost barriers to maintaining credential accuracy
Preserve predictability for enterprises and governments
Maintain native alignment with the $VLCT token economy
In particular, revocation must remain inexpensive. If revocation is costly, it is often avoided—undermining the reliability of the entire system.
Token-Native Pricing Model
Unlike verification fees, credential write operations are anchored in token units, not fiat.
At the reference point:
R0=0.10 USD
Base cost per operation: F0=0.1 $VLCT
This corresponds to:
$0.01 per credential registration
$0.01 per revocation
Price Evolution
As the token price increases, the fiat cost of credential writes grows sub-linearly using a dampening function:
Ct=(F0⋅Rt)⋅(Rt/R0)α
Where:
α=0.1 (strong dampening)
Equivalently, token cost evolves as:
Ft=F0⋅(Rt/R0)α
Pricing Scenarios (α = 0.1)
$0.10
1×
$0.01
0.10
$0.20
2×
$0.011
0.11
$0.50
5×
$0.013
0.12
$1.00
10×
$0.016
0.13
$2.00
20×
$0.019
0.15
$5.00
50×
$0.024
0.18
$10.00
100×
$0.032
0.20
$20.00
200×
$0.043
0.22
$50.00
500×
$0.068
0.27
$100.00
1000×
$0.100
0.32
Economic Implications
1. Extremely Low and Stable Fiat Costs
Even under a 1000× increase in token price, the cost of writing a credential grows only from:
$0.01 → ~$0.10
This ensures the network remains viable for:
large-scale issuance (millions of credentials)
frequent updates and revocations
public sector and enterprise adoption
2. Gradual Increase in Token-Denominated Cost
Unlike verification, token cost does not collapse — it grows slowly over time.
0.10 → 0.32 tokens
This ensures:
continued token demand
meaningful economic participation
alignment with network growth
3. Decoupling Infrastructure from Speculation
The model ensures that core infrastructure operations are not exposed to token volatility.
Fiat costs remain predictable
Token costs adjust gradually
No sudden pricing shocks
Positioning Within the Network Economy
Credential writes are intentionally priced as:
“low-cost trust maintenance operations”
They are not designed to maximize value capture, but to ensure:
continuous data integrity
accurate credential lifecycle management
scalable network growth
Economic value is instead concentrated in:
verification events
staking demand
network usage at scale
Bottom Line
This model creates a system where:
writing and updating credentials remains cheap, predictable, and scalable
token demand grows gradually and sustainably
and the network can support global, high-frequency credential activity without friction
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