NeuronNetwork (NEURON) Tokenomics
Last updated
Last updated
Token Economics
The $NEURON token is the driving force behind the Neuron Network, as it provides security to the network, supports decisions made by the DAO, and rewards users for their contributions.
Outlined below are these token specifications;
| Project Name | Neuron Network |
|---|---|
Symbol | $NEURON |
Decimal | 18 |
Network | BSC |
Total Supply | 1,000,000,000 |
Transaction Fee | 8% Sell tax 0% Buy tax |
Contract | 0x0000000000000000000000000000000 |
| Segment | Percentage | Total Tokens | Vesting Schedule | TGE | TGE Date |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Fairlaunch/Liquidity | 60% | 600,000,000 | Public Fairlaunch | -- | -- |
Staking Pool | 9% | 90,000,000 | 20% monthly | 20% | -- |
Exchange Listing | 10% | 100,000,000 | 20% | -- | |
Marketing | 6% | 60,000,000 | 20% monthly | 5% | -- |
Bridge Liquidity | 9% | 90,000,000 | 5% | -- | |
Development | 2% | 20,000,000 | 20% vested monthly | 10% | -- |
The NEURON token operates on the BEP-20 standard and serves several purposes, including project governance, incentivizing the network, staking on broker nodes, and facilitating payments on the Marketplace. The token is specific to the Binance mainnet and can be transferred to other networks such as Polygon, Bitindi, and Ethereum Chain through bridging.
IIn the Neuron Network, nodes that publish and subscribe to data are part of a peer-to-peer network. These nodes connect to each other in a specific way to create the network's topology and achieve the primary goal of the Neuron Network, which is disseminating messages published on the network. Each node that joins a network consumes data and helps to relay it to other nodes interested in the network. While the system could potentially function based on reciprocity alone, the reality is far from perfect. In practice, message passing reliability is reduced by various factors.
Churn – Nodes joining and leaving the network can add instability to the topology, which could disrupt message flow
Free riders – In a decentralized network, there’s no way to enforce honest behaviour. Some nodes might selfishly consume messages but refuse to propagate them onwards
Malicious nodes – Some nodes may intentionally try to disrupt the network
Node failures – Nodes can crash, run out of memory, get overwhelmed with data, get disconnected, experience packet loss, etc.
So, very roughly, what determines the quality of service in a network’s topology is the ratio of honest, stable nodes vs. nodes that perform questionably. If your use case needs honest, stable nodes to make your data flows more robust, how do you incentivise good nodes to join? Well, you pay them. This forms the basis of the token economics (tokenomics).
Traditional software products often have freemium and paid plans. Decentralized protocols usually have more of a grayscale spectrum as a result of being subject to true market conditions – you pay more for better service. Gas price on Binance is a good example: you bid a higher gas price to incentivise miners to execute your transaction faster. A similar economy is at play on Neuron: you pay less (or even nothing) if you’re happy with best-effort performance, while you can pay to incentivise nodes to make your network more robust and secure.
For the sake of clarity, the Neuron Network tokenomics should not be confused with the transactions happening on the Neuron Marketplace. On the Network, people pay for infrastructure costs; for data delivery. On the Marketplace, people pay for access to data content. Here’s an analogue: when you order an item from an online store, someone (either you or the store) pays the postal service for package delivery. You also pay the online store for the item you ordered, or the package content. Note that you can very well use the Network for data delivery without using the Marketplace at all, just like you can send and receive packages without ordering stuff from online stores.
Publishers and Subscribers are familiar roles in the Neuron Network, but they are only related to data flows and are considered a layer below tokenomics. The introduction of token economics has led to the development of three new roles: Sponsor, Broker, and Delegator. These roles utilize $NEURON tokens to participate in the incentive mechanisms, with value flows shown in orange in the diagrams below. It's important to note that these roles are independent of each other and can be combined by actors based on their objectives. For instance, a person could be a Sponsor, Publisher, and Delegator all at once.
A Publisher is a node that serves as an entry point for specific data into the Neuron Network. This data typically comes from a neighboring application that connects with the Publisher node, with the aim of distributing the data to Subscribers through the network. Publisher nodes transmit messages to other connected nodes.
A Subscriber is a node in the Neuron Network that desires to receive messages from the network. Like Publishers, they also transmit messages to other connected nodes. Subscribers may have various reasons for joining a network, including neighboring applications that require the data, Brokers who mine the network by being Subscribers, or even charitable reasons for supporting the network.
Sponsors contribute $NEURON tokens to a smart contract known as a Bounty, with the aim of securing the operation of a network. The Sponsor specifies the amount of $NEURON tokens they want to spend over a designated period of time T to enhance network N. The Bounty contract disburses the funds to Brokers who are mining the Bounty. It's worth noting that a network can have multiple Sponsors, and they can be anyone, including Publishers, Subscribers, or a third party.
Broker nodes serve as the miners in the Neuron Network. They constantly monitor available Bounties, which are smart contracts visible to everyone on the public blockchain. Brokers choose the Bounties they want to mine, stake NEURON on them, and become Subscribers in the associated network. Brokers join a network not because they're interested in the data but to earn a portion of the NEURON tokens flowing through a Bounty. They can periodically claim their rewards and withdraw earned tokens from the Bounty contract. Brokers are expected to be honest and stable, properly forwarding messages to connected nodes and possessing good uptime, sufficient bandwidth, and hardware resources to handle network traffic. Failure to meet these standards could lead to being kicked out of the Bounty and having their stake slashed. The amount of NEURON tokens a Broker stakes on a Bounty determines their share of the token flow, and they typically mine Bounties that offer the best yield for their stake. Overcrowded Bounties may not provide the best yield, causing some Brokers to mine other Bounties instead. Similar to any open market, the market for servicing Bounties will eventually reach equilibrium between supply and demand.
Delegators are NEURON token holders who don’t want to do mining themselves, but would rather earn yield on their tokens by supplying liquidity to Brokers. In exchange, they earn a share of the Broker’s rewards. Since Brokers need to stake tokens to mine Bounties, having access to tokens from Delegators enables them to earn more from Bounties, creating a win-win situation.
Delegators select Brokers to stake on and deposit tokens into the Broker’s Stake Pool smart contract. The funds in the pool can then be used by the Broker for staking on Bounties.
While the above processes and roles may seem quite straightforward, one of the key challenges is preventing Brokers that don’t actually do the work (of joining the stream’s topology and relaying messages to connected peers) from earning Bounties.
Since the Brokers place a stake on the Bounties, they could be slashed for not doing the work. The problem is proving to the smart contract that a particular Broker did not do the work or otherwise live up to its promises. There’s limited observability in the network, as basically only the peers connected to a node really know what the node is up to. On the other hand, only the tracker knows which nodes are connected to each other. By combining attestations from a Broker’s peers as well as the tracker, it could be shown with reasonable confidence that a Broker did/didn’t fulfil the requirements of servicing the Bounty – potentially leading to slashing the Broker or at least kicking them out of the Bounty.
Then again, the peers or the tracker could be malicious and give false attestations in order to harm a particular node! As you probably realise by now, this is pretty complex. As is usually the case with decentralized systems, nothing is foolproof and every such system has some conditions under which it fails or becomes less reliable. Understanding those conditions well is the key to establishing what parameters work in the real world and what guarantees can be given about the system in practice. And indeed, much of the remaining work is exactly in this area.
