A short, plain-English summary of the rules every Veld node enforces. No hidden fees, no off-protocol math. If you want the full technical derivations, formulas, and edge-case behaviour, those live in the whitepaper.
The network produces a new block roughly every 180 seconds and mints a fixed reward of 3.13926940 VELD — flat, with no halving. That works out to about 1,507 VELD per day across the network, or 550,000 VELD per year. That flat rate is mined all the way to the 21,000,000 VELD hard cap in roughly 38 years (21M ÷ 550K) — there is no premine and no separate reserve, every coin is issued through the block reward. Once the cap is reached, no more is ever created.
Every block reward is split four ways. Every node enforces this split — a miner who tries to keep more than 50% has their block rejected.
| Stream | Share | Goes to |
|---|---|---|
| Block winner | 50% | Whoever solved this block's proof-of-work |
| Co-mining pool | 20% | Pays out to near-miss miners every 100 blocks (see §10) |
| Vault | 20% | Pays out to stakers every 480 blocks (daily) |
| Validator pool | 10% | Pays out to active validators every 480 blocks (daily) |
Transaction fees from a block flow to the vault on top of the 20% block share.
Every 480 blocks (~24 hours) the vault pays out a portion of its inflow during that cycle to every active staker. Your share is proportional to your stake × your multiplier, normalised against the rest of the active stakers.
Higher multipliers get a bigger slice; everyone else still gets paid. The full payout math is in the whitepaper.
The vault is the network's long-term staking reserve. A consensus-enforced rule guarantees the vault holds a positive growth rate every cycle, even at scale:
These limits are a hard guarantee enforced at consensus time. The multiplier system can only redistribute the cycle budget between stakers; it can never enlarge it. Because at most 90% of inflow leaves per cycle, the vault grows monotonically — an early-staker bonanza is impossible by design, and the post-emission-era fee economy inherits a substantial principal that funds stakers indefinitely.
No single staker can receive more than 75% of any one distribution cycle, no matter how big their stake or multiplier is. If their share would exceed 75%, the excess stays in the vault for the next cycle — it is never redistributed back to other stakers.
At realistic network scale (many active stakers) the limit is dormant: every staker's share is well under 75% and the full cycle distributes. The 75% number is set so a max-lockup staker still earns the full multiplier they were promised; the math is in the whitepaper.
Your staking multiplier is the value that boosts your share of every vault distribution. It comes from two ladders:
The two multiply together. The result is capped at 3.00×, and that ceiling is reachable only at Diamond mining tier — even max Platinum + a 90-day lock tops out at 2.70×. Doing both pays the most.
| Mining tier | Lockup tier | Staking multiplier |
|---|---|---|
| Base | 7 days | 1.00× |
| Base | 90 days | 1.50× |
| Silver | 90 days | 1.875× |
| Platinum | 90 days | 2.70× |
| Diamond | 30 days | 3.00× (would be 3.75×, capped) |
When you stake, you pick how long to lock it. Longer commitment = bigger multiplier. You can't unstake before the lockup expires.
| Lockup | Duration | Multiplier |
|---|---|---|
| Base | 7 days | 1.00× |
| Short | 14 days | 1.10× |
| Medium | 30 days | 1.25× |
| Long | 90 days | 1.50× |
You can hold multiple stakes at the same address with different lockups. Each one unlocks on its own schedule — adding a new stake doesn't reset older ones.
Mining tiers reward consistent mining over time. A day counts as active for your address if you mined at least one block during it — it doesn't matter whether you found 1 or 100. Your tier is recomputed every block from a rolling window of recent days.
| Tier | Requirement | Multiplier |
|---|---|---|
| Base | Mine any block | 1.00× |
| Bronze | 7 active days out of last 14 | 1.10× |
| Silver | 25 out of last 30 | 1.25× |
| Gold | 165 out of last 180 | 1.50× |
| Platinum | 335 out of last 365 | 1.80× |
| Diamond | 1,000 out of last 1,095 | 3.00× |
There's no permanent tier. Mine consistently to earn it; if you stop, the tier drops as old active days roll out of the window. The full rolling-window logic is in the whitepaper.
Validators run a daemon that signs each new block — an endorsement. The validator pool collects 10% of every block's reward and pays it out every 480 blocks (daily) in proportion to each validator's endorsement count over the trailing 480-block window. Idle validators earn nothing for that cycle.
Endorsement is one of three independent reward streams: the co-mining lottery is a flat draw (§11), the vault pays every staker (§3), and only the validator pool is endorsement-gated. They do not overlap and you can earn from more than one.
A validator's registration bond is not just a balance check — it is real, slashable capital. This whole system is active on-chain from genesis — custody, slashing, and the reporter bounty are all live together.
At registration the minimum bond is sent into a sigless custody vault — an address whose key nobody holds, so the principal cannot be moved by anyone. It sits there as collateral for as long as you validate and is returned to you in full on a clean deregister, at the next 480-block settlement boundary.
Signing two different block hashes at the same height (equivocation / double-sign) is cryptographically provable. Anyone can submit that proof. A verified slash is permanent: the offending public key is banned and can never re-register, and the custodial bond is confiscated and split deterministically:
| Share | Goes to | Why |
|---|---|---|
| 25% | The reporter | Bounty — pays anyone who catches and proves an equivocation |
| 25% | The vault | Returned to the staking reserve the validator was meant to protect |
| 50% | The offender | Not total confiscation — the penalty is calibrated, the ban is the real deterrent |
Idle collateral is wasteful, so the bonded principal also earns vault yield at the top lockup tier (1.5×). Because it is paid at the 90-day tier rate, that yield is not paid out immediately — it is escrowed and vests on a rolling ~90-day delay (43,200 blocks), matching the multiplier it earns:
Live custody-vault and yield-escrow balances, per-validator bond status (custodial / slashed), and the slashing-evidence ledger are all on the Validators page. Full vesting schedule and confiscation derivation are in the whitepaper.
Mining doesn't have to win the block to pay you. The 20% co-mining pool collects on every block and pays out every 100 blocks through a simple uniform lottery:
At the end of each window the pool is split equally among a fixed number of randomly-chosen eligible miners. The draw is flat: every eligible miner has exactly the same chance, no matter how many near-misses they submitted — one near-miss qualifies you the same as a thousand. No carry-over between windows; each cycle starts fresh.
Why flat? A weighted lottery would let a hashpower-heavy farm sweep the pool by pumping near-miss volume. An equal-chance draw caps any single miner's expected take per cycle and pushes payouts toward the long tail of small, independent miners — which is the point of the co-mining stream. The exact winner count, draw-randomness derivation, and consensus enforcement are in the whitepaper.
Over the issuance era, miners (block-winner + co-mining pool) collectively earn ~70% of total supply, the vault accumulates ~20% for stakers, and the validator pool accumulates ~10% for endorsers. Post-cap fee-split details are in the whitepaper.
The chain aims at a 180-second block time. Mining difficulty re-tunes itself once every 144 blocks based on how fast the previous window of blocks was found. If miners are finding blocks too fast, difficulty rises; too slow, it falls. For the first 390 blocks after genesis the chain uses a faster 36-block window with a wider adjustment clamp, so a brand-new network settles to its real hashrate within hours no matter how many miners show up on day one.
Each standard retarget clamps the window's measured block time to between 0.5× and 1.5× of target before adjusting, so difficulty can at most roughly double (or fall to about two-thirds) in one step — a hashrate spike or drop can never push the chain off balance suddenly. If the network briefly stalls, mining waits for the next 144-block retarget boundary — LWMA reads the previous window's timestamps and re-targets to the current hashrate without any special-case eased-bits rule.
The retarget algorithm is LWMA (Linear Weighted Moving Average) over a 144-block window. Full math, clamp rationale, and consensus-enforcement details are in the whitepaper.
btcVELD is Bitcoin on the Veld chain: an on-ledger token where 1 btcVELD is always backed by 1 BTC. Deposit real BTC and an equal amount of btcVELD is minted to your Veld address (a wrap); burn btcVELD and the real BTC is paid back out to a Bitcoin address you choose (a redeem). The token ledger lives inside Veld consensus — every node validates every mint, transfer, and redeem.
The peg is protected by consensus rules, not promises:
btcVELD also trades against VELD in an on-chain liquidity pool. From mainnet block 1, the owner-approved launch policy enables swaps under the four-band fee model while deliberately capping the pool at 0.005 BTC of btcVELD at risk. The consensus gate retains an explicit fail-closed mode for a future coordinated release, but the launch unlock height is zero. Pool-cap and ordinary balance, ratio, and authorization rules constrain increases, while valid decreases remain permitted so the cap cannot trap LP funds.
The consensus fee model is seed-ratio-output-asset-4band-v1. The first successful seed fixes an immutable opening-price ratio. A trade whose actual fee-retained final state moves no farther from that ratio pays 0.30%. A worsening trade pays by its exact post-trade deviation: 0–5%: 0.30%, above 5–10%: 0.50%, above 10–20%: 0.75%, and above 20%: 1.00%. Exact 5%, 10%, and 20% values remain in the lower band. Because the output fee itself changes the final reserve ratio, consensus tests all four permitted fees against their own final states; if there is not exactly one self-consistent choice, the swap fails closed and the user must adjust the amount. The fee is withheld from the asset the trader receives, remains entirely in that reserve for liquidity providers, and has no protocol, treasury, miner, validator, or burn cut. This LP fee is separate from the native VELD transaction fee.
Veld supports three kinds of programmable payments, built from covenant scripts (special spend conditions enforced by every node). All three activated at genesis.
Smart-payment addresses look different on purpose (they start differently than normal addresses), and the wallet re-derives every contract locally before signing — if what the node proposes doesn't match what you agreed to, the wallet refuses. Fail closed, always.
Payment channels link into a routed network: a payment can hop across several channels to reach someone you have no direct channel with. Veld's routing is post-quantum end-to-end — the hash-locked hops use ML-DSA signatures and the route itself is wrapped in ML-KEM onion encryption, so intermediate nodes learn only their own hop, and none of it is breakable by a future quantum computer. Watchtowers can guard your channels while you're offline.
A new node's default path is to sync from genesis over the network, verifying every block's proof-of-work and every transaction signature itself — zero trust in anyone.
When an operator-published snapshot is available, a node may bootstrap from it for speed — but never blindly: the snapshot must carry a valid signature from the pinned release key, must declare the exact genesis this binary was built for, and the node re-verifies the snapshot's proof-of-work in the background after it starts, converging to the same zero-trust footing as a from-genesis sync. A --full-ibd flag forces the from-genesis path outright.
Deep history is additionally pinned by checkpoints compiled into the client itself, so no peer can feed a fresh node a fabricated early chain. And once Bitcoin anchoring has confirmed a Veld tip (see §15), that history is final against any attacker who cannot also rewrite Bitcoin.