No Native Token
Every new Layer 1 of the last decade launched with a coin: ETH, BNB, SOL, AVAX, and a few hundred you have not heard of. The coin is not a technical requirement. It is a business model. A share of the supply goes to insiders at launch, inflation pays validators, and every decision the chain makes afterwards is quietly bent toward one goal: the coin's price.
NetZero Chain does not have one. It will not get one later.
What replaces it
| Function a native token normally serves | On NetZero Chain |
|---|---|
| Paying for gas | USDn, a stable dollar. A transfer costs about $0.02 and will cost about $0.02 next year. |
| Paying validators | 10% of every block's fees goes to the seat that sealed it. |
| Paying miners | 40% of every block's fees plus the Incentive Pool, an on-chain account the operating company funds out of pocket, paying 0.05 USDn per block. |
| Funding the "foundation" | There is none. 50% of fees goes to the Carbon Fund, and that fund can only spend on carbon removals through a timelocked, public process. |
| Governance voting power | Validator seats. Ten at launch, converting to elected seats one per year from year six. Elections weigh miners' work and USDn stake. |
| Speculation | Nothing on the chain is designed to appreciate. CDRT tracks the price of a tonne of removed CO₂, which is a real market, not a reflexive one. |
The rules, exactly
- USDn is never minted by the protocol. On the mainnet design, each unit is minted only against an attested deposit of a real dollar, and burned on redemption. On the testnet it is minted freely because it is test money.
- No premine, no allocation. The genesis contains no balance for anyone except the test faucet and the Incentive Pool, both of which are test money on the testnet and, on mainnet, would be funded against reserves the company actually holds.
- No burn. Burning a backed stable coin would be a gift to the issuer. All fees are distributed.
- The split is enforced in the block. The engine credits the Carbon Fund, the miner pool and the proposer in
Finalize, the same place other chains pay block rewards. A block with a different split does not verify. There is no contract call to skip and no multisig to bribe.
"But then who pays for security?"
Fees do, and the Incentive Pool does while fees are small. That is honest: the pool's balance and its remaining runway are public, so everyone can see for how long mining is subsidised and by how much. On a chain with a native token the same subsidy exists, it is just hidden inside inflation and paid by every holder.
"Why would validators run seats without a token?"
At launch the validators are the operating company; the 10% fee share is its revenue. As seats are elected, the same 10% is what an elected operator earns, plus the bond it must post gives it something to lose. Whether 10% is enough is a market question the testnet exists to answer.
What you get instead of a coin
- Fees you can budget in a spreadsheet, denominated in dollars.
- A chain whose success metric is transactions and tonnes of CO₂ removed, both public.
- No airdrop farming, no "points", no vesting cliffs, no token unlocks to watch.
If you want exposure to something on NetZero Chain, buy CDRT: it is backed one-to-one by carbon removals in custody and you can burn it to retire a tonne. That is the only asset the chain creates, and it is created only when a tonne has actually been removed.