Incentives and Supply

Overview

Tangle is the current protocol (EVM-based; legacy: Tangle Substrate). TNT is an ERC-20 governance/alignment token used for protocol coordination and incentive programs; it is not the gas token of any underlying EVM chain.

This page explains how incentive programs relate to TNT supply, and what “inflation” means in an EVM-first context.

Incentives (How Rewards Are Funded)

Tangle incentive programs can distribute TNT to:

• Restakers (security providers)
• Operators (infrastructure providers)
• Developers (builders and blueprint authors)

The concrete program rules (eligibility, scoring, payout cadence) are documented in the incentives section of the docs. From a tokenomics perspective, the key point is that incentives are funded via explicit budgets rather than an automatic NPoS-style block reward.

Typical funding sources include:

• Governance-controlled treasury allocations
• Protocol revenue and fees (when applicable)
• Time-bounded incentive programs approved by governance

“Inflation” (When Does TNT Supply Change?)

In legacy Substrate-era designs, “inflation” often meant continuous minting to pay NPoS validators/nominators. Tangle’s EVM distribution and incentives do not assume that model.

Instead:

• If TNT has a fixed supply, then incentives are paid from existing allocations (e.g., treasury/incentive pools), and there is no protocol inflation.
• If TNT supports governed minting, then supply can change only via explicit, on-chain authorized actions (e.g., a governance vote), and any “inflation” is a policy decision rather than an automatic per-block mechanism.

Transparency

For each incentive program, Tangle publishes (or can publish) the program’s:

• Budget (total TNT allocated)
• Time window
• Distribution rules and recipients (where appropriate)

This keeps incentive emissions auditable and makes supply changes (if any) attributable to governance decisions.