Compute credits, ZEQ coin and tiers (ECON v4, 2026-09-04)

Two units, two ledgers, one bridge each way.

Compute credit — one hour of compute

• 1 credit = 1 hour = 4,633.2 Zeqonds (3600 s ÷ 0.777000777 s). The ledger is in plancks: 10^43 plancks per credit-hour, the coin's own scale, so the peg is exact.
• Metered per Zeqond. Each compute is charged for the Zeqonds it actually ran, never less than the floor (one Zeqond by default). A 20 ms operator compute costs 1/4,633 of a credit. Every tier pays; only the Foundation owner and BYOK LLM calls are waived.
• Where hours come from: one free hour every 30 days (never stacks), hours bought with a subscription or crypto, hours converted from ZEQ coin (POST /api/credits/from-coin). Credits never move between accounts.
• What a compute answers with: charge: { zeqonds, plancks, hours, floor_applied, fuel_after_hours }. Your balance: GET /api/tally/credits/:zid → fuel_hours, next_free_hour_zeqond. Out of hours: a per-IP try budget (5 an hour), then 402 INSUFFICIENT_FUEL.
• Envelopes are 1:1. Every compute mints one ZEQ envelope carrying the exact plancks it cost (value_plancks); a fuel-paid compute's envelope is yours, a try-budget compute's goes to the Foundation.

The price of an hour

usd_per_hour = cost_basis × (1 + markup) — CPU, electricity, broadband and wear, published live at GET /api/pricing/tiers (price block) and GET /api/oracle/compute-price. Defaults: $1.98 cost basis, markup 2.0 →$5.94 per hour, $0.00128 per Zeqond.

ZEQ coin — the token

The issuer mints about one ZEQ every Zeqond into the WORM spine. Each hour: 0.1% is burned, 5% goes to the treasury, 95% is paid to the machines that supplied sealed compute that hour, pro-rata at one coin per CPU-hour, residual back to the treasury. Coins are bearer tokens: transferable, exportable, bondable. Bridges: credits → coin (POST /api/credits/convert, released from the treasury, supply-neutral) and coin → credits (POST /api/credits/from-coin, the coin is burned).

Tiers are bonds you keep

Your tier is the ZEQ you keep bonded in your own wallet — coins marked immovable, never custodied, never spent:

Tier	Bond	Hours per cycle
Starter	10 ZEQ	10
Builder	40 ZEQ	40
Advanced	120 ZEQ	120
Architect	400 ZEQ	400

POST /api/tier/bond { tier } locks the coins (minting them from your integer balance when needed); GET /api/tier/status shows the bond and the next check; POST /api/tier/release frees them. Every 30 days the node re-attests the bond; if it is short you get 7 days of grace, then the tier falls to what the bond still covers. A subscription's cycle credits convert and bond automatically. Tiers set machine, app and disk limits and provenance cadence — not the price of compute.

Share your CPU, earn coin

Switch on sharing in the Vault (Your Node), the launcher, or zeq-local share --key my.zeqkey. Free public computes are replicated to your machine; a reproduced result is credited for the node-measured Zeqonds (capped per job) and enters the hourly distribution: one coin per CPU-hour, paid to your wallet on your home node, nothing kept by the Foundation. GET /api/contribute/share shows cpu_zeqonds_paid, zeq_earned and the next settlement.