The economics, on the record.

Infrastructure earns trust by what it refuses to do. These are the commitments we hold ourselves to — the exact splits, the patron tiers, and the pledges we publish so anyone can audit whether we kept our word.

Status — demo phase

The economics on this page describe how Attestto operates once mainnet anchoring is live. As of May 2026, anchoring runs on Solana devnet for development. The production anchor service ships with the next milestone. Until then, treat every "anchored on-chain" claim below as a commitment about the architecture under construction, not a statement about today's behavior. We will date and sign the flip to mainnet on this page when it happens.

The principle

Free for citizens, forever. Commerce pays.

Identity, signature, anchoring, recovery, and verification are citizen rights, not services. They are free for every citizen — including renewals — and they will remain free.

The infrastructure is paid for by the entities that extract commercial value from a verified-citizen network: banks doing KYC, employers hiring, insurers underwriting, businesses signing. Every fee on this page is a fee on commerce, never on the citizen.

A constitutional right cannot be a service. Charging citizens to exercise it would be the wrong shape of the entire system.
Stream 1 — B2B anchoring

$1 per anchor, split on-chain by a Solana program

When a business anchors a document, contract, or credential, the $1 fee is split atomically by an open-source Solana program. The split is enforced in code, not policy — no party can divert another party's slice.

$0.10
Relayer treasury
Funds free citizen anchoring. Solvency math published below.
$0.05
Anchor node operators
Pro-rata to active operators by uptime and replicas served.
$0.10
Originating-issuer kickback
Lifetime kickback to the notary or authority that originally issued the citizen's identity credential.
$0.75
Attestto operating
Salaries, R&D, growth, security audits.
Stream 2 — Verification

$5 per verification, with the majority returning to the originating notary

When a business verifies a citizen's identity credential — a bank doing KYC, an employer hiring, an insurer underwriting — the $5 fee is split as follows. The originating notary keeps earning every time their work is reused.

$4.00
Originating notary (80%)
The notary or authority that originally KYC'd the citizen earns recurring revenue from every commercial use of their verification.
$0.75
Attestto operating (15%)
Network operations and continuing development.
$0.15
Relayer treasury (3%)
Additional inflow to the citizen-anchoring treasury.
$0.10
Anchor node operators (2%)
Pro-rata to operators serving the verification path.
A bank that pays $20–$50 per customer for traditional KYC pays $5 to use a notary's existing verification — and the notary earns $4 of it, every time, for the lifetime of that citizen.
How the math holds

Why free for citizens is structurally sustainable

Anchoring on Solana with Merkle batching costs roughly $0.0008 per citizen anchor. At a conservative scale of 1,000 citizens averaging 30 personal anchors per month, the relayer treasury spends about $24 per month on free citizen anchoring.

The same 1,000 businesses generating 30,000 B2B anchors and 10,000 verifications per month put about $4,500 per month into the relayer treasury through the splits above. That is a 188× safety margin. The treasury is structurally over-funded from the moment commercial use turns on.

The economics work because commerce extracts more value from a verified citizen than the citizen will ever consume in infrastructure. The free tier is not a subsidy; it is a side-effect of doing commerce on the network.
Institutional patronage

Four tiers, $100,000 floor, no logo walls

Attestto accepts institutional patronage in the museum and scientific-expedition tradition. Patrons fund the work; they do not steer it. The four tiers below are the only paid recognition we offer.

Founding Patron
$1,000,000
2–3 slots, ever

Permanent acknowledgment in the genesis ceremony recording, on the architecture page, in the technical whitepaper preface, and in every annual report. Once filmed, the genesis ceremony's Founding Patron credit is closed forever.

Sustaining Patron
$500,000
5 per year

Current-year footer credit on the architecture page and acknowledgment in the technical whitepaper preface.

Supporting Patron
$250,000
By institutional review

Whitepaper preface acknowledgment and annual report inclusion.

Institutional Partner
$100,000 / year
Recurring

Annual report inclusion. The minimum entry to the patron register.

Discretion enforced. No homepage logos, no badge walls, no “powered by” headers. Recognition appears in the footer, the preface, and the annual report — nowhere else.
No editorial control. Patrons buy the right to say they supported the work, never the right to shape it. No governance seat, no architectural influence, no veto.
No retroactive credit. A patron who arrives after the genesis ceremony is filmed cannot be added to it. Genesis credit is one-time and irrevocable.
No floor below $100,000. Smaller contributors support the work through open-source code, not sponsorship. The floor protects the class signal of every tier above it.
Pledges

Three things this infrastructure refuses to do

01

No hidden default-issuer

Attestto will not pre-install itself as the default credential issuer in any institutional deployment. Every issuer in the network is named, contractually identified, and visible to the subject. There is no “Attestto issuance” layer hiding behind the public deployment of an institution.

02

No sponsored content in governance or professional surfaces

Governance proposals, professional discovery, credential ranking, and similar surfaces are never paid placement. Where any surface displays ranked or recommended content, the sort key is named in subject-visible UI — and patron status is never one of the inputs.

03

No premium tier for individuals

There is no “priority anchoring” for citizens. No “extra replication”, no “longer retention”, no upsell that creates a class system in which wealthier citizens get better identity than poorer citizens. The free tier is complete. Premium tiers exist only for organizations.

How to verify this page

Anchored, hashable, audit-ready

Starting with the first governance ceremony (see Status above), each published version of this page will be hashed and anchored on-chain under a did:sns identifier owned by Attestto's governance multisig. The proof will be human-verifiable: anyone can fetch the page, hash the canonical content, and check the signature against the on-chain record.

Once mainnet anchoring is live, every change to the splits, the tiers, or the pledges will leave the previous version permanently anchored and the diff on the record. Commitments under this page are versioned, not silently rewritten.

On-chain proof
did:sns:vault.attestto — anchor record published with the next governance ceremony
Why we publish this

Transparency of incentives is the price of legitimacy

A self-sovereign identity infrastructure that hides its own economics has no claim on transparency anywhere else. The W3C Credentials community calls this the Transparency principle: the rules that govern how the system makes money are themselves part of the system, and they belong on the public record.

If anything on this page changes — a percentage, a tier, a pledge — the change is published, anchored, and dated. If something on this page is wrong, please tell us; we will fix it on the public record.

Why we built this → The standards we use → GitHub →