WIT: Witnet Blockchain’s Native Tokenomics

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The Witnet Oracle Blog

2 min readFeb 19, 2021

About the WIT token

The WIT token is a utility token, native to the Witnet blockchain, encouraging fair and trustworthy behavior throughout the network. These tokens perform a number of important functions within the ecosystem:

they incentivize node validators (“witnesses”) through a reward system when resolving data requests and mining blocks;
they are used as payment system for data requests;
they act as a form of collateral, ensuring node operators are not subject to bribery in high-value data requests.

Distribution model

The Witnet Mainnet protocol contains a hard-coded distribution model for WIT tokens, as below.

Total supply

No more than 2,500,000,000 WITs will ever exist.

Mining and Block Rewards

70% (1,750m) of the total supply will be mined by block validators (“witnesses”) through block rewards.

Witnet block time is 45 seconds; initially, this reward is set to 250 WIT per block, and is set to decrease geometrically, with a 50% reduction every 3,500,000 blocks (around every 5 years).

Until the first halvening in 2025, there will be 1920 blocks mined every day, with a daily token emission of 480k, a monthly emission of 14.6M, and a yearly emission of ~175M.

Genesis Block Mine

The remaining 30% of the total WIT supply (750M WIT) were pre-mined in the Mainnet genesis block (the first block in the chain).

250M (10%) went to founders and early contributors — all these tokens are locked. All these tokens are initially locked and subject to a vesting period: 6m cliff in April 2021, followed by 18m vesting.
250M (10%) have been allocated to the Witnet Foundation to support ongoing efforts.
250M (10%) were preassigned to participants in the Republic.co token pre-sale and SAFT participants.

About Witnet

Witnet is a next-generation decentralized oracle that leverages state-of-the-art cryptographic and crypto-economic techniques to provide smart contracts with secure data inputs. In exchange for WIT tokens, Witnet’s network of permissionless oracle nodes retrieve, attest and deliver information to smart contracts in a tamper-resistant and decentralized way.

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