5. Fees and Reputation

The Lagrix network's money is USDC: the part of a deal paid through the network is deposited in escrow, the network takes a fee on it, and search and message delivery are paid from a prepaid deposit, one voucher per super-node carrying a running total (changelog entry 52). This document describes what the network charges, where the fees go, what answers for a super-node's honesty, and how super-nodes join.

All rules here live in immutable contracts: no administrator key, no upgrade key, no parameter anyone can change after deployment. New rules can arrive only as a new version of the contracts that participants join voluntarily (document 18). The numbers that are not fixed below are set once, by modelling, before deployment.

5.1 Key properties

5.2 Receipts

Bitcoin pays miners for computations that are useless in themselves, because Bitcoin is its own ledger: proof of work decides who writes the next block and makes rewriting history expensive. Lagrix keeps its escrow and its records in contracts on an EVM layer-2 network (Arbitrum, Base), which already orders transactions and protects history. Lagrix therefore needs no mining: it records what the network exists for — paid deals between agents.

Receipt. When a deal between a customer and a provider is closed in escrow (document 04), the contract records a receipt — a record of a completed, paid deal for the customer, the provider and the super-node it passed through, naming the element and the agent that did the work. A receipt's weight is the network part of the deal in USDC, not the number of messages: a thousand messages inside one deal give one receipt, and a part paid outside the network gives none (document 04, section 4.6).

Receipts are what the rest of the network stands on: search ranking follows the receipts of the last twelve months (document 17), a super-node place goes to owners of provider agents by the receipts of their paid work (section 5.6), and every review belongs to the deal of one receipt (document 17, section 17.5). A receipt cannot be forged: it is the closing of a paid deal.

5.3 The deal fee

The network takes a fee on the network part of every deal, in USDC. Its size is a constant in code, set by modelling and never above 5%; until the modelling is done, it is 5%. The fees of a period are pooled and divided in equal parts among the super-nodes that passed the quality minimum in that period; the parties of a deal never receive it. When the provider works with an element it received over F2F, 20% of the fee goes to the developer of that element and the rest to the pool (document 26). At a 5% fee this is one rule in two cases: with an element received over F2F, 1% of the deal goes to its developer and 4% into the pool; with the provider's own element, all 5% go into the pool. The fee is taken from the very first deal; nothing is kept back for later periods. The full rules are in document 09.

The fee pays super-nodes for the work they do all the time — search, connections and the index of receipts and reviews — and it is how fake deals are made to cost real money. A review weighs exactly the fee paid on its deal (document 17, section 17.5), so a deal with oneself, made to collect reviews, buys one unit of review weight for one dollar of fees: weight can never be had for less than it weighs. The one exception is stated in document 26: in a deal with itself, a node that names a wallet of its own as the developer gets the 20% developer share back, so its weight costs it 80 cents on the dollar.

5.4 Reputation answers for honesty

What a super-node has at stake is its place and its reputation:

• A proven violation leaves a mark. When a violation is proven (document 06, section 6.3), a permanent, visible «proven violation» mark is added to the node's wallet and to all its elements. The mark is a new event in the record: nothing is erased or rewritten (document 17).
• The place is lost for good. The node leaves its place at once and may not hold a super-node place again. Its elements keep working as customers and providers, and every counterparty sees the mark.
• A new element starts from zero. Its way to a place is the same as anyone's — paid work near the median (section 5.6).
• Whoever proves a violation is rewarded in USDC from the fees; the size of the reward is set by modelling.

A place takes a year of real paid work to earn, and a violation loses it for good — that is the stake. Money cannot buy a place, and the mark obeys only the immutable contracts.

5.5 No founder share

The founder receives no share of anything: no share of the fees, no tranche, no pre-allocation. No key changes a rule.

The founder and persons related to them, Fractera, Inc. included, take part only on the same terms as anyone: a super-node place only by the same random choice and on the same conditions (section 5.6), provider agents paid by the same rules. There is no privilege and no exclusion.

At the launch of the network the founder also takes on public commitments of their own: one publicly named node, no deals between the founder's own elements, and, until ten super-nodes pass the quality minimum in a period, no share of the fees — it stays in the pool of the other super-nodes (document 000, entries 41 and 42); and no developer share from the founder's named node (entry 51). They are commitments of a person, not rules of the contracts.

5.6 How new super-nodes join

A super-node is a permanent server that keeps the discovery index, builds search results, keeps the index of receipts and reviews and helps agents connect; payment itself is settled by the escrow contract (documents 01, 02, 04, 06, 17). A super-node place is not bought and not taken by number: places have no stages and no numbers, and the terms are the same on any day (document 000, entries 31 and 40).

• Only owners of provider agents. The application comes from a node whose elements work as providers; one application per node wallet.
• The measure is paid work. The sum of the network parts of deals in USDC in which the node's elements were providers, over the last 12 months (or since the network started, if it is younger) — the same number search follows. Karma is not part of it: it lives outside the network.
• A window around the median. When a place opens, all nodes with a non-zero measure are taken and their median M is found. Nodes with a measure from 0.75 × M to 1.25 × M can apply. The largest providers fall outside the window: whoever earns most in the network does not also hold its search. The median, not the mean, because a few very large providers pull the mean but not the median.
• Random choice with diversity. When a place opens, the contract puts the applicants in the window in a random order, keeping diversity of networks and regions, so that one applicant with many servers cannot take many places. It computes the randomness itself with commit and reveal: when applying, an applicant publishes the hash of its secret; after applications close, it reveals the secret; all revealed secrets together decide the order. Until the last secret is revealed nobody knows the result; an applicant that does not reveal is out of this choice. No oracle and no outside service are needed. Ranking applicants by power or by the number of operations is not used: it would start a race for hardware and reward load generated by oneself.
• An invitation and 48 hours. The first applicant in the order receives an invitation. Within 48 hours it deploys its server, catches up the announcements of the kinds it will hold from their other holders (document 17, section 17.12) and submits it for the check by agents of the network's nodes taken in turn — not by super-nodes: existing super-nodes gain from having fewer competitors, so they must not be the ones who judge newcomers. A server that passes is included; if it is not ready in time or fails, the next applicant in the same order receives the invitation.
• A clean record. A node with a «proven violation» mark cannot apply (section 5.4).
• How many places. There are always at least ten places. They open without waiting for overload, and a place freed among the ten reopens at once. Beyond ten, new places open only when the network is overloaded — when deals, redeemed searches or delivered messages per super-node exceed their constants (changelog entry 47) — two at a time.
• Overload. Once both new super-nodes are included, one super-node leaves: the one with the worst results in the period's checks under load — response time and refusals. There is no penalty. Each overload adds one super-node, and the network replaces its weakest link by the service it gave under load, not by declared hardware.
• The start. While no node has paid work, the window is empty and anyone can apply; the same invitation and the same 48 hours apply. This is not a benefit: these operators have served longest and so are the first to leave by rotation, and their places then open by the window.
• Rotation. Once every 1 year / N, where N is the number of super-nodes, the super-node that has served longest leaves — but only after its successor has passed the check and been included; until then it keeps working. There is no penalty. Each super-node stays about a year, so the door stays open to those who do paid work now, and capacity does not dip while a place changes hands.
• The quality minimum. Every period, agents taken in turn check each super-node against a minimum, its index included (document 17, section 17.12): passed or failed. Those who passed share the period's fee pool equally (section 5.3, document 09); a super-node that fails for several periods leaves.
• Requirements grow. The minimum is checked against the network as it is, so hardware that was enough at entry may fall short as the network grows. A super-node found short of capacity gets a warning at its operator's point of contact; if capacity is not added in time, it leaves early, without a mark (changelog entry 45).
• Vacancies. A place freed by rotation, by failing the minimum or by removal for a proven violation (section 5.4, document 06) opens by the same random choice, using the window of the day it opens.
• The cost we do not hide. A large player can split its work across several nodes near the median and file several applications. Without identity checks this cannot be closed, but each extra application costs a year of real paid work with a 5% fee on the median volume. Leaving by the worst results under load is a contest of quality of service: an operator whose server passes the minimum may still leave when the network grows.

The numbers — the overload constant, how many failed periods lead to leaving, the reward to whoever proves a violation — are set by modelling. How "passed or failed" and the checks under load are measured, and how the contract finds the median cheaply, are open questions (document 000).

5.7 What a super-node is paid for

This is the whole list, in one place; other documents refer here. Everything is paid in USDC, for work, under rules fixed in the contracts. How much a super-node earns is not known in advance and not guaranteed: it depends on the deals of the network and on how many super-nodes pass the quality minimum.

What a super-node loses goes to the others: downtime and a failed minimum cost it its share of the period's pool, which the super-nodes that passed divide among themselves (document 06, section 6.2); a proven violation also costs it the place, with a permanent mark (section 5.4). What a super-node does not earn is part of the list too: the parties of a deal never receive the fee, and a super-node takes nothing from the deals it serves beyond the fees above.