Emissions

Lithos emits LIT when a queued collateral position becomes active. The schedule advances by activations, not by wall-clock time and not directly by Ergo block height. Each activation removes the scheduled LIT from the emission box and places that allocation into the new collateral box.

This page covers the LIT supply, the activation-based schedule, the split between public and private emission, the finder's LIT share, and what happens after emission ends. It only introduces Join, Activate and Clear where they affect emission. The queue rules themselves are covered in LFSM.

Emission allocations#

LIT has a fixed supply of 1,000,000,000 LIT with 9 decimal places. The supply is divided into one genesis allocation and four allocations that leave the emission box over time:

The emission box starts with 825,000,000 LIT, or 825000000000000000 base units. That balance is the 685,000,000 LIT public mining allocation plus the 140,000,000 LIT team, investor and advisor allocations. The 175,000,000 LIT community allocation never sits in the emission box.

The public and private allocations leave the emission box at activation time, but they do not all reach their final recipients at that moment. The new collateral box carries the exact split until a finder spends that collateral box in a Lithos block.

By activation#

An Activate transaction turns one queue box into one live collateral box. That transition is the event that advances the LIT schedule.

At a high level, one activation does the following:

1. Spends the current emission box and the queue box selected by the queue policy.
2. Creates the successor emission box with one fewer scheduled LIT allocation.
3. Creates a collateral box carrying the public LIT amount and, while private emission is active, the team, investor and advisor amounts.
4. Records the public and private split in collateral R6.
5. Increments the emission box's activation counter.

The collateral box then waits in the active set until a finder uses it. A later genesis transaction spends that collateral box to make a block a Lithos block.

The collateral spend releases the LIT that activation reserved. The private allocations go to their fixed recipients during the first 1,000,000 activations. The public allocation is split between the finder and the holding box. The holding box starts the rollup that later pays miners according to their proven work.

Public emission schedule#

One emission epoch is 125,000 activations. The public rate starts at 500 LIT per activation and falls over the life of the schedule.

The public rate and its immediate split are:

Epoch 22 is truncated. Only its first 75,000 activations emit LIT. The schedule reaches its rate-zero phase when the activation counter reaches 2,825,000.

The public schedule emits exactly 685,000,000 LIT. The private schedule emits another 140,000,000 LIT, so the emission box releases its full 825,000,000 LIT balance over the emitting region.

Founder emission schedule#

Private/founder emission runs only for the first 8 epochs, which is the first 1,000,000 activations. Its rate is constant at 140 LIT per activation.

Each private allocation uses the following split:

These amounts are recorded when the collateral box activates and paid when that collateral box is spent. The collateral contract requires the private allocation to be paid in full. A transaction cannot pay only part of the scheduled private split.

After the first 1,000,000 activations, collateral boxes carry no private allocation. Public emission continues until the final emission boundary.

Understand the block finder's LIT share#

The finder of a Lithos block receives 4% of the public LIT rate for the collateral box they spend:

finder LIT = public LIT rate / 25

The remaining 96% enters the holding box and becomes part of the rollup payout for miners. The finder share is part of the 685,000,000 LIT public mining allocation. It is not an extra emission on top of the schedule.

The collateral contract implements this share as transaction slack rather than as a recipient-specific reward rule. Whatever public LIT the holding box is not required to take remains available to the finder's transaction. Because the share is proportional, it falls automatically as the public rate falls and reaches zero when emission reaches its rate-zero phase.

The rollup distributes the holding box's LIT according to miner scores. For how miners prove those scores, read NISPs. Block finders can also earn additional ERG from additional collateral fees, along with MEV and batching.

Understanding why emission is usage-indexed#

The emission schedule is indexed by activations, not by every Ergo block. This ties most LIT emission to actual Lithos use.

The active set holds at most 100 collateral boxes. During bootstrap, Lithos can fill those slots without first retiring old collateral boxes. Those initial activations are the only part of the schedule that can advance without prior Lithos block production.

Once the active set is full, a new activation needs a proof-of-spend box from a collateral box that was already consumed. A finder creates that proof-of-spend when they use collateral in a Lithos block. After bootstrap, continued activation therefore depends on collateral turnover.

If Lithos produces no blocks, the full active set does not turn over and the emission counter stops advancing. The schedule does not continue merely because Ergo height increases. This usage-based approach also encourages long term development from the foundation, as founder rewards are only released when the protocol is doing its job properly and finding blocks.

The emission box layout#

The emission box is a singleton authenticated by the emission NFT. It carries both the remaining LIT supply and the minimum state needed to manage activations:

LIT sits last in the token list deliberately. When the emission balance reaches zero, the LIT entry can disappear without shifting the indexes of the emission NFT, queue tokens or collateral tokens.

The emission box also serves as the source of queue and collateral proposition tokens. Those tokens authenticate queue and collateral positions. Their supply is separate from the LIT schedule.

Separate policies#

The emission box runs two pieces of logic together:

This split means changing queue policy does not change the LIT supply schedule. A replacement enforcer can change which valid queue box becomes eligible or how much LIT a permit requires, but the immutable emission logic still decides how much LIT an activation can release.

The emission logic recognizes exactly three operations:

A fourth operation cannot be added after genesis.

Know what protects the supply#

Several rules keep the contract and client on the same schedule.

First, the emission arithmetic is pinned inside Emission_Guard. A config update can replace queue policy, but it cannot replace the schedule itself.

Second, the Lithos client mirrors the contract arithmetic in EmissionSchedule. Any client building an Activate transaction has to calculate the same public and private amounts as LIT_Emissions.ergo. If the values differ, the contract rejects the transaction.

Third, an activation cannot take more LIT than the emission box actually holds. The final emitting activation is capped by the remaining balance rather than trusting a nominal rate that would overdraw the box.

Finally, private allocations are all-or-nothing. During the private-emission region, a collateral spend must satisfy the complete recorded split.

The end of LIT emissions#

Emission ending does not stop Lithos.

At the boundary, the public and private rates become zero. Join, Activate and Clear remain valid operations. The collateral queue can continue rotating positions, and lenders can continue using LIT permits that already exist in circulation.

This rate-zero phase is explicit in the protocol. The queue does not depend on a positive emission amount, and the LIT token ID remains the same even after the emission box no longer carries a LIT entry.

The result is a fixed supply: after the emission box releases its 825,000,000 LIT, no later activation creates additional LIT.

Next steps#

• LFSM: the contracts that enforce emission, the collateral queue and the rest of the protocol state machine.
• NISPs: how miners prove work and how the rollup divides the public LIT reward.