Fees, Economics, the Coin and the Token
What a transaction costs, what a block costs to settle, the size of today's subsidy, the five things that close it, what the native coin SULI is, and what the…
What a fee is made of
A Layer 2 fee is not just execution. It carries a share of what it costs to publish data and settle on Solana, plus the cost of proving. Any fee model that ignores those is subsidised, and subsidies end.
| Component | What it pays for | Weight |
| Execution | Compute and state access on Solieum | Smallest at scale |
| Data availability | Publishing the batch so the chain can be verified | Usually the largest, and it scales with usage |
| Settlement | Committing state roots to Solana | Fixed per batch, so it shrinks per transaction as batches fill |
| Proving | Generating or standing ready to defend correctness | Small |
Settlement cost is per batch, not per transaction. A thousand transactions in a batch each carry a thousandth of it. That is the entire economic argument for a rollup, and it also means per-transaction cost depends on how full batches are, which is why a single headline fee figure is misleading.
What a transaction costs today
On the rollup — the chain that settles on Solana — a flat 5,000 lamports, paid in SOL, the same order as a Solana signature fee. On a Solieum coin chain the same flat fee is 5,000 base units of SULI, and half of it is burned (below). Both are placeholders for the composition above rather than a market price.
On the rollup, SOL is the gas asset and stays the gas asset: there is no fee token, no fee discount in a token, and no token bid in any auction. Solieum's own native coin, SULI, is the gas asset of Solieum's own chains — the ones that anchor to Solana without a bridge portal — and never of the rollup. A user never needs to acquire anything to use the chain, and the asset they pay in is the asset the operator's own costs are denominated in, so there is no oracle and no exposure between the two.
What a block costs
The devnet chain earns nothing by design and pays for every block it produces. Measured by the node itself:
| Item | Lamports |
| Root record rent | 2,042,160 |
| Batch record rent | 1,229,360 |
| Signature fees, four transactions | 20,000 |
| Sunk per block | 3,291,520 |
| Proposer bond, returned on finality | 100,000 |
Three things follow.
Rent, not fees, is the cost of running a rollup on Solana. It is roughly 164 times a block's fee revenue at this chain's rent schedule. It is sunk because nothing closes a root or batch record: the commitment chain is the chain.
A block needs about 820 transactions at the flat fee to pay for its own settlement. Below that the chain is subsidised, and it is subsidised today by about three orders of magnitude. That is fine for a test chain and it is disclosed rather than hidden; it is not a chain anyone should call self-supporting.
The floor is not the flat fee. The measured data-availability share alone is about 280 lamports per transaction on modelled sustained traffic, derived from the compression figures and Solana's posting mechanic. Sparse traffic compresses worse and costs more.
Two facts make the whole picture tractable. Blocks are produced only when there is work, so an idle chain costs nothing. And the dominant cost is rent, a function of bytes rather than congestion, so it is predictable and, unlike a fee, recoverable.
Five things that close the gap
1. The fee is kept, not burned
It is credited on the Layer 2 to the sequencer identity the genesis declares, and leaves through the bridge like any balance. A burn is what a Layer 1 does with its base fee because there is nobody to pay. A rollup's sequencer pays real Layer 1 costs, and every rollup that covers them keeps the fee. Burning while paying rent is the one combination that cannot stand.
Implemented, and activated from a per-chain block height so earlier blocks replay exactly as they were: the current chain burned up to block 100 and has kept the fee since, a switch it crossed on 10 September 2026, and each block reports which rule it used. The fee step changes shape with it, from one leaf to two, so the verifier gained a paid-fee class beside the burn class.
The sequencer's balance sits on the Layer 2 until swept through the bridge, which is an operational hot-key exposure. The sweep should be frequent and the destination a cold key on Solana.
2. The fee is composed rather than flat
A data share from the bytes published, a settlement share from the block's fill, and a margin. This is computed today and charged by nothing, and the arithmetic shows why it is not ready.
The settlement share is a division by the fill, so it is largest exactly when a block is emptiest. On the current block shape, a one-transaction block prices at 4,487,240 lamports and an 800-transaction block at 6,066. The payload compresses with fill too, 223 bytes per transaction at one and 89 at fifteen, which is the same effect from the other side.
Both the margin and the fee floor default to zero, which is the absence of a published price rather than a price, because this step requires disclosure before charging.
3. Rent is reclaimed
Finalized root records are closed after a retention period and their rent returned to the root's proposer; sealed batch records are closed after a longer one, with the bytes archived first. This turns the dominant cost from sunk into float. Both are built and gated by tests. Neither is deployed.
Retention is deliberately two bounds at once, a count of newer final roots and a floor in slots, because closing a root ends the ability to prove new withdrawals against it. Retention is therefore a proving deadline, and a count alone is a deadline that shrinks as block cadence rises.
4. Ordering is sold, in SOL
A priority-fee auction pays the sequencer for the one thing it has that costs it nothing to give. Planned. Priority-fee instructions from Solana are not honoured today.
5. Services
Keyed RPC and explorer APIs, indexing, and running chains for others with the deployment tooling that already exists. This is revenue that does not wait for transaction volume.
The canonical bridge charges nothing in either direction beyond Solana's own fee. The fast exit earns a spread, in the asset withdrawn, and the operator earns there as a provider or through a share of it.
When Solana's own fees spike
Base-layer fees are not constant. When they rise sharply an operator has three options, and the time to pick one is in advance rather than during the incident.
| Option | What it means |
| Pass through | User fees rise with Solana. Honest and sustainable; users feel the volatility. |
| Absorb | The operator runs at a loss to keep fees stable. Fine briefly, a hidden liability if it becomes the plan. |
| Throttle | Slow batch posting until costs normalise. Protects economics at the cost of settlement latency. |
Solieum will publish which one it does, and the threshold at which behaviour changes, before mainnet. An undefined policy here becomes an improvised decision during exactly the wrong week.
The principles the fee model answers to
- Fees are charged in the chain's native asset: SOL on the rollup, SULI on a Solieum coin chain. No separate token is required to transact.
- Fees track real cost. No figure that only holds while someone is subsidising it. Today's flat fee does not, and the measured gap is stated above rather than hidden.
- The cost model is published, so a quoted fee can be checked rather than trusted.
- Fee changes are announced before they take effect.
- No hidden spread between what is charged and what is paid to Solana.
The native coin, SULI
Solieum has a native coin of its own, SULI — a coin in the sense that SOL, ETH and BNB are coins: the native asset of a chain, not a token issued on someone else's. It is the gas of Solieum's own chains, and it is not the gas of the rollup, which stays SOL.
What is decided and built, as of 21 September 2026:
| Name, ticker, decimals | SOLIEUM, SULI, 9 |
| Genesis supply | 500,000,000, funded at genesis; the coin is named in the genesis file, so it is part of the chain's identity — a rename is a new chain |
| Fee | 5,000 base units, flat, per transaction — the same shape as the rollup's fee |
| Burn | Half of every fee is destroyed (2,500 base units) and half is paid, by one rule the charge and the explorer share. 400,000 transactions destroy one SULI: a fee-policy mechanism, not a supply story |
| Identifier | 22222222222222222222222222222222222222222222, the only all-2 string that is a valid 32-byte key |
| Where it runs | Two devnet chains: one anchored to real Solana devnet with its own settlement, data-availability and inbox deployments, and one on an embedded Layer 1 that also carries the SPL Token program |
A coin chain anchors; it never bridges. A chain has either a bridge portal or a native coin, never both: value on a coin chain is the coin, minted at genesis, not SOL locked on Solana, so there is no vault to prove a withdrawal against and no portal to name. The anchoring — roots and batches committed to Solana — is the mechanism the rollup uses, and it is open to any chain.
What is not decided. How a coin chain is secured beyond its operator: the anchored chain runs today with no dispute game — its dispute authority is the operator's settlement key — so it is a demonstration, not a chain to hold value. A bridge between the rollup and a coin chain, inflation after genesis, allocation and vesting, and the legal and trademark review are open, and the last are the owner's. Nothing is issued on a network of value: there is no SULI mint address on Solana, no public sale has opened, and the devnet coins carry test value only. The direction recorded is that Solieum keeps the rollup on SOL and moves, additionally, to a chain of its own with a bridge between them.
The token
The token does not exist. It is not issued: there is no address and no published supply. Rights to a future token are sold privately, by direct agreement, and delivered if and when it is issued; a public presale is planned with no date, and until it is announced on the official site there is no public sale. There is no airdrop. Until an address is published on the official site, every address claiming to be a Solieum token is a scam.
What has been decided is what it would be for, because that decision constrains the protocol being built now.
The line, and why it is drawn there
On the rollup, anything that is a fee or a collateral securing user funds is SOL, and anything that is a reward, incentive, membership stake or vote is the token. On a Solieum coin chain the fee is SULI, and the line is drawn the same way in that asset.
| Use | Asset | Why |
| Gas, priority bids | SOL on the rollup; SULI on a Solieum coin chain | Users hold it, wallets understand it, no oracle, no exposure against Layer 1 costs |
| Canonical bridge | No protocol fee | Solana's transaction fee only; the door is the wrong place to earn |
| Fast-exit spread, any future token-bridging fee | The asset bridged, in kind | A user bridging a token may hold nothing else |
| Proposer bond, challenger bond, sequencer receipt bond | SOL | Collateral that secures user funds or pays whoever caught a fraud |
| Rewards to proposers, verifiers, challengers | Token | Payment for settlement work that held |
| Staked sequencer membership | Token | A liveness and ordering commitment, slashable for double-signing |
| Fast-exit liquidity incentives | Token | Providers front SOL and earn their spread in SOL; the token bootstraps depth |
| Governance of the economic surface | Token | Fee margins, caps, treasury, grants |
| Treasury | SOL first | Revenue is SOL; whether the treasury buys the token is policy, not protocol |
Why bonds stay SOL. A bond's job is to be worth enough to pay the challenger on the day a fraud is found, which is the day a protocol token is least likely to be worth anything. A guarantee that weakens exactly when it is needed is not a guarantee.
Why the rollup's gas stays SOL. Making the token the gas asset puts a bridge-then-swap step in front of a user's first transaction, creates an exposure between the fee asset and the Layer 1 cost asset, and hardens the regulatory posture, all for gas revenue that is negligible. The large rollups settling to Ethereum charge gas in ETH and are governed by their tokens. This follows that pattern.
What it would govern, and what it must never touch
Governable, because it is economic: fee margins, the bridge fee, fast-exit fee caps, treasury spending and grants, reward schedules and their vesting, retention windows within a floor the code enforces, and admission to a staked sequencer set.
Not governable, because it is the security of the chain and lives in code changed by redeploy: the challenge window and its unit, the air gap and who may deny a root, the dispute authority, the one-step classes and their boundaries, the state commitment, and the supply rule. A vote that could shorten the window or move the dispute authority would make the token the security, which is precisely what it must not be.
Program upgrade authority stays with the operator's keys until a separate decision hands it to a governance-controlled multisig with a timelock.
Three rules that keep the rewards honest
- No fee-path role for the token. On the rollup gas is SOL, priority bids are SOL, the bridge fee is SOL; on a coin chain the fee is the coin itself.
- No collateral role for user funds. Bonds that secure funds or pay a challenger are SOL, and stay SOL even if the token is worth more.
- Rewards are paid for settlement that held, never for settlement promised. A proposer's reward is pending until the window closes clean, and a refuted root pays the challenger instead, along with the bond.
When it would be issued
When at least one of these is true, and not before:
- Sequencing opens to staked outsiders.
- Verifier coverage needs paying rather than volunteering.
- Fast-exit liquidity needs bootstrapping beyond what SOL fees attract.
- Decisions on the economic surface need a constituency wider than the operator.
Until then the rollup runs on SOL, the roles are the operator's, and this paper says no token is issued. Whether the native coin SULI, described above, and this token become one asset or two is not decided; the rollup's gas and bonds stay SOL either way. Non-transferable points for early verifiers, challengers and providers may be recorded before issuance and honoured at issuance; that is a decision for the issuance record, not a promise here.
Supply, emissions, the public allocation, the mint address, and the chain it is minted on are deliberately undecided. Each is a decision with reasons, recorded when taken. What a private round settles is that investor's own rights and vesting, not any of those parameters.