Tokenomics
77% open distribution. 23% insiders.
Non-inflationary after the emission schedule. No institutional VC rounds. No paid advisors. Minority seed/angel investors participate via tokens-only SAFT with no governance control rights — zero allocation until mainnet, then a 5% unlock with 36-month linear vesting. The 77% non-insider supply splits into three honest buckets — 17% users (airdrops, quarterly drops, freeze-insurance), 26% ecosystem (validator emissions, builder grants, bug bounty, advocates), and 34% protocol (strategic reserve, treasury, DEX liquidity, incentive reserve). No catch-all "community" label hiding what each allocation actually does.
100,000,000 SUNA
Every category is milestone-gated, vested, or DAO-controlled. The only unlock event on day 1 is a fraction of the retroactive airdrop — no founder tokens, no team tokens, no investor tokens reach market at TGE ("Token Generation Event") without a multi-year cliff.
| Category | % | SUNA | Vesting / Lockup |
|---|---|---|---|
| Users — open distribution to non-contributors | |||
| Retroactive airdrop | 10% | 10,000,000 | 10% TGE + sell-rate cap + 90% linear 12 months · testnet depositors, auditors, advocates |
| Quarterly user rewards | 4% | 4,000,000 | 10 quarterly rounds · merit-weighted |
| Freeze-insurance pool | 3% | 3,000,000 | Auto-compensation for users wrongly frozen by x/twomode · per-address cap + cooldown · history public |
| Users subtotal | 17% | 17,000,000 | — |
| Ecosystem — earned by work, distributed to contributors | |||
| Validator / security emissions | 17% | 17,000,000 | Linear 7 years from mainnet · then sustained by fees · permissionless |
| Builder ecosystem grants | 5% | 5,000,000 | Milestone-gated, 3 years · DEX / lending / structured products |
| Bug bounty pool | 3% | 3,000,000 | Permanent pool · pays security researchers |
| Community advocates | 1% | 1,000,000 | Performance-vested grants · 6mo cliff + 24mo linear · cancellation for hype content |
| Ecosystem subtotal | 26% | 26,000,000 | — |
| Protocol — DAO-controlled pools for network operations | |||
| Strategic reserve | 15% | 15,000,000 | Bounded on-chain rules + timelock · perpetual validator APR-floor + second round + flexibility |
| Treasury / operations | 9% | 9,000,000 | 4 years linear, DAO-governed · ops + USD-side liquidity tranche + USD buyback source |
| DEX liquidity pool | 6% | 6,000,000 | Hyperliquid + Osmosis + Uniswap · 2-year lock · DAO-controlled migration |
| Incentive reserve | 4% | 4,000,000 | DAO-controlled SUNA incentives · the buyback itself is USD-funded (see below) |
| Protocol subtotal | 34% | 34,000,000 | — |
| Insiders — capped at 23% (Starknet ~38% · Arbitrum ~44% benchmark) | |||
| Team | 15% | 15,000,000 | 5% TGE + 4-year vest, 1-year cliff · on-chain vesting public |
| Seed & angel investors | 8% | 8,000,000 | 4%+4% staged · 0 until mainnet, then 5% TGE + 36-month linear · zero governance |
| Insiders subtotal | 23% | 23,000,000 | — |
| TOTAL | 100% | 100,000,000 | — |
Spend is bounded by published on-chain rules with a hard cap per category: second-round raise (up to ~5%), early builder-grant top-up (up to ~4%), emergency security floor (up to ~3%), and general flexibility (remainder). It also funds the perpetual demand-contingent validator APR-floor that sustains security after the 7-year emission ends.
Every release requires a DAO vote plus a timelock delay. Rules and balances are on-chain and public — the reserve cannot move silently.
against launch-and-crash.
The 2024-2026 airdrop graveyard (Wormhole −99%, Starknet −98%, EigenLayer controversy) has one common cause: high-FDV ("Fully Diluted Valuation") launches with VC-heavy unlocks. Sunima's design makes a VC-cliff collapse highly unlikely.
The airdrop's 10% TGE unlock (1M SUNA) + team 5% TGE (0.75M SUNA) enters the market on day one — under 2M SUNA total. Seed & angel investors unlock nothing at TGE (locked until mainnet). The remaining ~98% of supply is locked behind vesting, DAO reserves, or emission schedules that span 3–7 years.
Seed & angel investors (8% total) unlock nothing at TGE — locked until mainnet, then a 5% unlock with the remaining 95% on a 36-month linear vest. There is no Starknet-style monthly unlock wall because there is no 38% VC allocation. Insiders total 23% — significantly below Starknet's ~38% and Arbitrum's ~44%, while maintaining 0% institutional VC.
The 90% linear-vested portion of the airdrop unlocks gradually over 12 months. Long-tail claimants cannot be flash-dumped by early farmers. Bot-farmed wallets are filtered by the Sentinel stack before eligibility snapshot.
Airdrop recipients who lock their tokens for 12 months post-claim receive a 20% staking bonus. Tokens locked cannot reach DEX order books. Voluntary structural sink that removes supply from the float precisely during the fragile early-market period.
6% (6M SUNA) seeds Hyperliquid, Osmosis, and Uniswap. No CEX listings by design — CEXes require KYC and custody, which conflicts with Sunima's self-custody doctrine. CEX listings are the single largest vector of market-maker dumps on new launches.
~98% locked + 0% VC cliff + 12-mo airdrop vest + lock-bonus sink + no CEX = structurally resistant to the Wormhole / Starknet launch-collapse pattern. Removing the supply that can be dumped removes the largest, most predictable source of launch-crash pressure.
In 2022 Tornado Cash was sanctioned by OFAC. Exchanges delisted it, bridges refused traffic, front-ends went dark. By 2025 the sanctions were lifted — and recovery never came. The anonymity set had collapsed; mainstream users were gone; only ideological holdouts remained. Technically alive, economically extinct.
The lesson: privacy without a legal exit is a regulatory battering ram. Exchanges, custodians, and large counter-parties cannot integrate. Liquidity dries up. Once liquidity is gone, the privacy is gone too — a smaller anonymity set is a more deanonymizable one.
Sunima's Legal Bridge is the moat, not the compromise. Default state = fully encrypted. A signed, verified court order opens exactly one wallet for exactly one period — math, not trust. Exchanges can integrate. Liquidity can exist. The privacy survives because the protocol survives. Few privacy L1s — Monero, Zcash, Aleo, Penumbra — offer this third path.
What worked, what died.
Real market data. Every line in this table is a lesson — either a survivor to emulate (Zcash, Monero, Hyperliquid) or a cautionary tale to avoid (Aleo supply-crush, Wormhole FDV-trap, Starknet VC-cliff).
| Token | Supply | Launch FDV | Current (snapshot · 2025) | Insider % | Community % | Lesson |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Zcash (ZEC) | 21M fixed | N/A (2016 mining) | $5.9B mcap | 20% → expired 2020 | 80% mined | Privacy L1 can hold $5B FDV |
| Monero (XMR) | Tail emission | No ICO, no premine | ~$7B mcap | 0% | 100% mined | Ideological peer — pure community |
| Penumbra (UM) | 100M genesis | ~$80M | ~$20M | Team+investor lockup | 41% (airdrop + pool) | Closest Cosmos privacy peer |
| Namada (NAM) | 1B fixed | Dec 2024 | Phased rollout (transfers locked) | ~50% Anoma + contrib | 33% RPGF + airdrop | 6.5% airdrop to Cosmos stakers |
| Aleo | 1.5B → 5B max | ~$150M | $48M mcap | ~75% backers+team+foundation | ~25% community pool | ⚠ Supply killed the price |
| Injective (INJ) | 100M soft cap | $100M TGE | Variable | ~45% (team+VCs+advisors) | 36% ecosystem | Small-supply L1 works |
| Hyperliquid | 1B | Self-bootstrapped | Strong (HYPE) | 0% VC | 76.2% community | No-VC model proven |
| Wormhole (W) | 10B | $13B | ~$77M | Heavy VC+team | 6% airdrop | ⚠ High-FDV trap: −99% from peak |
| Starknet (STRK) | 10B | $13B peak | ~$220M | 38% VC+team | 31% | ⚠ Monthly unlocks crashed it: −98% |
over 7 years.
Validator emissions are the single largest protocol expense. The supply cap allocates 17% (17,000,000 SUNA) over a fixed 7-year window. Under-pay and validators leave; over-pay and the token inflates to death. Final validator-set size, per-operator floor payout, and implied price floor are determined empirically from Stage 3–4 testnet telemetry rather than fixed at design time.
Validator-set size finalized empirically through the Stage 3–4 testnet ramp on Cosmos-SDK + CometBFT consensus. Validators earn from three streams: block rewards (emissions), gas fees, and MEV ("Maximal Extractable Value") share.
Peer-calibrated against operator cost structure (server, monitoring, opportunity cost) so that the post-emission validator economy is profitable on gas fees alone, with emissions accelerating the bootstrap. The exact per-validator floor is set when the final committee size is locked at testnet open.
17% supply (17,000,000 SUNA) over 7 years is the budget envelope. Required price floor = (validator-set size × per-validator USD payout × 7) ÷ 17,000,000. Both inputs are empirical — published with the testnet open announcement once measured. We do not pre-commit to a specific number that the protocol cannot guarantee.
Operators earn from gas fees plus bug-bounty payouts (no inflation past Year 7). Gas is governance-set on this chain and recalibrated to keep transactions cheap. Every gas fee is split three ways on a committed 24-month ramp (whitepaper §11.5): burn 30% → 50% (rises with maturity — deflation grows as the network matures), validator pool 50% → 35%, and protocol treasury 20% → 15%. Running a validator needs no GPU, so the cost an operator must clear is hosting rather than hardware. The ramp is deliberate bootstrap protection: early on, less is burned and more flows to operators so they stay profitable while fee volume is still thin; as usage grows, the burn climbs and the split normalises. A USD-funded buyback (below the moving-average price, repurchased in USD from real reserves, never by selling SUNA) returns tokens to the DEX pool rather than destroying them. Full breakdown in whitepaper §11.5.