21,000,000 RLD
Lifetime issuance cap under the construction’s execution, ordering and custody assumptions.
RLD & issuance
One currency. A finite issuance budget.
runlai (RLD) pays principal and native protocol fees. The paper fixes a 21 million lifetime cap and zero initial allocation.
Zero allocation
No spendable genesis, founder reserve, investor, treasury or validator allocation.
10²⁴ atomic units
Per RLD. Moving to another domain creates neither a wrapped token nor new supply.
How the budget becomes RLD
The budget consists of 4,096 roots, each containing 1,000,000 unique issuance slots. Successful Mint work consumes one eligible slot and pays its work author 0.005126953125 RLD. All 4,096,000,000 slots together sum to the cap. A slot can be exercised only once.
Claiming a range is different from mining it
Public proportional-work claims can select up to 256 unconsumed slots for relocation under funded receiving terms. Claiming pays no RLD and replaces no later Mint work. It moves only those exact entitlements through the same prepare, release and install-or-reject mechanism used for typed transfers.
A stable placement grant identifies the selected range. Splitting an unrelated range does not invalidate that claim’s work. Moving, consuming or delegating a selected slot can. Every installation or return preserves its unique slot identity and receives a new grant; it never copies the budget.
Public work during isolation
A community with an installed grant and a responsive accepted local quorum can admit Mint work without an existing RLD balance, stake or compulsory pool. The proposed profile is Argon2id with 64 MiB memory, three passes and one lane. Work distributes issuance; it does not choose a global payment history or grant validator votes.
CPU participation does not establish profitability, equal access or ASIC resistance. Hardware advantage, bootstrap authority, bounded sponsored admission and censorship remain real considerations. The profile and its proving costs have no claimed production benchmark.
No promised exhaustion date
There is no halving, automatic difficulty retarget, tail emission or reissue of lost or retired RLD. Hardware progress may accelerate issuance. Lost grants, unavailable controllers or unreachable authorities can leave actual issuance below the cap. Creating a new domain cannot replenish it.
Who pays for a payment?
Every owner-initiated local or cross-domain payment includes a positive RLD service fee and a positive share for a verifiable prior Mint work author, funded from exact authorized existing balances. The work-author share is at least one atomic unit. A funded sponsor may pay on an owner’s behalf. Mint itself requires no RLD admission fee, so first issuance has no prior-balance prerequisite.
Service terms cover consensus, verification and an archival-reserve contribution. Cross-domain terms also bind destination and recovery charges before preparation. Performed preparation service remains paid after cancellation. Relay contracts and renewal have their own funded terms; receipts cannot create a subsidy.
Same denomination, explicit acceptance
Communities choose which authority families and security rules they accept. The paper calls these finite policies acceptance covers. Two balances can both be RLD while carrying different accepted exposure. Common denomination alone guarantees neither universal acceptance nor equal market value.