PoUW Economics

Revenue Model

Provers earn rewards from the Mining Pool, which is refilled by transaction fees:

Fee Destination	Share
Validator/Proving Pool	65%
Rivellum	25%
Burn	10%

These ratios are immutable protocol constants.

How Provers Earn

A batch of intents is executed, generating an execution trace
A ProofJob is created with a reward_budget derived from the batch fees
A prover claims the job and generates the ZK proof
On successful proof submission and verification, the prover receives the reward

Reward Calculation

Prover rewards come from the Mining Pool’s share of fees, not directly from the fee split. At epoch settlement, the pool distributes to provers proportionally to work performed, subject to CPI-indexed per-prover caps ($3,500/month).

Provers have no guaranteed floor — compensation is competition-based via the PoUW marketplace auction.

For a batch with 1,000 RIVL in total fees:

800 RIVL to Mining Pool (funds all operators including provers)
200 RIVL to Foundation

Job Economics

Fee Budget vs Reward Budget

Field	Description
`fee_budget`	Upper bound the protocol is willing to allocate
`reward_budget`	Actual credits available for the prover on successful completion

Job Tiers and Rewards

Tier	Scope	Relative Reward
`Micro`	Per-instruction	Smallest
`Macro`	Per-intent	Medium
`Full`	Per-batch	Largest

Full-batch proofs have the highest reward but require the most computation.

Prover Economics

Revenue Factors

Network activity: More intents = more proof jobs = more reward opportunities
Proof speed: Faster provers claim more jobs per time period
Concurrency: Running multiple concurrent workers increases throughput
Uptime: Continuous polling ensures no missed jobs

Cost Factors

Hardware: CPU-intensive workload; 16+ core machines recommended
Electricity: ZK proof generation is compute-heavy
Network: Bandwidth for downloading traces and submitting proofs

Breakeven Analysis

A prover is profitable when:

reward_per_job × jobs_per_hour > hourly_hardware_cost + hourly_electricity_cost

Monitoring Earnings

# Check prover statistics
curl https://rpc.rivellum.network/v1/pouw/provers

# Response includes:
# - jobs_completed
# - jobs_failed
# - total_fee_earned
# - avg_completion_time_ms

Reward Pool Status

curl https://rpc.rivellum.network/v1/rewards/pool

Market Dynamics

Competition: Multiple provers compete for the same jobs; faster provers claim first
No minimum stake: Anyone with adequate hardware can run a prover
Dead-letter recovery: Failed jobs re-enter the queue for other provers

For setup instructions, see PoUW Setup. For the technical specification, see PoUW Specification.