Merit credentials
Two credentials, earned only through participation. Neither can be bought, sold or transferred โ there is no market for them and no function that moves one. They exist to make certain powers available only to people who have done the work.
Merit credentials
Connect your wallet to see your ARETE and MUNERA.
The cross-link
Each credential is earned by one activity and spent on the other. That is deliberate, and it is the part that makes the system stable.
stake TRITO โโโถ earn MUNERA โโโถ operate more effectively
โฒ โ
โ โผ
stake more โโโ earn ARETE โโโโโโโโโโโ seal blocksIf sealing earned the credential that improved sealing, the most-selected operators would compound into permanent dominance and the cooldown between selections would stop doing its job. Crossing the two means winning selections never buys more selections โ it buys better staking terms, which is a different axis entirely.
ARETE
แผฯฮตฯฮฎ โ excellence through sustained practiceEarned by sealing. Every reward-bearing seal mints ARETE in proportion to what it paid โ a node that is selected but fails to attest earns nothing, because it was paid nothing. Spent on staking yield.
Why base APR is one third
Staking used to mint far more TRITO than node rewards did, and node rewards are burn-backed while staking was minted against nothing. Base rates were cut to a third and ARETE restores them, so yield above the base is earned through consensus work rather than bought with capital. Total issuance roughly halves.
| Tier | Multiplier | Tier-21 APR | ARETE/day per 10,000 staked | 1 ARETE covers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | ร1.5 | 65% | 0.042 | 240,000 stake-days |
| 2 | ร2.0 | 86.7% | 0.083 | 120,000 stake-days |
| 3 | ร2.5 | 108.3% | 0.125 | 80,000 stake-days |
| 4 | ร3.0 | 130% | 0.167 | 60,000 stake-days |
Read the fourth column as: a 10,000 TRITO position at tier 4 spends 0.167 ARETE a day. Cost scales with position size ร days, so a 100,000 position costs exactly ten times that โ and receives exactly ten times the TRITO. A larger stake is not better value per ARETE; it is the same value, larger and faster.
Every tier returns the same yield per ARETE, so the choice is strength versus duration, never efficiency. The last column is that figure inverted: at tier 1, one ARETE covers 240,000 stake-days โ 10,000 TRITO for 24 days, or 1,000 for 240.
Second power: penalty-free early exit
Unstaking before your lock ends normally halves the APR for the days you held. Spending ARETE waives that reduction. Limited to one waiver per position, with a cooldown between waivers per account.
MUNERA
munus โ a duty owed to the publicEarned by staking. A share of the interest your position actually returns โ so an early exit, which pays less interest, mints proportionally less MUNERA with no separate penalty. Spent on operator powers.
| Tier | Freeze | Selection rate | Seal bonus | Per selection |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| none | 11 slots | โ | โ | โ |
| 1 | 9 slots | +20% | +10% | 0.381 MUNERA |
| 2 | 8 slots | +33% | +17% | 0.600 MUNERA |
| 3 | 6 slots | +71% | +36% | 1.109 MUNERA |
| 4 | 5 slots | +100% | +50% | 1.429 MUNERA |
Subscriptions are denominated in selections, not days. Slots open in response to network activity, so their timing varies โ pricing a month would be a promise the protocol could not keep. A deeper tier drains faster in two ways at once: it costs more per selection and it gets selected more often, so the most aggressive operators are also the fastest to run out.
Why they cannot be traded
The moment a credential can be bought it stops measuring participation and starts measuring capital โ which is the thing this protocol is built to avoid. So there is no transfer function, no approval, no market, and no amount of money that produces one.
It also does something for consensus security. Spending a credential burns it, and those burns feed the randomness that selects sealers. An attacker with unlimited capital can flood that pool with ordinary trade burns โ but cannot spam credential burns at any price, because credentials only accrue through sustained participation. Part of the entropy supply is therefore sybil-resistant by construction.