How the Onyx Flywheel Works

2026-05-25·The Onyx Council

A plain-language walkthrough of the staking → yield → ONYX distribution loop. No jargon, no buzzwords, no charts that lie.

How the Onyx Flywheel Works

There is one economic loop. It has four steps. We will walk through each one.

Step 1 — Channel KLV into Attunement

You spend KLV at /attunement. The KLV does not vanish; it goes into the treasury wallet. You receive an attunement rank in the branch you chose. The rank is a multiplier on every yield event you participate in for that branch.

Higher rank costs more KLV per tick. The cost curve is documented in the contract source — there are no hidden ramps and no admin-discretion mults.

Step 2 — The treasury earns

The treasury holds KLV. KLV native staking returns a base annualized yield on chain — that's just how KleverChain works. The treasury also takes a small fixed cut of the casino shard's net house revenue. There is no third revenue source. We are explicit about this on purpose.

Treasury balance is public at /treasury. The balance updates every block.

Step 3 — Daily yield distribution

Once per day, at a fixed UTC hour, the yield orchestrator runs. It does three things:

Snapshots every wallet's current attunement ranks.
Computes each wallet's share of the day's yield pool, weighted by ranks and branch multipliers.
Streams ONYX to each wallet in a single batched on-chain transfer.

The orchestrator's exact distribution math is on chain — anyone can re-derive any wallet's payout from public data. We post the daily total in this blog and on Discord; we post the methodology here.

Step 4 — ONYX has a use

ONYX is not "the project token that does nothing." ONYX is required to:

Mint cosmetic rims for your shards.
Etch your name onto top-3 leaderboard slots.
Buy boost packs in shards that have them.
Pay the swap-back fee if you ever want to convert ONYX → KLV (there is one, and it sits in the contract).

If you don't want to spend it, you can hold it. Holding ONYX gives you a small additional multiplier on the next day's yield. There is a cap on this multiplier; we did not want a "stake forever for infinity" trap.

Why this is a flywheel and not a Ponzi

A Ponzi pays old participants with new participants' money. The Onyx flywheel pays participants with yield the treasury actually earned from on-chain staking and casino fees. If new participants stopped joining tomorrow, the treasury would still earn — slower, smaller, but real — and the daily distribution would still happen.

This is also why the cost curve in step 1 climbs steeply. We don't want anyone to be able to dominate the rank pool with a single large purchase. The curve is the brake.

The honest part

This is a young economy. The early daily yields will be small. The treasury needs to build for the steady-state to feel rewarding. We're not promising a rocket. We're promising a wheel.

— The Onyx Council