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Overview

You’ll touch two currencies. TAPE pays for storage, and it’s what node operators stake and earn. SOL pays Solana transaction fees, nothing more. Users pay exactly once, when they reserve a tape. Everything else on this page follows that one payment to the people who earn it.

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Following a payment

  1. You reserve a tape, paying in TAPE. The price scales with capacity × duration at the network’s current storage price.
  2. A small fraction of the payment is burned immediately.
  3. The rest is released gradually, epoch by epoch over the tape’s lifetime, into each epoch’s reward pool. Nodes are paid while they store your data, never up front.
  4. While the network is young, a subsidy vault tops up each epoch’s pool from a genesis reserve. The top-up shrinks every epoch and fades as fee revenue grows.
  5. At each epoch’s end, the pool is divided among storage nodes by how much data each was assigned, scaled by its challenge score. A node that failed to prove its data earns less (challenges). Rewards unlock only after the node attests spool sync (spool groups).
  6. Operators claim their rewards each epoch, and the rewards flow through each node’s staking pool to the operator and anyone who delegated to it.
The money flow: a reservation splitting into an immediate burn and a gradual release into the epoch reward pool, the subsidy vault feeding the same pool, and the pool distributing through staking pools to operators and delegators.

One payment: part burns, the rest streams to the nodes that carry the data.

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Staking and roles

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Node operators

Stake TAPE to join the committee. Stake sizes the job: assignment is stake-weighted, so more stake means more assigned data and a larger share of each epoch’s pool. Stake changes take two epochs to apply, in both directions. The downside risks, briefly: data a node fails to prove earns less, and failing the epoch’s random audit forfeits the epoch and slashes (challenges, storage nodes).

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Delegators

You can delegate TAPE to a node operator’s staking pool and share in what it earns, without running hardware. The operator sets a commission; delegators earn the rest as the pool’s value grows.

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Gateway operators

Gateways stake in order to read from storage nodes. That stake is what lets them serve the public, but they hold no data and take nothing from the reward pool. Running a gateway is a business built on top of the protocol: the protocol charges nothing per read, and gateways are where read service is priced. A metered free tier for light traffic, paid tiers for real workloads, or self-hosting for full control (gateways).

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Prices are votes

The numbers on this page aren’t constants. The storage price, the burned fraction, the subsidy rate, committee size and group count: all of them are set by the node committee’s standing votes, re-aggregated every epoch (how epochs work). Check current values rather than expecting fixed ones. For scale, the default storage price operators start from is 954 base units of TAPE per mebibyte per epoch, about 1 TAPE per tebibyte per epoch.

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Supply

All rewards, fees and subsidy alike, are paid from the pre-minted supply. Nothing new is issued after genesis. The total supply is 7,000,000 TAPE, with 9 decimals, minted in full to a single treasury authority when the mint is initialized. There is no on-chain allocation split. Storage activity funds the rewards, proof of service earns them, and the supply never grows.