Total Supply and Emission Schedule
QCH has a fixed maximum supply of 1,000,000,000 tokens (1 billion QCH). No new tokens can be minted beyond this cap. The genesis block did not distribute the full supply: 400,000,000 QCH (40%) are reserved for network emissions paid to validators over a 10-year schedule.
Emissions follow a halving curve. In Year 1, 80,000,000 QCH are emitted to validators. That rate halves every two years: 40,000,000 in Year 3, 20,000,000 in Year 5, 10,000,000 in Year 7, and so on. By Year 10, cumulative emissions reach approximately 390,000,000 QCH, close to the 400,000,000 allocated, with a small remainder held as a perpetual security reserve.
After Year 10, validator compensation comes entirely from transaction fees. The protocol retains 5% of all transaction fees in a network treasury rather than paying them fully to validators. This treasury funds protocol upgrades, ecosystem grants, and CCRP migration operations.
Token Allocation Breakdown
The initial 600,000,000 QCH distributed at genesis break down as follows.
Validator bootstrapping reserve: 40,000,000 QCH (4%). This funded the initial validator set during testnet and the first 90 days of mainnet, ensuring the network had sufficient stake to operate securely before public staking was live.
Ecosystem fund: 180,000,000 QCH (18%). Controlled by on-chain governance. Used for developer grants, exchange listings, infrastructure subsidies, and integration partnerships. Disbursements require a QCH governance vote with a 10% quorum and 66% approval threshold. Tokens release linearly over 4 years.
Team and advisors: 120,000,000 QCH (12%). Subject to a 12-month cliff followed by 36-month linear vesting. No team tokens were liquid at genesis.
Community treasury: 100,000,000 QCH (10%). Governed directly by QCH holders. No vesting restriction, but disbursements require governance approval. This is the pool from which CCRP operational reserves draw.
Public sale and liquidity: 160,000,000 QCH (16%). Distributed through the public token sale and initial exchange liquidity provisioning.
Staking Mechanics and the Proof of Coherence Weight
To operate a validator on QuanChain, a node must stake a minimum of 50,000 QCH. There is no maximum stake per validator, but the Proof of Coherence consensus mechanism prevents large stakes from dominating the network through stake alone.
Under Proof of Coherence, 50% of a validator's score comes from stake weight and 50% comes from performance metrics: uptime, block proposal latency, and signature accuracy. A validator with 10x the stake of another but half the performance score will earn roughly equal rewards per slot. This means raw capital does not automatically dominate the validator set.
The minimum lock period for staked QCH is 14 days. During unbonding, staked tokens do not earn rewards. Delegators face the same 14-day unbonding period as validators. There is no penalty for unstaking (only the opportunity cost of 14 days without rewards), but slashing does apply to staked and delegated tokens alike when a validator commits a slashable offense.
Transaction Fee Structure Across the Three Channels
QuanChain's three-channel architecture applies different fee structures to different transaction types.
Channel 1 (payments, 200,000 TPS): Base fee of 0.0001 QCH per transaction, with a size multiplier applied to the signature bytes. At ML-DSA-87's 4,595-byte signature, the size multiplier adds approximately 0.000046 QCH per transaction. Total Channel 1 fee at current parameters: roughly 0.000146 QCH per payment transaction.
Channel 2 (smart contracts, 15,000 TPS): Gas-based pricing analogous to EVM gas, denominated in QCH. The base gas price floats with demand. Contract execution pays both a base fee and a per-byte storage fee. Larger ML-DSA-87 signatures increase the per-transaction storage cost relative to chains using smaller signatures, but TADEQS compression reduces on-chain signature storage by 70%, which largely offsets the raw size difference.
Channel 3 (oracle and data): Data submission fees are priced per kilobyte of payload, with a minimum floor of 0.001 QCH per oracle report. Oracle operators who stake QCH earn a rebate on submission fees proportional to their stake.
If the network activates a lighter post-quantum signature scheme via CCRP (for example, a future 2,048-byte scheme), Channel 1 and Channel 2 fees will decrease automatically because the size multiplier component will be smaller. The protocol does not require a fee parameter change vote when fees decrease as a natural result of a CCRP migration.
The Burn Mechanism
QuanChain does not burn the base fee component of transaction fees. Instead, the base fee goes to the network treasury (5%) and validators (95%). However, the protocol does burn QCH in one specific circumstance: CCRP deprecation penalties. During the Phase 2 deprecation window of a CCRP migration, the 2x fee multiplier on old-algorithm transactions splits as follows: 1x goes to validators as normal, and 1x is burned. This creates a temporary deflationary event during every cryptographic migration, directly linking the token's supply dynamics to the network's quantum security lifecycle.
Governance Weight and Validator APY Estimates
Each QCH token carries one governance vote. Staked tokens vote with the same weight as liquid tokens. Validators do not receive additional governance weight for their stake: a validator staking 500,000 QCH has the same per-token governance weight as a delegator holding 100 QCH.
At the current total staked supply of approximately 280,000,000 QCH (as of testnet projections), and with Year 1 emissions of 80,000,000 QCH distributed to validators, the network-wide staking APY is approximately 28.6% gross. After the 5% treasury cut and a typical validator commission of 8%, delegators earn roughly 18-22% APY depending on their chosen validator's performance score. Validators running high-performance hardware (which boosts the 50% performance component of Proof of Coherence) can outperform this estimate by 3-5 percentage points.
These numbers will compress as more QCH is staked and as emissions halve on schedule. Anyone modeling validator economics should account for the Year 3 halving, which cuts gross emissions to 40,000,000 QCH and will reduce APY proportionally unless total staked supply also decreases.
Why the Tokenomics Are Designed Around the Quantum Migration Lifecycle
The 10,000,000 QCH community treasury reserve and the 5% ongoing fee treasury exist partly to fund CCRP operations. A full cryptographic migration involves validator software upgrades, developer tooling updates, wallet library changes, and coordination overhead. Funding these through a pre-committed treasury avoids the need for an emergency governance vote during what may be a high-urgency security event.
The CCRP burn mechanism (described above) is also intentional. It creates a tokenomic signal that a migration is underway: burn activity during the Phase 2 window is visible on-chain and quantifies how much of the old-algorithm transaction volume remains. As the burn rate drops to zero, the migration is complete. The treasury and burn mechanics together ensure that quantum security events are funded and observable without requiring any changes to the base protocol.
For a detailed breakdown of how CCRP migrations actually execute, see the CCRP protocol deep dive.
