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03 / 09 All mechanics

Mining costs

The 10% round fee and where every part of it goes.

Beginner

Every time you mine a round, you put some SOL onto the board. The protocol takes a small cut of that SOL before the rest goes into play. Think of it like the rake at a poker table: the house keeps a slice, and the remainder is what’s actually in play and paid out to winners.

Step by step:

  1. You choose how much SOL to deploy into a round.
  2. The protocol skims a small fee off the top: in the current example, 10% of the SOL you deploy.
  3. The remaining 90% becomes your real stake on your hidden tiles.
  4. If you win, your payout is based on that 90% net stake, not the full amount you sent.

So a fee exists, it’s small relative to what you keep playing with, and it’s the same for everyone. Nothing is hidden: the rate is published and you can see it before you deploy.

Intermediate

The fee isn’t just “lost.” It’s split into parts, and most of it works in your favor as a ZINC holder.

Step by step, where the 10% fee goes:

  1. A part funds the Stockpile, the secondary SOL + ZINC jackpot that pays out to bricks-holders, so some of your fee flows back to players.
  2. A part pays affiliates, but only if you were referred by one. Referred players also receive bonus bricks, so a binding is a perk, not a tax.
  3. A part feeds the Bonanza, the rolling ZINC mega-pot that pays out to round winners.
  4. A part funds protocol work, the admin/treasury slice that keeps the system running.

Separately, a buyback slice of your deploy buys ZINC on the open market: steady buy pressure that supports the token’s price and staking yield.

The takeaway: the fee is mostly recycled into player prizes, not pure overhead. The SOL game itself is a near-fair redistribution among players, minus this fee.

Advanced

All fee rates are config-driven, read live from the on-chain Config account in basis points (bps), never hard-coded, and changeable by governance.

Step by step:

  1. deploy_total_fee_bps is the total SOL skim at deploy time. It decomposes into deploy_admin_fee_bps (protocol/treasury), deploy_stockpile_fee_bps (feeds the Stockpile), deploy_affiliate_fee_bps (paid to a bound affiliate, or zero if unbound), and a bonanza share that feeds the Bonanza pot.
  2. Your net staked = gross × (1 − deploy_total_fee_bps / 1e4). At the example 10% rate, depositing 1 SOL leaves 0.9 SOL of effective stake on the winning-tile math.
  3. The buyback is funded separately via a buyback_fee_lamports portion that accrues to the buyback vault and is swapped to ZINC through the Meteora pool by a crank.
  4. Implication for EV: on the SOL side, the house edge is approximately deploy_total_fee_bps. Your positive expectancy must therefore come from minted ZINC + Bonanza + Stockpile bricks outweighing that fee. If those rewards don’t clear the edge, the round is −EV.