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Offchain Revenues

When projects pretend their Labs Co doesn't need durable economics, one of three things happens:

  • Opaque cash sweeps: quiet arrangements where money flows back to Labs through hidden mechanisms
  • Offchain deals that siphon value: the classic "vampire economics" problem where usage and fees grow but the token does not benefit
  • Constant token selling: creating perpetual sell pressure of the magnitude that has destroyed countless promising projects

This is why you see protocols with explosive usage paired with tokens that go nowhere. The onchain story says one thing. The offchain arrangements say another.

Zenrock is structured differently. Zenrock Labs is compensated 35% of Zenrock protocol fees, and in exchange, Zenrock Labs agrees to route all economic activity through the protocol.

If Zenrock Labs signs an offchain agreement, all resulting revenue will be treated as protocol revenue and distributed through the same publicly visible tokenomic fee structure. Zenrock Labs will have no second business quietly capturing value outside the protocol. This way, even offchain deals are structurally designed to benefit $ROCK holders.

As a $ROCK holder, you do not have to guess whether some unseen side deal is draining your upside. You want Labs to pursue as many profitable offchain deals as possible, because all of that revenue will flow through the protocol as if it originated onchain.

To be clear: this isn't charity. Zenrock Labs is a for-profit business and $ROCK holders are not stakeholders in that business. But we understand a few things that many projects seem to have forgotten:

A thriving ecosystem benefits Labs far more than hoarding economics ever could.

A strong token is the most powerful tool in crypto: It attracts builders, users, partners, liquidity, attention. It creates a flywheel of decentralized support that no amount of centralized management or offchain deal-making can replicate.

When the token succeeds alongside the project, that's where true network effects are built. That's the system we designed.