A node on YOM earns one fee for every play session it serves, paid at a price fixed by the session’s workload tier. No idle-token farming and no per-minute metering: the session is the atomic unit that players consume, operators serve, and the protocol settles. One quantity flows through the whole system, which is what makes every payout auditable end to end.
Compute Tiers: a delivered experience, not a hardware spec
Every session settles at a fixed per-session fee set by workload tier. A tier is a delivered-experience contract: the resolution, framerate, and responsiveness the player actually receives, not a GPU model name. The network measures whether a machine can honor a tier’s contract before it ever assigns one.
| Tier | Walter credits per session | Network fee per session |
|---|---|---|
| Light | 1 | $0.04 |
| Standard | 2 | $0.08 |
| Premium | 4 | $0.16 |
| Ultra | 6 | $0.24 |
See current compute tiers for each tier’s resolution, frame rate and resource allocation. Walter credits pay for consumer access; the network fee pays for the compute session. The subscription price and the network fee are separate amounts.
Fees scale with the resources a session reserves. At equal session duration and utilization, equivalent reserved capacity earns the same per-session fee across tiers. Each game is assigned a tier, and the operator doesn’t choose it; every game currently runs at the Standard tier. Actual host earnings also depend on demand, session duration and the mix its hardware can serve.
Streamed sessions, games and live AI, are billed per session, not per hour, and a session runs up to an hour: a Standard session costs $0.08, against about $1.23 for the same hour on a data-centre GPU reserved for the peak.
Session credits and play time
Walter’s Compute Pass includes a monthly credit allowance. A session uses the credits shown above for its tier and can last up to 60 minutes. The $9.99 subscription includes 70 credits, which players can spend across different tiers. Extra credits cost $0.175 each.
The session cap describes how long a single session can run. The forecast uses an assumed duration of 20 minutes to estimate typical usage and revenue per hour; it does not set a player’s session length. Longer sessions within the cap spread the same session charge over more play time.
Flow of Value
Every session settled through the YOM protocol pays the per-tier fee, and the network splits it when the session closes. Operators contract with the protocol, not with individual publishers, which keeps payouts stable and predictable whoever sold the session.
| Stakeholder | Split | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Node operators | 60% | Paid directly to the operators who served the session. |
| Network development | 30% | Funds development and growth of the network. |
| Holders’ share | 5% | Shared with everyone who holds on to their payout. |
| Retired | 5% | Permanently retired from supply. |
This 60% / 30% / 5% / 5% split is the protocol’s economic invariant. It applies uniformly: Walter sessions, enterprise sessions, and any third-party aggregator settling through the network all pay the same split, on the same tiers.
The two-part payout
Operator income has two components, and the distinction matters when you are deciding whether to plug in:
- Usage payout: the 60% share of every session fee your machine serves. This scales with network demand and your machine’s measured capacity.
- Monthly bonus: $74 per NANO each month, on top of session earnings. $37 is guaranteed when the machine is online at least 6 hours a day, and $37 goes into a shared pool split by the sessions each machine serves. It stays until a better subsidy system replaces it, announced in advance.
At the network’s 50% utilization target a NANO (one Standard session at a time) earns about ~$53 a month before electricity. Total host earnings scale with the capacity the backend estimator assigns to measured hardware; the live figures are on /operators and scale with network demand.
Predictable repricing, not silent drift
Session fees are calibrated against an assumed session duration, then compared with observed usage. As the game library improves and players stay longer, the per-session fee can be recalibrated so that operator earnings per machine-hour hold steady. Fee changes are announced before they take effect: operators should be able to plan around their payout rate the way they plan around their electricity bill.
Pricing
Session fees are priced in USD and paid in $YOM, with a single global token. This keeps operator rewards stable and predictable without depending on the token’s spot price. See Tokenomics for the token detail.
Why this structurally undercuts centralized cloud
The endgame is not a discount; it is a different cost curve. A data-centre GPU’s $1.23-an-hour reserved price is built from GPU capex on a five-year depreciation clock, data-centre real estate, cooling and enterprise networking: costs carried whether or not anyone is playing. YOM’s supply is marginal consumer silicon that already exists: the network’s cost per hour is the operator’s electricity plus the incentive that makes plugging in worthwhile, on hardware that was bought for gaming anyway.
Serving sessions on existing consumer hardware reduces the capital cost that each session has to recover. Operator earnings still depend on demand, utilization and the session duration actually served.
In short: your node earns by serving sessions, priced by workload tier, with a uniform, predictable split that does not depend on who sold the session or where the player is.