The flywheel.

zkBNB has no token emissions, no staking rewards created out of nothing and no team supply to sell. Every BNB it pays out comes from one place: the 2.00% fee on trades. That fee is split four ways, and three of those parts give people a reason to hold or trade again.

Loop 1: roots, on every coin

0.50% of every trade on a coin goes into that coin's roots, its own BNB vault. Any holder can burn coins and receive their share:

BNB behind each token = roots ÷ supply
your harvest           = roots × tokens burned ÷ supply

That backing only goes up:

• Every trade adds BNB to the roots and leaves the supply unchanged, so the backing per token rises.
• A harvest removes BNB and burns tokens in the same proportion, so the backing per token stays the same for everyone left.
• Nobody can withdraw roots BNB except by burning coins. The deployer and the admin cannot.

Example. A coin has done 400 BNB of volume. Its roots hold 2 BNB (0.50% of 400). With the full 1,000,000,000 supply, that is 0.000000002 BNB behind each token, so a holder with 10,000,000 tokens (1%) can harvest 0.02 BNB at any time, whatever the market price is.

Roots are capped at 50 BNB per coin, which takes about 10,000 BNB of volume. At the cap, a coin with its full supply has 0.00000005 BNB behind each token, close to the price at which coins graduate from the curve (0.0000000548). Past the cap, the roots share goes to that coin's holder-reward pot, so nothing is lost.

Loop 2: $ZKBNB, across the platform

0.50% of every trade on every coin collects in a single rootstock pot. That pot buys $ZKBNB and sends it to the dead address: the tokens are out of circulation for good, not kept by anyone. $ZKBNB is the one token whose demand grows with all trading on zkBNB, not with a single coin.

$ZKBNB itself was launched on Flap, not on zkBNB. It is a Flap tax token paired with ZEC: 2% on every buy and sell, half to the creator wallet and half paid to $ZKBNB holders in ZEC.

• The keeper runs the buyback once the pot holds at least 0.05 BNB. Anyone can also call buybackAndBurn. Calls from anyone other than the keeper spend at most 0.05 BNB per block, so a bot cannot sandwich a large buy.
• The FeeRouter hands the BNB to the FlapBuyback contract. While $ZKBNB is on Flap's curve, it buys through Flap, which also moves $ZKBNB toward migration. Once $ZKBNB trades on PancakeSwap, it swaps BNB to ZEC, then ZEC to $ZKBNB on the $ZKBNB/ZEC pair.
• A buyback is an ordinary buy, so it pays the 2% $ZKBNB tax and Flap's fees. Part of every buyback therefore reaches $ZKBNB holders as ZEC dividends, and part reaches the creator wallet.
• Every buyback is a public Buyback event with the BNB spent and the tokens sent to the dead address, listed on Rings.

Loop 3: the deployer's 0.80%

The largest share is the one the coin's deployer chooses at launch:

• Holders. BNB builds up in the coin's reward pot. When it reaches 0.05 BNB and an hour has passed since the last run, the keeper snapshots everyone holding at least about $20 of the coin and pays them pro rata. Holding is paid in BNB, not in more of the coin. See Holder rewards.
• Donate. BNB goes to a ring of causes, paid to one cause per epoch as a shielded note. See Donation rings.
• Me or another wallet. The creator, or a wallet they name, is paid on every trade. This is how builders fund a project without holding a team allocation.

Everything except "Me" is handed over at launch and cannot be changed afterwards, by the deployer or by the admin.

Where the BNB goes

Type a volume to see how its fee is split. The shares are the ones set in the FeeRouter today.

What the flywheel is not

• It runs only on trading volume. When nobody trades, no fees come in and nothing is paid out. Roots already collected stay in place.
• Roots set a value you can always redeem, not a market price. Early on, the BNB behind each token is usually far below the price the coin trades at.
• Buybacks reduce the $ZKBNB in circulation. They do not guarantee its price.
• Nothing here is advice. Coins can go to zero. Read Risk.