SOL vs $RELAY tips: how the discount and burn work

Every transaction submitted through FastRelay carries a tip — it is how the relay meters usage of its priority landing infrastructure. What makes the system worth understanding is that tips can be paid in two currencies: SOL, or $RELAY at a discount. And because a portion of every confirmed $RELAY tip is burned, the token is the rare case of a Solana tip burn token where the burn is driven entirely by real usage, not by a schedule.

Here is how both payment paths work, how the discount is priced, and what the burn actually does to supply.

How SOL tips work

The baseline is simple: each transaction relayed through FastRelay includes a tip of at least 0.001 SOL (1,000,000 lamports), paid to one of the FastRelay tip wallets — recognizable by their Fast-prefixed addresses — selected at random from the published set.

A few practical details:

• During congestion, tip higher. The recommended range is 0.002–0.005 SOL when the network is busy and landing competition is at its worst.
• A large enough stake removes the tip entirely. The tip fades to zero at full stake — there is no subscription to buy.
• Jito bundles carry their own tip. Atomic bundles (up to 5 transactions) additionally require a Jito tip of at least 1,000 lamports, separate from the relay tip.

SOL tips are the zero-setup path: if you hold SOL — and every Solana trader does — you can use the relay immediately.

Paying in $RELAY: the discount

The second path is paying the same tip in $RELAY, the relay's utility token, at a discount to the SOL price of the tip. The relay treats a $RELAY tip as worth more than face value, so the same transaction costs you less when you pay with the token.

For stakers the terms improve further: staking $RELAY reduces what you pay to use the relay, with the tip discount scaling as your stake grows. A committed user who stakes for landing priority and tips in $RELAY is paying meaningfully less per transaction than a casual SOL-tipping user — by design, since the token exists to give the relay's heaviest users the best terms. (Exact discount curves are finalized against real usage data before launch.)

TWAP pricing: value, not token count

An obvious question: if tips are paid in a token whose market price moves, how is the amount kept fair?

The answer is that a $RELAY tip is priced by SOL-value, not by a fixed token count. At tip time, the relay targets a set SOL-value — the discounted equivalent of the SOL tip — and converts it into $RELAY using a time-weighted average price (TWAP) of the RELAY/SOL pair. Averaging over a window rather than reading a single instant does two things:

• It keeps the tip's real cost anchored to the SOL tip schedule, wherever the token trades.
• It resists manipulation — a momentary price spike or dip cannot meaningfully change what a tip costs.

So the number of tokens per tip floats, while the value per tip stays put. You are always paying the same discounted SOL-value; the TWAP just determines how many tokens that is today.

The burn: supply contracts with usage

Here is the mechanic that makes the token's supply dynamics unusual: a portion of every confirmed tip is burned — permanently removed from supply. Confirmed matters: the burn is tied to transactions that actually land, so it tracks genuine relay activity rather than raw submission volume.

The result is an EIP-1559-style usage burn. Every day of real relay traffic removes a slice of $RELAY from existence, and the removal is proportional to how much the network is actually used. The framing worth internalizing is simple: supply contracts with usage. More transactions relayed means more tips confirmed means more tokens burned.

None of this relies on trust. Every burn is an on-chain event that anyone can verify, and the burn dashboard tracks the total burned, the circulating and total supply, and cumulative and per-burn charts — with every burn linked to Solscan so you can check it directly.

Fixed supply, no new tokens ever minted

The burn only means something because the other side of the ledger is closed. $RELAY has a fixed total supply of 1,000,000,000 tokens — an SPL token with no mint authority after launch, so no new tokens are ever minted. There are no emissions, no inflation, and no staking-rewards printing — supply can only ever go one direction: down.

Alongside the usage burn, AllenHark runs a revenue-funded buyback-and-burn governed against a monthly deflation target: when the usage burn runs high, the buyback does less; when usage burn is low, it tops up the difference. The two mechanisms are designed to work together so that the supply reduction is steady without ever overspending on it.

For the full allocation and vesting picture, see the token page or the litepaper.

Which should you tip in?

A practical way to decide:

• Tipping in SOL is the frictionless default — no token needed, minimum 0.001 SOL per transaction, works today.
• Tipping in $RELAY costs less per transaction, and less again if you stake. For anyone relaying serious volume, the discount compounds across every transaction sent.

Either way, the relay delivers the same thing: priority landing with same-slot execution. The difference is what you pay — and, when you pay in $RELAY, the fact that a portion of every confirmed tip leaves the supply for good.

$RELAY is a utility token for network access — it is staked for landing priority and spent on discounted tips. Nothing here is financial advice.