Vela Palina — Retroactive Royalty Layer

Vela Palina builds on the Capsule + FlowDAG objects defined in 5 Capsules & FlowDAG — The Network’s Long-Term Memory.

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1 Purpose

Vela Palina is a value-tracing economic fabric that converts the provenance proof that FlowDAG already provides into an automatic payment rail. Whenever value lands at any leaf agent, a programmable share streams backward through every Capsule that enabled the outcome, rewarding upstream developers, data owners and prompt engineers, no off-chain licensing deals required.

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2 Key primitives

Primitive	What it does	Stored where
cToken	Lightweight ERC-6909 token minted once per Capsule; represents its perpetual royalty share.	On-chain
RetroStream	Smart-contract function that routes payments backward through the FlowDAG either push (sender pays gas) or pull (receiver claims).	On-chain splitter
Slashing bond	Collateral posted by each Capsule author; forfeited if hidden parents are later proven.	On-chain vault
Weight	Integer attached to a Capsule (default = 1) to express unequal royalty splits.	Capsule metadata

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3 Workflow example

1. Publish Alice trains a niche sentiment model → mints Capsule #01, stakes a bond, receives 1 cToken (weight = 1).

2. Compose Bob builds a trading agent that depends on #01 → mints Capsule #02 (weight = 3) which references parentCapsuleID #01.

3. Monetise Carol integrates Bob’s agent into a SaaS, earns 10,000 USDC in fees.

4. Settle SaaS backend calls RetroStream.settle(Capsule #02, 10,000) Contract streams automatically:

• Carol → 6,000 USDC

• Bob → 3,000 USDC

• Alice → 1,000 USDC

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4 Why Palina matters

Benefit	For whom
Perpetual royalties without manual deals	Upstream developers & data curators
Composable licensing by hash, not paperwork	Agent builders & startups
Network-effect moat: the bigger the FlowDAG, the harder to fork away	Entire Vela ecosystem
Hard, data-driven reputation: value flow doubles as a ranking signal	Indexers & discovery tools

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5 Comparison to existing approaches

Aspect	Traditional royalty standards	Vela Palina
Split depth	One hop (e.g., ERC-2981)	Unlimited hops along a DAG
Payment timing	Manual or periodic	Streams in real time
Dependency proof	Off-chain agreements	Cryptographic Capsule lineage
Fraud deterrence	None	Slashing bonds for hidden parents

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6 Risks & safeguards

Risk	Mitigation
Omitted dependency	Any peer can present proof → offending Capsule’s bond is slashed; flows re-routed.
Sybil Capsules	Author must stake bond; cTokens carry zero voting weight until Capsule earns positive rep.
Hot-wallet griefing	Pull-mode RetroStreams let recipients pay the gas to claim, limiting spam.
Royalty dust	Protocol can batch micro-flows below a threshold before distribution.

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7 Integration timeline

1. Agent Economy Beta — Palina contracts deployed on testnet; cTokens & RetroStreams gated behind allow-list.

2. Audit & bug-bounty — external review, economic-sim testnet.

3. Mainnet activation — DAO vote to turn on continuous issuance of cTokens and live revenue splitting.

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8 Takeaways

• Palina does not change the Capsule or FlowDAG schema, it activates them economically.

• Revenue finds its origin automatically, keeping open collaboration profitable even when agents remix each other at machine speed.

• Parameters (weights, decay, bond size) remain adjustable via DAO vote, so the community can tune incentives as real data arrives.