Confirmed: KUNAI emission changes from 1 September
Following the proposal we published last week and several days of discussion in the Dojo, we’ve settled on a final plan. It goes further than what we originally put forward, and that is a direct result of the conversation that followed it.
What changes
On 1 September, two things happen at once.
The staking APR moves from 19% to 17%. From there it drops two percentage points every month until it reaches 5%, where it stays permanently.
On the same day, the remaining 6,000,000 KUNAI stake-burn reserve is unstaked and burned in a single transaction, rather than over three more annual burns.
The schedule
| Date |
APR |
| 1 September 2026 |
17% |
| 1 October 2026 |
15% |
| 1 November 2026 |
13% |
| 1 December 2026 |
11% |
| 1 January 2027 |
9% |
| 1 February 2027 |
7% |
| 1 March 2027 |
5% |
| From then on |
5%, permanently |
Why 5% and not 10%
Our published proposal said 10%. The discussion in the Dojo is what changed it, and the argument that did it was a fairly uncomfortable one.
At 10% APR we would need to buy back roughly 17,800 KUNAI a week to stop supply growing. We currently manage around 1,900. That is a factor of nine, and setting a target we probably would not reach is worse than setting a lower one we might. At 5% the threshold is 8,773 a week, which is a factor of under five. Still a long way off, but it is a number we can work towards rather than one we would be quoting in the hope that something changes.
So the reason for going further is not that we wanted to pay out less. It is that 10% produced a goal we could not honestly stand behind.
What it does
|
|
| Circulating supply, today |
34,087,668 |
| Immediately after the burn on 1 September |
28,087,668 |
| Emissions over the next 12 months |
766,542 |
| Net supply change, year one |
−5,332,258 |
| Net supply change, year two onwards |
+357,414 |
| Circulating supply after five years |
30,219,568 |
Against the 10% version we published, this emits 481,140 fewer tokens in the first year and 468,242 fewer every year after that.
Worth being precise about one thing: the 6,000,000 was always going to be burned. It was committed at launch and two of the five wallets are already done. What changes is the timing, and the fact that an unstaked reserve stops earning rewards. Bringing it forward prevents around 2.2 million KUNAI from being minted over the next three years that would otherwise have been paid out on tokens we were about to destroy.
What it doesn’t do
Supply still grows from year two. At 5% APR we emit roughly 456,000 tokens a year and buy back around 99,000. That leaves a gap of about 357,000, which is close to 14% of our total pool depth annually.
Our buyback runs on KLV validator rewards, so it scales with activity on KleverChain. If the network grows, so does the amount of KUNAI we buy and burn each week, without us doing anything. More nodes have the same effect. But that depends on a network we don’t control, and every figure above assumes the buyback stays exactly where it is today. If it turns out higher, the numbers improve. We would rather be wrong in that direction.
What we’re watching
The honest risk in this plan is that people unstake. Going from 19% to 5% is a real reduction and we are not going to pretend otherwise. Around two thirds of freely tradeable KUNAI is currently staked, which gives us room, but we don’t know how much.
Each monthly step is a checkpoint. If participation starts falling in a way that concerns us, we will pause and say so publicly rather than push through and explain it afterwards.
Verifying it
The burn transaction will be published on 1 September, and each APR change will be posted on the day it takes effect.
Everything is checkable on-chain. KleverScan now shows Void separately from Contract Burn, so permanent burns are visible in the supply figures rather than hidden inside them. The stake-burn wallets and the buyback transactions have always been public.
Thank you to everyone who pushed back on the first version. The plan is better for it, and the parts that got argued over are the parts that changed.
Figures measured on-chain, August 2026. Nothing here is a prediction about price, and nothing here is investment advice.
