the network remembers

premise

a token is usually a set of isolated balances. a number sits in an account, and nothing about that number knows where it came from. mycelium is not that. every wallet is a node in a living graph, and value moves through edges — the record of who transacted with whom — not through balances alone.

total supply is fixed at 4,194,304 mycelium, forever. there is no inflation and no burn. decayed mass is redistributed through the network, never destroyed and never newly minted. the integer is the same on the last day as on the first.

everything else on this page is a consequence of that one rule.

decay

every wallet balance decays at λ = 0.12% per epoch. one epoch is approximately 2.2 days, the length of a solana epoch. decay is continuous in principle and lazy in practice: it is computed by a transfer hook at the moment a stale account moves, from the difference between the current slot and the account's last-touch slot.

there is no crank, no keeper bot, no scheduled job, and no admin override. an account that never moves is never charged gas; its debt to the network is simply recorded in arithmetic until it is settled.

fig. 1 balance as a fraction of principal against elapsed epochs, λ = 0.0012. the transfer hook evaluates this exact curve at settlement time, using the wallet's last-touch slot as t₀; no intermediate state is stored.

propagation

decayed value does not go to a random caller, and it does not go to the protocol. it distributes across the wallet's most recent counterparties — the last 8 to 16 tracked edges per wallet, stored on-chain — weighted by the recency of each connection and by the counterparty's own activity level.

stale nodes lose mass into the network. active, connected nodes absorb it. the graph is the distribution mechanism; there is no other one.

the reference is literal rather than decorative. mycorrhizal networks move carbon, nitrogen and water between trees through fungal filaments threaded into their roots; a shaded seedling is fed by a canopy tree it will never touch. forests do this. the arithmetic here is the same arithmetic.

fig. 2 a force-directed rendering of a wallet neighbourhood: nodes repel, edges act as springs. the highlighted node is stale; the travelling marks are realized decay propagating outward to its tracked counterparties. simulated, not sampled.

the grove

deposit mycelium into the grove vault and the balance freezes against decay. a sheltered balance is not merely spared: grove members become high-weight nodes in the propagation graph, so decayed value from connected stale wallets flows preferentially toward them.

at each epoch boundary, realized decay splits three ways.

grove members, pro-rata 70%
substrate reserve 25%
propagation gas and incentive 5%

there is no lock, no cooldown and no exit penalty. the moment you withdraw, decay resumes from that slot.

grove (sheltered)network (circulating)dormant

fig. 3 modelled migration of the fixed supply across states over 1,200 epochs. mass moves between shelter, circulation and dormancy; the total is invariant by construction.

the substrate

the substrate accumulates 25% of all realized decay plus a transfer fee of 25 bps. it is deployed automatically as protocol-owned liquidity in the canonical mycelium/sol pool.

there is no withdraw function. no key can touch it, including the creators' — because no such key exists.

terminal states

there are two honest endpoints. if every wallet stays connected and active, the network is fully alive: decay approaches zero, propagation has nothing to carry, and nothing moves.

if wallets go dormant en masse, mass concentrates into whatever nodes remain active. the grove outlives the individual trees.

no allocation, no admin role, no pause function, no upgrade path. the hook program is immutable. if everyone who shipped this disappeared tonight, the network would still route mass tomorrow, at the same rate, under the same rules.

that is the only promise mycelium makes.