Getting Ready for Real-World Utility: The Next Phase of the $CERE Economy

In December we announced Cere Network is taking a big step forward by transitioning its economy from an inflationary model to one driven by real-world utility. And today marks a significant milestone in that journey!

Turning Off Inflation and Burning Excess Tokens

As promised, inflation for $CERE will officially be turned off on April 16, 2025. Following this, excess tokens will be burned by April 30, and going forward, the $CERE tokens supply will be fixed to the 10,000,000,000 non-inflationary total on Cere mainnet. This transition aligns with Cere's commitment to creating a sustainable fixed-supply ecosystem that rewards participants based on real-world utility rather than inflationary rewards.

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Inflationary models are common among Proof-of-Stake (PoS) networks to incentivize validators and nominators during the early stages of network development. At later stages, however, this continued inflation needs to be replaced with transaction fees mapping to real-world utility, which is an achievement achieved by a small number of top blockchain networks. 

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The Cere team has been working tirelessly on tokenizing real-world cloud data compute using the decentralized infrastructure and services powered by the Cere protocol and its L1 blockchain. — We have reached the pivotal milestone where real world users and businesses are now using data clouds powered by our protocol, and are using $CERE token to pay for their data compute, although we’ve only started to tokenize “a few drops out of an ocean” of $1T+ cloud compute market, this is an important accomplishment not only for us, but for all of crypto/blockchain space. 

How is $CERE Token Economy Working—and What’s Coming Next

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As we have previously explained $CERE token economy and it’s participants here, here’s another refresher:

• Developers are already using CERE tokens with Dragon 1 to stream videos or storing app user activities and transactions, the first data cluster powered by Cere Protocol,
  
  • An example for this already being used by an application with many real users and generating revenue as we speak is the new AI-powered DeFi platform by Pineapple, whose founder recently shared in an AMA with Mario Nawfal that “People don’t realize how big this is with what we are building with Cere. It’s AI + DeFi, closing the loop.”  We’ll be diving deeper into the Pineapple Success Story in an upcoming article.
• We are very close to solving one of the hardest problems in Depin, and perhaps in all of web3, which is verifiable computation and enforcing SLA’s of any decentralized data cluster via our blockchain, thus providing truly trustless cloud data compute that can be powered by anyone. This will allow many (and much needed) computing resources with idle bandwidth, CPUs and GPUs to be mobilized around the world into 1000’s of data clusters. We are projecting to have a handful of 2nd and 3rd party data clusters coming online in Q3 and Q4 of this year already. 
• We are working with enterprise partners who are using prototypes of our data cluster to perform near real-time AI-related data compute at the edge (think of more customizable web3 versions of DataBricks). The collection of enterprise licensing fees on our blockchain will be tied to the size and compute of these clusters and their nodes in the near future.

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How We Are Transitioning Rewards to Real Utility

To complete Cere Network’s transition from an inflationary model to a non-inflationary, utility-driven protocol, a series of technical and economic changes are being implemented. 

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It all starts today with the approval of Referanda 33, which turns off inflation & activates the new Fee Distribution Mechanism.

The first successful fee payout using the new Fee Handler Pallet

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• April 16, 2025: The Fee Handler pallet enables the collection of various on-chain fees and their distribution to all shareholders, replacing inflation-based rewards with utility-based, on-chain fee collections.
• April 30, 2025: Token Burn Event - all tokens exceeding the 10 billion supply cap will be burned.
• May 1, 2025: First Verifiable Data Compute Receipt on Testnet - The network will generate its first verifiable data compute receipt on the testnet, demonstrating the operational capability of the new utility-driven rewards system.
• June 2025: Real Yield Captured on Mainnet - The first instance of real yield generated from actual protocol utility will be captured and distributed to stakeholders on the mainnet.
• July 2025: First Enterprise License - the network will onboard its first enterprise partner, with license fees contributing to the on-chain rewards pool.

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With inflation now disabled and a clear path to utility-driven rewards, Cere Network is positioned for sustainable growth, aligning protocol incentives with real-world usage and enterprise adoption.

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