Credits and pricing
1,000,000 credits = $1.00. Credits are prepaid in BOLT and do not expire.
Why credits and not requests
Not every call costs the same to serve. Reading the ETN price is a value already in memory; listing yield farms is orders of magnitude more work. A flat per-request quota would either price the cheap call as though it were expensive, or let the expensive one run unmetered. Credits let the price say what the call actually costs, and let you see that before you make it.
The cost table is generated from the same module the meter charges against, so what is published and what is charged are the same number by construction.
What $50 buys
| What you are building | Credits per call | How long $50 lasts |
|---|---|---|
| A price ticker every 30 seconds | 25 | 347 days |
| A dashboard reload (tokens, pools, trades, spot), every minute for 8 h/day | ~1,125 | ~92 days |
A bot polling 20 prices every 10 seconds via prices.batch | 300 | 19 days |
| The same bot using 20 single calls | 1,000 | 5.8 days |
Those last two rows are the point of the batch endpoints.
Buying credits
- Ask for a quote on the developer page. You get a locked rate, an exact BOLT amount, and fifteen minutes.
- Approve exactly that amount — never an unlimited allowance — and deposit.
- Credits appear within about thirty seconds. The page nudges settlement so it is usually faster.
The rate
BOLT is priced against the volume-weighted mean of the last six hourly typical prices, times the ETN spot. Not the last trade: a last-trade price can be moved by one transaction, and this is the number your money is measured against. To move the reference you would have to hold a manipulated price across most of six hours, paying fees and arbitrage the whole time.
If we cannot price BOLT honestly — no usable ETN tick, too little trading in the window, or a reference that disagrees with the last trade by more than 15% — the quote is refused. It is not estimated, and nothing is charged. Top-ups pause until we can price it properly again.
The fifteen minutes
A quote locks a rate for fifteen minutes and is single-use. Yes, that is technically a short option on a ~$50 purchase; its value is cents, and saying so is easier than pretending it is not there.
If you deposit less than the quote, you are credited pro rata at the quoted rate. We are not going to keep money you sent us because the amount was not round.
Free credits for BOLT holders
There is no free tier. A base account has zero credits, and free credits exist only as this: hold BOLT, earn credits for every hour you hold it.
| Tier | BOLT held | Credits/hour | Credits/day | Worth/month |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Spark | 25,000 | 4,167 | 100,008 | ~$3 |
| Arc | 100,000 | 20,833 | 499,992 | ~$15 |
| Surge | 500,000 | 83,333 | 1,999,992 | ~$60 |
| Storm | 2,000,000 | 333,333 | 7,999,992 | ~$240 |
Worth/month is that tier's credits at the published rate — 1,000,000 credits = $1.00 — over thirty days of unbroken holding. Counted in calls instead of dollars: a 25-credit price check every thirty seconds, around the clock, costs 72,000 credits a day, so Spark covers one of those with room to spare and Storm covers about a hundred at once.
Per hour is what is actually credited. Every hour, any account at or above a tier at that moment is credited that hour's share. Miss the hour and you earn nothing for it — so borrowing BOLT for five minutes earns essentially nothing, and a full day's allowance costs a full day of holding.
Your BOLT balance counts, and so does BOLT you have deposited as a farm boost. Penalising you for farming your own BOLT would be a dark pattern.
Free credits are capped at 30 days of your tier's allowance, and are always spent before credits you paid for. Accrual that never expired would just be a monthly lump by another name, which is the thing the hourly cadence exists to avoid.
Credits you have already earned are yours. If you sell your BOLT you keep what you accrued; what stops is earning more.