The Rayls Public Chain has two tokens that do two different jobs. $USDr is the native gas token — it is what users actually pay transaction fees in, pegged 1:1 to the US dollar. $RLS is the staking and rewards token — it is what validators hold, earn, and have aligned incentives with.

The most innovative part of this design is what it does for users. On almost every other chain, gas is paid in a token whose value moves around — so the cost of sending a transaction can double or halve from one week to the next, depending on market conditions that have nothing to do with the user's activity. Rayls fixes this. Because $USDr is dollar-pegged, the cost of using the Rayls Public Chain is denominated in dollars and stays predictable. A transaction that costs five cents today costs five cents next month, regardless of what $RLS is doing in the market. For developers building consumer applications, this means quotable pricing. For users, it means no more checking a token chart before sending a payment.

Validators are still paid in $RLS, because that's the asset whose value is tied to the long-term success of the network. The protocol bridges between the two automatically, every epoch, with a deterministic mechanism that this post walks through end to end.

The two main tokens

$USDr is the native gas token of the Rayls Public Chain. It lives only on the Rayls Public Chain. It is pegged 1:1 to the US dollar and backed by USDC bridged from Ethereum: every $USDr in circulation has a corresponding $USDC.e (the bridged form of Ethereum USDC) locked in an on-chain escrow. Users hold $USDr, pay transaction fees in $USDr, and use $USDr for stable-denominated activity on the chain.

$RLS is the staking and rewards token. It exists in two places: on the Rayls Public Chain itself, and as a representation on Ethereum reached through the LayerZero bridge. Validators receive $RLS as their share of fees and as the unit in which their stake is measured. $RLS supply is finite and managed by the foundation at launch.

How USDr is minted

$USDr is fully backed. Every $USDr in circulation can be traced back to USDC sitting on Ethereum, through a two-step lock-and-mint process that uses the LayerZero bridge.

A user who wants to acquire $USDr starts on Ethereum with USDC. When they bridge it, the USDC is locked in the LayerZero bridge contract on Ethereum — it doesn't leave L1, it just becomes inaccessible to the user. In exchange, an equivalent amount of $USDC.e is minted on the Rayls Public Chain. This is the standard lock-and-mint pattern that LayerZero uses to represent an L1 asset on a destination chain: the L1 supply is locked, the L2 supply is minted, and the two stay in 1:1 correspondence.

The second step is what produces $USDr. The newly-minted $USDC.e is then locked in the $USDC.e/USDr 1:1 escrow contract on the Rayls Public Chain, and an equivalent amount of $USDr is minted to the user. Locking the $USDC.e is what gives $USDr its backing — every $USDr in circulation has a corresponding $USDC.e sitting in escrow, which in turn corresponds to USDC locked on Ethereum.

For most users this happens in a single step: the LayerZero bridge runs both legs automatically, so a user bridging USDC from Ethereum receives $USDr directly on Rayls without having to interact with $USDC.e along the way. Users who want to interact with $USDC.e directly can also do the second exchange manually.

Behind the scenes, a separate Rayls Minter wallet has the right to mint $USDr for foundation-controlled accounts at genesis — the role exists to bootstrap the system. The plan is to revoke this minting role over time so that only the escrow contract can mint $USDr, which means every $USDr in circulation will be provably backed by $USDC.e in the escrow.

There is one important asymmetry: $USDr cannot be bridged out. Once you have $USDr on the Rayls Public Chain, it stays on the Rayls Public Chain. You can spend it, swap it for $RLS, or convert it back to $USDC.e and bridge that back to Ethereum — but $USDr itself is not transferable to L1. This keeps the peg cleanly bounded: the only way $USDr enters or exits circulation is through the escrow on the Rayls Public Chain, against $USDC.e it controls.

How users pay for transactions

Every transaction on the Rayls Public Chain pays its fee in $USDr. From a user's perspective this is the simplest possible model — the price of submitting a transaction is denominated in dollars, not in a token whose value moves around.

What happens to those fees is more interesting. Rather than going directly to validators, every $USDr fee paid on the chain is redirected to a contract called the Fees Aggregator. The Fees Aggregator collects $USDr continuously, transaction after transaction, and holds it until the end of the epoch.

What happens at the end of each epoch

Once per 24-hour epoch a validator triggers the fee distribution. This is where the two tokens meet.

The Fees Aggregator takes its accumulated $USDr balance and swaps it for $RLS through the on-chain RLS/USDr liquidity pool. The pool is a standard automated market maker that holds $RLS on one side and $USDr on the other; the swap converts the epoch's $USDr fees into $RLS at the prevailing market rate.

The resulting RLS is then split into two equal halves:

• 50% goes to validators. The $RLS is sent to the Rewards Distributor at the Validator Pool Address, which pays each validator their share of the epoch's rewards.
• 50% is sent for burning. This half is bridged back to Ethereum L1 via LayerZero and accumulated at a designated burn address.

The validator share is the direct economic incentive for running consensus. Validators do work — proposing batches, voting on headers, anchoring commits — and at the end of every epoch they collectively receive half the fees the chain produced that day, denominated in $RLS.

The burn

The other half doesn't disappear immediately. It accumulates at a burn address on Ethereum, and every few months the accumulated balance is burned in one batch. The reason for batching it on L1 rather than burning continuously on the Rayls Public Chain is that the L1 burn is publicly visible to the whole Ethereum ecosystem — anyone watching Etherscan can verify the amount, and the supply impact shows up in the same place where the canonical $RLS contract lives.

Every burn is tracked on https://transparency.rayls.com, which shows the running total of $RLS removed from circulation, the amount queued at the burn address awaiting the next batch, and links through to the on-chain transactions on Etherscan. Anyone can verify the numbers independently against L1 directly.

The economic effect is the same as a continuous burn: half of every fee paid on the chain is permanently removed from circulation. Network usage translates directly into deflationary pressure on $RLS, in proportion to actual on-chain activity.

Liquidity and the genesis stake

For the swap mechanism to work, the RLS/USDr pool needs liquidity from day one. The Rayls admin wallet seeds this pool at genesis: it adds $USDr liquidity (from the bootstrap mint) and $RLS liquidity (from a pre-deployed allocation set aside for this purpose).

There is a useful detail in how the genesis stake is balanced. Validators are allocated staked $RLS at genesis so they can begin participating in consensus. To keep the initial supply neutral, the same amount of $RLS that validators stake is burned at the same time. Genesis-stake issuance and pool-seeding burn cancel out, so the launch doesn't introduce a supply shock either way.

The Rayls Foundation treasury

There is one extra inflow worth describing. The Rayls Foundation operates a separate private chain alongside the public chain, and fees collected on that private chain flow to a treasury wallet on Ethereum (held in a Gnosis Safe). The treasury accumulates $RLS over time and is available to fund grants, ecosystem incentives, and ongoing development.

This is the only source of $RLS into the system that is not directly tied to public-chain activity. It exists because the foundation operates infrastructure beyond the public chain itself, and routes the proceeds back to a transparent on-chain treasury rather than off-chain accounts.

Putting it together

In one paragraph: $USDC comes in from Ethereum and is converted to $USDr on the Rayls Public Chain through a 1:1 escrow. Users pay gas in $USDr. Every epoch, the protocol swaps the day's $USDr fees into $RLS, pays half to validators, and sends the other half to L1 to be burned. $RLS supply is finite, validator incentives are aligned with chain activity, and gas costs are stable in dollar terms.

The design reflects a few opinions about what makes a long-lived chain work. Users should pay gas in dollars because they don't want to think about exchange rates every time they send a transaction. Validators should be rewarded in $RLS because that's the asset whose value tracks the network's long-term success. Burns should be public and verifiable because supply mechanics are easier to trust when they happen on Ethereum where everyone can see them. And the system should bootstrap from a known state — known foundation, known admin wallet, known initial allocations — and progressively decentralise from there.

Each of those opinions is debatable, and the precise parameters (the burn cadence, the 50/50 split, the role of the minter wallet) will likely evolve as the chain matures. But the shape of the model — two tokens, one for stability and one for incentives, joined by an epoch-by-epoch swap — is what the Rayls Public Chain runs on at launch.