How yield-as-inference works

Yield-as-inference turns Cardano staking rewards into AI compute. You delegate ADA to the Gatewayz stake pool from your own wallet, link that wallet to your Gatewayz account with a signature, and after every finished epoch Gatewayz credits 95% of your stake's share of the pool's fees to an inference discount balance. While the balance lasts, each request on Gatewayz costs 1% of its list price.

What are the four steps?

Delegate, link, convert, use. Steps 1 and 2 are things you do once; steps 3 and 4 then repeat every epoch without any action from you.

Step 1, delegate. Delegation assigns your stake to a pool without transferring your ADA. It is one transaction with a delegation certificate from your stake key, costing only the usual fee. If your stake address has never been registered, the wallet also pays a one-time stake address deposit, currently 2 ADA on mainnet, which is returned in full if you deregister. There is no lock-up: your ADA stays spendable.

Step 2, link. Your wallet signs a one-time message with its stake key using CIP-8 message signing, which proves you control the address without sending a transaction or paying a fee. Any CIP-30 wallet can do this from the browser. Before linking, you confirm you are not a US or Canadian person.

Step 3, convert. Once the pool's rewards for a finished epoch are recorded, Gatewayz splits what it actually received across linked wallets by stake and credits 95% of each wallet's share to its account. The next section shows the math.

Step 4, use. Every request made with your API key, by you or by your agents, is billed at 1% of list price while the balance lasts.

How is each epoch's discount calculated?

Gatewayz runs the pool with a near-100% margin, so almost all of an epoch's rewards are pool fees: the fixed cost plus the margin. Those fees are the revenue the discount comes from, and each linked wallet receives its proportional share:

discount = 0.95 x pool_fees x your_stake / pool_active_stake

The result is converted to USD at the ADA price at the moment it is recorded, and that USD amount is what sits on your balance. It does not move with ADA afterward. Rewards are only counted once Gatewayz has actually received them, never in advance and never from a promised rate.

Worked example (illustrative numbers only, not Gatewayz pool data). Suppose that in one finished epoch:

Your share of the stake is 100,000 / 20,000,000 = 0.5%. Your share of the fees is 0.5% x 4,000 = 20 ADA. The reward share takes it to 0.95 x 20 = 19 ADA, which at $0.20 is a $3.80 discount credited for that epoch. Real numbers depend on the blocks the pool mints, so a different epoch, or a new pool that mints fewer blocks, would give a different figure. You can rerun this math on real chain data with the verify script.

When does the first discount arrive?

About 15 to 20 days after you delegate, provided the pool mints blocks. Cardano does not use live delegations: it pays rewards from a stake snapshot taken at an epoch boundary, which creates a built-in reward lag.

After that, a new epoch's rewards arrive every five days. Each epoch is 432,000 one-second slots. Cardano epochs and reward timing explains the snapshot in depth.

How does billing use the discount?

On each request you pay 1% of the list price from your normal Gatewayz credits, and the other 99% is drawn from the discount balance until it runs out. If a request is refunded, its discount goes back to the balance. Because the 1% still comes from credits, you need a small credit balance to use the discount at all; a request your credits cannot cover returns a 402 insufficient_credits error (agent errors). When the balance is empty, requests are billed at list price from credits as usual.

What limits apply at launch?

Two daily limits apply while the program starts, and a safety stop sits behind them.

The program also pauses automatically if discounts granted ever exceed 95% of the rewards Gatewayz has received. The calculator applies the per-account limit as a cap of $150 a month.

What happens if you redelegate or stop?

You can leave at any time and leaving is never blocked. Redelegating is one more certificate from your wallet; deregistering returns your 2 ADA deposit. Because of the snapshot, a redelegation becomes active in the epoch after next, and your old pool still earns you rewards for three more payouts before the new pool takes over, with no gap. Accounting follows the stake recorded for each epoch, so epochs in which your stake still counted in the Gatewayz pool are attributed as usual while your wallet stays linked. Discounts already credited stay on your account whatever you do next.

Frequently asked questions

Does linking my wallet send a transaction?

No. Linking is a CIP-8 signed message from your stake key. It proves you control the stake address, costs nothing and moves nothing. The only transaction in the whole process is the delegation itself.

Why is the discount in USD instead of ADA?

Because inference is priced in USD. Each epoch's share is converted at the ADA price when it is recorded, so the balance you see is fixed in dollars from that point on, even if ADA moves afterward.

What if the pool mints no blocks in an epoch?

Then there are no rewards for that epoch and nothing to share, so no discount is credited for it. Small or new pools mint blocks less often, so their rewards vary more from epoch to epoch.

Can the discount ever exceed the rewards Gatewayz received?

No. The discount is calculated only from rewards actually received, and the program pauses automatically if discounts granted ever exceed 95% of rewards received.

Sources

• Cardano Docs: Delegation, as of 2026-10-27
• Cardano.org: Stake your ada on Cardano, as of 2026-10-27
• Cardano.org Glossary: Stake Address Deposit, as of 2026-10-27
• Cardano.org Glossary: Stake Snapshot, as of 2026-10-27
• Cardano Docs: Cardano node (Slots and epochs), as of 2026-10-27
• Cardano Docs: Pledging and rewards, as of 2026-10-27
• CIP-0008: Message Signing, as of 2026-10-27
• CIP-0030: Cardano dApp-Wallet Web Bridge, as of 2026-10-27