Everything you pay the Ethos protocol is destroyed. Not collected, not routed to a treasury, not shared with the team — burned, permanently, by the smart contract.
What costs $WHUF
Small fees apply to actions that write to the reputation graph: writing reviews, creating attestations, initiating vouches, comments and votes, posting Broker listings, and processing human verification.
Why fees exist at all
Without a cost, a reputation network drowns in manipulation: fake reviews, sybil attestations, coordinated vouching rings. A per-action fee is negligible for a genuine user and ruinous at the scale an attacker needs. Spam doesn't just fail — it pays the network, because every spam attempt burns supply.
Why burned instead of collected
A fee that's collected has to go somewhere — a treasury, a company, a revenue line. That creates an extractive relationship between a protocol and its users, and for a reputation network it's disqualifying: an operator with fee revenue has a financial stake in how reputation gets scored. A burned fee benefits no intermediary. There is nothing to collect, and therefore nothing to corrupt.
The supply consequence
Total supply is fixed at 10,000,000 — no minting function exists. Burns only subtract. The more Ethos is used, the smaller the total supply gets, permanently.