Provider pools
The pool side of the rewards engine: who holds a pool, how much traffic is served by sellers who do not, what the next rollover changes and what every pool still holds. The pools and positions themselves are on the Staking page →; this epoch's split is on the Rewards page →
Epoch 25 · ends in 5d 21h · live on-chainThe bucket's share rises with active stake on a saturating curve: 400.00M ANTS staked would take it to the halfway point of its 2–40% range (21%), and the ceiling is approached but never reached outright. The 1.90M ANTS between this epoch's budget and the ceiling stays unallocated: burned at settlement up to the epoch cap, the rest minted to the reserve. No seller without a pool accrued points in our index this epoch. A position activates one epoch after it is created, so stake already committed for epoch 26 is not counted above: the Staking page shows it as pending.
Until real stake arrived every pool held the same 1 $ANTS starter position, so power was the same everywhere and cancelled out of usage times power — the budget was split by usage alone. It no longer cancels. Taking epoch 24's usage exactly as it happened and re-splitting it under the power each pool holds for epoch 26:
A hypothesis, not a forecast: it holds usage fixed at what it actually was so that the effect of the power change alone is visible. Real usage in epoch 26 will differ, and any pool can change its own side of it by staking.
Nobody can buy their way into a pool: $ANTS transfers are disabled, and no wallet holding a position is on the token's whitelist. The only route in is converting rewards you have already earned, which works because those $ANTS are minted straight into the pool and never touch a wallet. Every position on the network arrived that way — two of them funded by buyers staking their own usage rewards behind a seller they use. That leaves 101.68k ANTS earned by pools and not yet staked, worth 10.57M of power — about 0.5x everything that exists today. Where the power share would sit if each pool locked what it already holds:
Same caveat: nobody has to do any of this, and the maximum lock is only one of the choices. What it shows is that today's concentration is a question of who has acted, not of who could.