Gas & Wallet Economics

What this skill covers

How token economics work on Tawa — pod pricing, the deploy gate, gas metering, and wallet management.

Token Basics

• 1 gas token = $0.01 USD
• New accounts receive 50,000 free intro tokens
• Tokens pay for two things: hosting (pod uptime) and transactions (API calls)
• Token spend order: intro tokens first, then purchased, then earned

Pod Tiers and Pricing

Set pod tier in catalog-info.yaml:

metadata:
  annotations:
    insureco.io/pod-tier: "nano"    # Default if not specified

Deploy Gate

Before every build, the builder checks your wallet has enough gas to cover 3 months of hosting:

Required reserve = hostingGasPerHour × 24 × 30 × 3

For a nano pod: 5 × 24 × 30 × 3 = 10,800 tokens ($108)

If you also declare spec.storage, the gate adds 3 months of storage gas on top:

Required reserve = (hostingGasPerHour × 24 × 30 × 3) + (storageGasPerMonth × 3)

If your wallet balance is below the reserve, the deploy is blocked with:

"Deploy gate: insufficient gas reserve"

The deploy gate runs two more hard-fail checks before the reserve check:

• Org allowlist — spec.owner must be in the approved-orgs list (ALLOWED_DEPLOY_ORGS, default insureco).
• Owner tamper guard — spec.owner must match the registered service owner, so a deploy can't charge another org's wallet.

Platform Services Skip the Gate

These services bypass the deploy gate: iec-wallet, iec-janus, tawa-web, koko, bio-id, iec-test.

Gate is Fail-Open

If the wallet service is unreachable, deploys proceed anyway (resilience over strictness).

Gas Metering via Janus

Janus tracks two types of gas events:

Transaction gas is only charged on successful (2xx) responses.

Wallet Operations

# Check your balance
tawa wallet

# Buy more tokens
tawa wallet buy 10000

# View gas spending
tawa gas

Key Facts

• Start with nano tier — it's enough for most services and keeps gas costs low
• The 50,000 intro tokens cover ~13 months of a nano pod
• Deploy gate checks happen BEFORE the Docker build (saves time on failures)
• Gas events are scoped by org — each org sees only their own usage
• Pod tier is the single biggest factor in your monthly cost