Inside the CRUSH Burn: How Settlement Works On-Chain

The short version of the CRUSH burn is simple: when contributed data gets accessed and purchased, most of the value permanently destroys CRUSH, and the rest becomes a contributor payout. This post is the longer version. It walks through the settlement pipeline, the on-chain accounts, and the first official settle transaction on Solana mainnet.

If you want the plain-English overview first, start with The CRUSH Burn Has Begun.

Why we built this

Legacy rewards apps like Ibotta, Fetch, Pogo, Receipt Pal, and Receipt Hog train people to accept expiring, non-fungible points and closed gift-card catalogs, then give them almost no observability into what happens to their data afterward. Dissatisfaction is the product, not the bug. The stats behind that are in Loyalty Program Trends 2026: Why Programs Are Failing.

Redistribution is the other model: when anonymized contributed data is accessed and purchased, value flows back on-chain. Most of it burns CRUSH. The rest funds contributor payouts that can recur whenever that data is used again. That is the alignment: if Crush gets paid for access, contributors get paid too. Same shopping activity, opposite deal: ownership, a public settlement trail, and payouts that do not expire with a points calendar.

What this system is (and is not)

Crush has two reward loops that people sometimes mix up:

1. Epoch rewards: the regular payout cycle for shopping activity (receipts, cards, missions). That path still exists.
2. Redistribution: a separate, revenue-linked loop. Paid access to anonymized data can trigger a settlement that burns CRUSH and funds contributor payouts.

This article is about loop 2. Technically we call it redistribution. In product language we call the payout side a contributor payout. It is not a stock dividend, not yield, and not an investment return. CRUSH is a utility reward for contributing data.

The settlement pipeline

Paid access to anonymized insights is sold through Syntalic, Crush's data layer for agentic commerce. Buyers and agents pay over open machine-payment rails, including x402 and MPP. When that access creates a settlement, Crush does four things in order:

1. Take a USDC amount tied to that paid access
2. Buy CRUSH on the open market with that USDC
3. Deposit the full CRUSH amount into the program vault
4. Call on-chain settle, which burns part of the vault balance and registers the rest as claimable for contributors

On the first official settle, that split was 75% burn / 25% fund. The burn permanently removes tokens from supply. The fund stays in the vault for eligible contributors to claim.

Settlement pipeline from USDC in to on-chain settle, then 75% burn and 25% contributor pool

Important detail: settle does not pull tokens into the vault. CRUSH must already be deposited there first. On-chain, settle only burns and updates accounting.

On-chain pieces

What you need to verify a burn settlement:

Genesis mint was 1,000,000,000 CRUSH on 2026-03-26. BurnConfig is the program account that tracks funded and distributed totals for redistribution. The vault is the CRUSH token account owned by that config. Burns and contributor claims both move through it.

On-chain accounts: program, BurnConfig, vault, and settle

What settle does

When an authorized settle runs:

• An SPL burn destroys CRUSH from the vault
• The funded share is recorded as claimable liability for contributors
• The program checks that after the burn, the vault still covers unclaimed liability
• No CRUSH leaves a user's wallet in this step. The burn comes from the settlement vault, not from contributor balances.

What claims do

Contributors later claim their share of the funded amount from the vault into their own CRUSH wallet. Claims cannot exceed what has been funded and not yet claimed. That is the on-chain side of a contributor payout.

Who gets credited

Off-chain, Crush attributes paid data access to the contributors whose data was in the batch. Current contribution surfaces are browser extension missions for ecommerce prices, and very soon Shelf Scan observations for physical store price and promo observations, then eventually receipt data insights. Exact shares are computed before settlement so the on-chain fund side has a stable pool to claim against.

Receipt shopping volume still earns through the separate epoch rewards path. Redistribution is specifically about paid access to contributed data products.

The first official burn

The first mainnet settle we are pointing people at landed on 2026-07-29:

View the transaction on Orb

Decoded from the transaction:

That is the mechanism in one screenshot-worthy moment: deposit already in the vault, settle burns three quarters, leaves one quarter as the contributor pool.

As of this writing, there is one SPL burn from the redistribution vault under this program: that same 84.106052 CRUSH on 2026-07-29. Other CRUSH burns on Solana (for example burn-bot style transfers) are unrelated to redistribution.

First official settle: 84.106052 CRUSH burned, 28.035351 CRUSH funded

Design choices worth knowing

Why not burn on every data access? Shares are computed over a stable batch, not a live stream of API calls, so the fund side matches a finished window of paid access.

Why deposit then settle? The open-market buy and vault deposit happen before the on-chain settle. Settle itself stays narrow: burn, record the funded share, check the vault can cover claims.

Why 75/25 on the first settle? That is what the first official transaction did. Future settlements can use a different split. What matters for verification is the burn and fund amounts on each public transaction.

Why say contributor payout, not dividend? Because this is a reward for contributing data someone paid for, not a distribution on a security. Same reason the plain-English post hammers that point.

How this connects to the product

Today, the live contribution path that feeds this loop is Crush Missions via the browser extension. Shelf scanning is next, then receipt data insights, for the same burn-and-payout idea.

For the non-technical walkthrough, read The CRUSH Burn Has Begun. For the token overview, see /token.

Verify it yourself

You do not have to take our word for the first settle:

1. Open the Orb transaction
2. Confirm the program is 7bmibT1msU5Qu98f1dPZEyGPmqifGwLf1RRYrHk5osqg
3. Confirm the inner instruction is an SPL token burn of 84106052 raw units (84.106052 CRUSH at 6 decimals)
4. Confirm the vault token balance moved from 112.141403 to 28.035351

That is redistribution in production: real burn, real 75/25 on that settle, on a public ledger.