Last night while analyzing Dune data, I was shocked by the rental fee model of the Polygon chain. The Katana chain pays a "venue fee" of 32 million USD per year, of which 80% goes directly to the treasury to repurchase POL Tokens, with an average daily burn rate of 13.47 million pieces, and the circulating supply shrinks by 0.13% daily.

After Sandeep took over, he directly wrote the "building chain and collecting rent" logic into the protocol design. AggLayer is like a rental collection platform, and each connected chain has to pay an annual fee, allowing POL token holders to just sit back and receive dividends. At the current price of $0.19, it feels like catching the bottom of future cash flow. To be honest, this model is somewhat like a Web3 version of "land finance"—the deflationary mechanism is already in motion.

Specifically, regarding the design of chain rental fees: Each chain connected to AggLayer is required to pay a fixed annual fee of 29.3 million USD, plus 0.05% of TVL as a commission. Katana is the first to take the plunge, with the full amount of 32 million USDC already received in the first year.

The on-chain record is very clear: the multi-signature address of the treasury 0xTreasury received funds transferred from Katana on November 3rd, and the buyback contract was triggered within the same block, purchasing 13.47 million POL at an average price of $0.189, and then directly burned. There is a real-time dashboard on Dune tracking this: the treasury currently has a balance of $210 million, and the buyback volume accounts for 1.3% of the circulating supply, which calculates to an annualized deflation rate of 2.8% at this speed.

The core of this trap model lies in the fact that value capture no longer relies on the small change of Gas fees, but establishes stable cash flow through infrastructure charges. The addition of each new chain will bring deflationary pressure to POL, while creating actual returns for coin holders. From the perspective of token economics, this design is much more sustainable than simply relying on trading volume.