Learn the systems · how MELEK rewards, curates, and raises people up
MELEK isn't just a chain that pays block producers. It's a set of systems for finding good work and rewarding it — and for our witnesses to give back to the community, not just collect rewards. Here's how each part works.
💎 How rewards work
When you post or comment, people vote on it. Votes carry weight (your stake / "Power"), and at payout the chain splits a daily reward pool across content by how much vote-weight it earned — like Steem/Hive/Blurt. MELEK is fee-less and has no downvotes: you reward good work; you don't punish. Curators who vote early on work that does well earn a curation share — so curating well is itself rewarded.
🔗 Curation Trails
A trail lets your account automatically follow another account's votes — when a curator you trust upvotes something, your account upvotes it too, at a weight you set. It's how a community pools its judgment: one good curator's calls lift everyone who follows them. You stay in control — pause it, scale the weight, or cap how many votes per day.
🪙 Tokens & Token Trails
Beyond the base coin, communities can run their own tokens (SCOT / tribe tokens) that reward posts tagged for that community. A Token Trail is a curation trail flagged for a specific token or organization — so a project, DAO, or tribe can run an automated curation program that rewards its own contributors in its own token, on top of the base rewards.
🤖 The AutoNetwork (bots)
Voting well takes attention you don't always have. The AutoNetwork lets you pick an automated-vote strategy and runs it for you — keylessly, through MELEK-Signer, even while you're offline. Choose any of them:
- Curation Trail — follow a leader you trust.
- Earnings Autovote — fire your votes at the best moment for curation rewards (each chain's reward-timing optimum).
- Token / Org Trail — automated curation for a token or organization.
- Karma Curation — lift quality newcomers by merit (below).
⭐ The Karma system
Karma is social reputation — earned by teaching, helping newcomers, curating well, and being here a while. It is not economic: it never changes the chain's reward math or your vote weight. It informs the witness's discretionary choices — who to lift, how much to weigh a flag. Karma is cross-chain: your standing on Hive, Steem, Blurt and MELEK combine into one score that lives on your MELEK account. And Karma Curation uses it to do the most valuable thing a curator can: lift quality newcomers — a real contributor with little reach counts for more than the same vote aimed at someone already established.
🤝 Witnesses that give back — Community Rewards Programs
A witness earns block rewards. The question is what it does with them. Our witnesses are built to reward the community and raise people up — not just pull rewards off the chain. Think of programs like a chain-run curation rewards fund or a community rewards coin (in the spirit of regional rewards programs other chains have run): the witness routes a share of what it earns back out — funding curation, grants to people doing valuable work, and lifting newcomers via the Karma system. Being a witness here is a stewardship role, not a faucet.
These programs are coming online now — built on the Karma and AutoNetwork systems above. Watch the live chain →