For everyone / Pickle in plain terms

Why fees are in ETH

You never need to hold PKL to use Pickle. Fees are paid in ETH, and that is a permanent design decision rather than a stage on the way to something else.

What a fee is

Every transaction costs the network work, and the fee pays for that work. The technical name is gas, and you will see the word everywhere: it is a measure of how much work your transaction asked for, multiplied by a price per unit.

On Pickle the price per unit is set at the smallest amount the chain will accept - one wei, which is a millionth of a millionth of a millionth of an ETH. There is no bidding and no fee market, so a busy moment does not make your transaction cost more. That is a property of the current design rather than a promise about the future.

Why ETH and not PKL

Most chains make you buy their own token to do anything. It guarantees demand for the token, and it makes the chain harder to use: before you can try anything, you have to acquire something.

Pickle deliberately does not. The consequences are worth being clear about:

You can use the chain holding zero PKL. A wallet with ETH and nothing else works completely.
PKL's value is not propped up by needing it. Its role has to be earned some other way, which is what the PKL page is about - and it is a harder position to argue than the usual one.
Fee income arrives in ETH. That matters for staking: a return paid in fee income is paid in ETH rather than in freshly issued tokens. See staking and the yield.

Where the fees go

The fees the network collects are split four ways. The intended shares are 40% toward buying and burning PKL, 30% to people who have staked PKL, 20% to a treasury, and 10% toward the cost of security.

Two honest gaps in that sentence

The split is applied to the gross fee today, with nothing set aside first for what the chain itself has to pay - settling on Ethereum, storing the data, running the machine. A corrected version that pays those costs before splitting the remainder is specified and is not what runs.

The 40% is not currently buying or burning anything. No destination for it has been configured, so it accumulates in the treasury instead, and the mechanism that would spend it is a design rather than a deployed system. See what burning means here.

On a testnet with valueless coins none of that costs anyone anything. It is stated because the same sentence, said at mainnet, would be a claim about money - and the gap between the intention and what runs is exactly the sort of thing that quietly stops being mentioned.