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 time you do something on the chain, a computer has to do some work, and you pay a small amount for it. On Pickle you pay that in ETH, the money you already have from Ethereum. You do not need to buy the chain's own coin first. If your action fails, you still pay for the work the computer did trying, just as on Ethereum.
Every transaction pays gas used times gas price, in ETH, from the sender. Failed and reverted calls consume gas and pay for it, as on Ethereum. There is no base-fee burn: the entire fee is credited to the block beneficiary and then split inside the same transaction, so nothing is destroyed and nothing is stranded. The minimum gas price is one wei, and it is a consensus constant rather than something an operator adjusts.
Fees are charged through the gas price with an EIP-1559 base fee of zero, so blocks report a zero base fee and no ETH is burned by the fee market. The whole fee is credited to the beneficiary and split on all three execution paths, native transfer, ERC-20 fast path and general EVM, with the shares summing back to the fee exactly so that no wei is created or stranded. The minimum gas price is a compile-time constant: made tunable, it would let a replica re-price a transaction the sequencer accepted, and derivation would halt.
Why ETH and not PKL
Most chains make their own token the fuel, which means every user has to acquire it before they can do anything and every application inherits that friction. Pickle's second design principle is the opposite: ETH is gas, permanently, and PKL is never required in order to transact.
- For users, anyone who holds ETH can bridge and act. There is no second asset to find, buy and keep topped up.
- For builders, an application's users are Ethereum's users, with Ethereum's money. Nothing about onboarding is specific to this chain.
- For PKL, it means the token is not propped up by forced demand for fuel. Its role is a fee-share and coordination asset, described on its own page, and its value depends on the chain and its applications actually earning something.
The one place PKL buys something is the name service, where the ETH schedule is 0.05, 0.025 and 0.005 ETH per year by name length and PKL is accepted at a published discount. That is a utility, not a requirement: every name can be paid for in ETH.
Where the fees go
The chain distributes what remains after it has paid for itself. Settlement on Ethereum, data availability, operations and security are netted first, and the remainder is split four ways: 40 percent to a PKL buyback, 30 percent to PKL stakers in ETH, 20 percent to the treasury and 10 percent to security and insurance. The fee-sharing page has the mechanism in full, including the staking vault and why stakers never receive PKL emissions.