Put simply
A sponsored lane pays your card from a sponsor's own locked coin, never from the chain's reward and never through a pool or a fee. The sponsor locks what it will pay before the lane's earliest window, one amount a window of 64 blocks, and your card earns its exact share of the lane's work in each window, counted in the lane's own hashes, exact to the smallest unit.
What a card earns
Your card earns from a sponsored lane only while it also earns from the chain's own lanes: no standing on the chain, nothing here. The pay is the sponsor's locked coin, split across the window's cards by their exact share of the lane's work, counted in the lane's own hashes; the chain's reward is untouched by it, and no pool and no fee stands between the sponsor's lock and your key.
The smallest a sponsor may pay a window is one percent of what the chain pays that window: 5.083779 IGN on the public test network today, 3.048778 IGN from the 12-second gate at block 12,288. A sponsor may pay more; it may never pay less.
What a sponsor posts
The sponsor locks the coin it will pay before the lane's earliest window, one amount a window, and posts a bond as its good standing; the bond and the unspent coin return to the sponsor at the end. The lane's work is a verifier-checked kernel the registry swaps in as a lane; its weight in the chain's own pay is zero, and it is never one of the chain's security lanes.
Where it stands
This path is the rule frozen on 15 October 2026; it runs on no network yet. The mechanism's page is of 18 October 2026. A pilot's terms (the lane, the sponsor, the span, the amount a window) are served here only when a sponsor's lock has landed on the chain, and no sponsor is named before it.