Dedicated seats

#The seats

"MLX a day (cap)" is 8 MLX per unit a day (seatPerDay in lib/chain/curve.ts). It is a ceiling. What a seat really earns each hour depends on its Mac's score and on the pool's release (see Compute rewards). The table comes from TIERS in lib/chain/curve.ts. The ids are kept from the first launch: S is Core, M is Pro, L is Ultra, and the X ids are their Latest editions.

#Units

One unit is $100, so a seat's units are its price divided by $100 (multiplier in TIERS). Units do three things:

• They are the seat's weight in the hourly reward split.
• They set the seat's cap: 8 MLX per unit a day, or 8/24 an hour.
• Buying a seat moves the network's position on the price curve forward by its units (grantNode in lib/chain/ledger.ts). A Builder grant is the exception: no dollars moved, so the position stays where it is.

#Classes

The three class seats follow Apple's chip classes. chipClass in lib/chain/curve.ts reads the chip name a Mac reports (M4, M3 Pro, M5 Ultra):

A Latest edition costs and weighs 1.5× as much as its seat (LATEST_MULT). It earns its extra weight only on Apple's newest chip in its class, listed in LATEST_CHIPS. A chip name with no M-series chip in it counts as a base Mac.

Nano and Lite are starter seats (starter: true). They are smaller than any class, so any Apple silicon Mac carries them in full. They have no Latest edition.

The class a Mac is carried at is the checked class. The server checks the chip a Mac claims against Apple's model identifier and against the speed it measures for that Mac. The check can only lower a class, never raise it. See Jobs and checks.

#Pairing seats with Macs

Each hour, pairUp in lib/compute/seats.ts matches a wallet's seats with the Macs that worked for it that hour:

1. Seats are sorted biggest first: by units, then by seat number (seatsOf in lib/compute/rewards.ts).
2. Macs with a score above zero are sorted biggest class first, then Latest before not, then by score.
3. The first seat goes to the first Mac, the second to the second, and so on.

Each pair earns the units carriedUnits(seat, mac) returns:

• A starter seat earns its own units on any Mac.
• A class seat earns the units of the smaller of the two classes. It earns the Latest edition's units only when both the seat and the Mac are Latest.

So an Ultra seat on a MacBook Air earns as a Core seat. A Pro Latest seat on an M4 Pro earns as a Pro seat.

What follows from this:

• A seat with no Mac earns nothing that hour.
• A Mac with no seat left earns nothing, if its wallet holds any dedicated seat. The free seat is only for wallets with no dedicated seat at all.
• The wallet's row in the hour's split has weight = the units carried, and score = their units-weighted average score, capped at 1. So weight × score = Σ units × score over the pairs.

#What a seat pays up front

Nothing. A seat bought at or after SEAT_REWARD_END_AT is recorded with reward: "0" (grantNode in lib/chain/ledger.ts). What it buys is the higher mining rate above, earned hour by hour from compute.mlx.

Seats bought before that time were paid the curve integral for their units up front, from rewards.mlx, locked for the seat's lock-in. The referrer, if any, got a share of it from community.mlx. A seat bought after the cutover that was still paid the lump gives it back through the seat_reward_return system transaction: the seat's lump goes back to rewards.mlx and the referral bonus to community.mlx. The seat keeps its units, number and mining rate. Referrals kept counting, and since 29 Oct 2026 they pay on mining instead (Mining referrals).

#Buying a seat

A seat is bought with the buy_node transaction (see Transaction types), or through the crypto checkout, which records it once the payment arrives.

• pay set to USDC or USDT pays the price from that balance. With no pay, USDC is used first, then USDT.
• pay: "WALLET" pays from the whole wallet: USDC, then USDT, then just enough unlocked MLX sold at the spot sell price. See Paying from the wallet.

Seats are numbered in order across the network. Their records are public at /api/node/<id>, and the Seats API lists them.

#Giving a seat to another wallet

A seat can be given to any other wallet with the transfer_seat transaction (see Transaction types). It keeps its number, tier and lock-in; from then on it is carried by the new holder's Macs and counts for the new holder's lock-in. MLX it already mined stays locked with the wallet that earned it. The recipient must have confirmed it isn't a US person.

#Fit badges

seatFit(tier, mac) in lib/compute/seats.ts is the one rule behind every badge on mlx.app, in the wallet, at checkout and in MLX Node:

A not seat can still be bought. The wallet shows what it would earn on this Mac and what it would earn on a Mac of its class (fitRates). MLX Node gets the same verdicts in its heartbeat reply, as earning.offers[].fit (see The worker protocol).