Paid when the work sells

There is a plain way to describe how a household hosting a Genie gets paid and a flattering way, and Element 31 has committed to the plain one. The household is paid when, and only when, the computing their Genie performed is actually sold to a paying customer. Not when the machine runs. Not when the sun shines. When the work sells.

The chain from surplus to payment

The sequence has links, and each link can fail without the next one happening. The home makes surplus. Genie uses the surplus to perform sealed batch work for E31 Cloud. E31 Cloud sells that computing to a business that needs it. The business pays. The household is paid their share.

The app shows the chain in that order: energy used, work performed, work sold, and money owed. Each figure is a record of something that happened. If the sun was out but demand was quiet, energy used and work performed may be real while work sold is small, and money owed follows work sold, not work performed. The app does not blur those figures together or substitute an estimate for a missing link.

What quiet demand looks like

Businesses do not buy computing on a steady schedule. There will be stretches when E31 Cloud has more capacity than buyers. During those stretches a Genie may run, or may be asked to do less, and either way little is sold. The app shows a quiet period of demand the same way it shows a quiet period of weather: as a quiet period, with small figures.

Element 31 states this up front rather than letting households discover it. Quiet demand means quiet earnings. This is the honest consequence of being paid for work that sells rather than for work that happens, and it is the reason Element 31 intends to ship machines only where real buyers exist to keep them busy. Supply follows demand, not the other way round.

Why there are no projections

Element 31 will never promise yields, returns, or passive income, and will never publish a figure for what a Genie typically earns. The reasons are not modesty. A projection would have to assume a level of demand that nobody can guarantee, a level of surplus that depends on the roof and the weather and the household, and a market for computing that moves. Any figure produced from those assumptions would be a guess dressed as a fact.

What Element 31 will publish, before the first Genie ships, is measured results from real homes, including the low ones. Those are records, not forecasts, and they will be presented as the range they are rather than the average someone might prefer to see.

Dollars for work

Customers of E31 Cloud pay for computing in currency. Element 31 pays households in currency. There is no token, no coin, no mining, no staking, and no exchange rate between a Genie's work and the money the household receives. No tokens. No mining. Dollars for work.

That sentence is short because the arrangement is short. A business bought computing. A Genie performed part of it from a home's solar surplus. The household is paid for the part that sold. Genie is in development, and the full rule set, including this one, is on the principles page. For the longer answer to whether any of this involves cryptocurrency, see Is Genie cryptocurrency?, and for what the quiet days look like in practice, see What happens when the sun goes in.