The shopper never touches CCD. Four parties do, and for each of them it is a requirement.
The previous piece left a basket frozen on a case of wine, ninety seconds from done. Here it completes: the shop confirms the buyer is old enough, the order clears in seconds, and the shopper doesn’t have to go near an exchange. Since Protocol 10 the merchant can cover the network fee through a sponsored transaction, so the customer checks out without ever holding the token.
CCD is still in the transaction, one step upstream from the shopper: it has moved off the person buying a bottle and onto the businesses that make buying it possible.
This piece is about what that order cost, and who paid it. CCD is the native token of Concordium, and in a single agent-run purchase it does four jobs for four different parties: a merchant spends it, the validators running each check are paid in it, a validator has it locked, and a holder's stake carries a vote on where the protocol goes next. Those four run on different clocks and answer to different incentives.
It Gets Spent
A transaction on Concordium costs about a euro cent. The order crosses six boundaries, five of which carry a fee today, so the whole thing runs to about €0.05.
Committing and paying are the same event here, which is why the table charges once for both. When Protocol-Level Locks arrive they will separate the two, holding the funds until delivery and then releasing them or returning them to the sender, and that will add a sixth chargeable event rather than replace one of the five.
Who spends it is the part that changed. A shopper might buy CCD once, or never. A business running on the network keeps buying it: it cannot run an empty balance and hope, so it holds a working float. The fee itself is set in euro cents and converted to CCD at a rate the chain updates, so the cost per order is stable in euros whatever the token does; what moves is the quantity of CCD a float has to hold to cover the same number of orders, and what the validators processing those orders are paid is fixed per order in the same way. How a business sizes and sources that float, and where it buys CCD, is the CCD token page's job.
Ten thousand first orders a month comes to about five hundred euros in network fees, and repeat orders cost less, since the mandate and the credential are reused rather than registered again. The same ten thousand baskets cost €8,600 to €18,100 to process on cards. A float is not a month of fees, though. It is a buffer a business keeps ahead of the orders it expects, topped up before it runs low, because an empty balance stops the checkout. And it is held per business, so the figure that scales with the agentic economy is the number of businesses running on the network, each carrying a float of its own.
It Pays for Trust
Every boundary in that table rests on a service, and mostly not one the network itself provides. The Identity Provider (IDP) that vetted the merchant and the provider that runs the age gate are paid by the business that engages them, on commercial terms. What the network fee buys is the check: each of those credentials is verified on every order, and the cent that pays for it goes to the validators who do the verifying and keep the chain running. Each is a service with a cost, and the fee is how the on-chain part of that cost gets covered.
That is why the ecosystem is a commercial structure rather than a partner logo wall. AITECH's Agent Forge, a no-code builder for AI agents, now lets creators publish under a badge showing a verified human is behind the agent, and stores only an account address and a timestamp to do it. Checking that proof costs nothing. What it creates is a counterparty willing to transact afterwards, and each of those transactions carries a fee that pays for the network running it. The Verified by Concordium badge does the same job for an agent wherever it runs: a counterparty can check that a verified owner stands behind it before transacting.
It Gets Locked
Validators have to lock CCD before they can process anything. Just under 10 billion CCD is staked with 122 validators, about 68% of the total supply as of 17 September 2026, and a validator stake starts at 500,000 CCD. Roughly a third is not locked. Stake does not come back on demand: unlocking runs through a cooldown, so CCD committed to securing the chain is out of circulation for a set period. A business funding a working float draws on the portion that is not locked.
That locked supply is the price of breaking the guarantees. An agent transacting here is relying on three things: that the record of who vetted the merchant has not been rewritten, that the age proof anchored for the order is the one that was checked, and that a payment which has settled stays settled. Those are outcomes the network makes expensive to rewrite. To rewrite one, an attacker has to acquire and lock a meaningful share of a supply that is already mostly locked, bidding against everyone else who wants it, then wait out a cooldown to get any of it back. And the moment they hold that much, they are the party with the most to lose if the guarantee fails.
The token can stay invisible to the people relying on it, so long as breaking what they rely on costs an attacker more than it could gain them.
That is what the fees pay for. Ninety per cent of every transaction fee goes to running the network, distributed to the validator pools that produce blocks, whose operators and delegators have their own CCD locked to keep the chain honest. The remaining tenth funds the Concordium Foundation.
The basket itself settles in a stablecoin, one of several running as Protocol-Level Tokens (PLTs). Charging the fee in whichever of those the shopper happened to be spending would have been simpler, and it would have cut the link between using the network and paying for its security.
It Carries a Vote
Governance on Concordium is shared between the Swiss-based Foundation, an independent Governance Committee, and CCD holders, who have nominated and elected committee members since 2024.
Votes are weighted by the CCD held in the voting account, averaged over a period published ahead of each election. Staked CCD counts toward that weight. Tokens locked in smart contracts and CCD held in custody at an exchange do not count at all. So staking CCD costs an account nothing in voting weight, and holding it on an exchange removes that weight entirely. The parties securing the chain and the parties steering it are the same parties, by design.
Sponsored Transactions arrived the way every protocol change does. The update was written up as a public proposal in January 2026, adopted by the Governance Committee, scheduled on-chain by the Foundation, and went live on 10 March only because the validators had upgraded their nodes to carry it; a validator still running the old software would have dropped out of consensus at that block. Holders did not vote on it, but both sets of parties answer to the token: the committee is put there by the people who hold CCD, and the people who deploy have half a million or more of it locked while they do.
One Spends It, Three Hold It
A cent is not much. If every fee is a cent, and every cent goes straight out again to pay the validators who processed it, why would anyone hold CCD rather than pass it through?
Because three of the four jobs are holding, and even the one that spends runs on a balance somebody holds.
A merchant keeps a float funded rather than passing the token through, the way it holds working capital for anything else it buys in bulk. What it spends goes mostly to the validators who process the transaction, and a validator locks half a million CCD and cannot process a single transaction until it has. The cent the objection worries about lands with the party that has to hold the most. And a holder's vote is weighted on an average taken before the election, so influence belongs to whoever held through the period rather than whoever traded during it.
Only the cent in flight moves quickly, and it moves between parties who have already locked far more than it. One job spends CCD and three hold it.
All Four at Once
What the agentic economy changes is that it pulls on all four jobs at once.
The previous piece put figures on how much buying is moving to agents. Every one of those baskets has a fee payer upstream of the shopper, and at that volume a CCD float stops being a rounding error and becomes a line somebody in the treasury manages.
Some of that volume has nowhere else to go. An agent paying a few cents for a single API call is making a payment smaller than the €0.25 fixed component of the card fee that would have to carry it. Percentage-plus-fixed pricing does not scale down to that. It stops, where a flat cent keeps going.
More orders mean more fees, and every fee pays for the validators whose locked CCD keeps the guarantees expensive to break, which is the only reason any of it is worth trusting. Voting weight follows CCD held in an account, staked or not, so the parties running the network also elect the committee that steers it. That link is meant to carry more of the load over time. Concordium's mint rate has been cut through governance from 10% to 4% a year, with a stated long-term target of 2%, and the intent is that transaction fees, not newly minted CCD, come to cover the cost of running the network. That makes transaction volume the thing the whole arrangement rests on, and the agentic economy is what puts volume through it.
One thing this piece has taken for granted. The shop confirmed the buyer was old enough, and at no point did anyone show it a passport. How a shop can know that much about a customer and nothing else is the next piece.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What is CCD used for?
CCD is the native token of Concordium. It pays transaction fees, at about one euro cent per transaction; validators and delegators lock it as stake to secure the network, with a validator stake starting at 500,000 CCD; and a holder's average CCD balance weighs their vote in Concordium governance.
Do I need to hold CCD to use Concordium?
It depends on what you are doing. As a customer or an agent making a payment, usually not: since Protocol 10 a business can pay the transaction fee for you, so you can transact without ever acquiring the token. CCD is still required elsewhere in the system. The sponsoring business holds it to pay those fees, validators and delegators hold it to run the network, and voting weight in governance follows it. The fee is not removed, it moves to whoever chose to absorb it.
Who pays transaction fees on Concordium?
Transaction fees on Concordium are paid in CCD, at about one euro cent per transaction. Since Protocol 10 a business can sponsor the fee, so in an agent-run purchase the merchant pays it out of a working float of CCD that it funds and tops up, and the customer checks out without holding the token. A €40 order that takes five chargeable transactions costs the merchant about €0.05 in fees, against €0.86 to €1.81 in card and age-verification charges for the same order.
Why does Concordium charge fees in CCD rather than in the stablecoin being spent?
Concordium charges the fee in CCD because the protocol's distribution rules only move CCD. The chain parameters split every transaction fee 45% to the pool that produced the block and 45% into an accumulation account that is distributed gradually to the pools producing subsequent blocks, leaving 10% for the Concordium Foundation. That is 90% of every fee funding the validators and delegators whose staked CCD keeps the chain running. Over time, as transaction volume grows and the mint rate falls, fees are designed to take over from newly minted CCD as the network's running cost. A fee denominated in a stablecoin has no path into that split without something converting it to CCD first.
CCD is a utility token intended for use within the Concordium ecosystem.
Disclaimer: this article is published for information only. It isn't investment advice or an offer to buy or sell any cryptoasset. Cryptoasset prices are volatile and you could lose all the money you put in.