On proof of work blockchains typically the miner earns through two different methods.
First they earn when the find new valid blocks. They earn whatever the blockchain has defined as their reward. This is the largest incentive to get people interested in mining on any given blockchain. This is also how new coins are mined.
A miner finds a valid block through the mining process and a specific amount of coins are rewarded for finding that block.
On our chain our rewards are 416.66666666 and that number is reduced by 1/2 every 8400000 blocks. This makes for a total of 7 billion CLC coins in total.
Miners also earn though tx fees. These are the fee's one pays when they create a transaction. The more transactions on a chain the more minerscanearn in fee's.
There is a problem however. The problem is miners earn a LOT from rewards but they actually earn very little from the fees. Fees are tiny fractions of a percent of a transaction usually and the cost of mining vs amount one would earn from fees alone, is not really incentive enough to keep a blockchain going after rewards end.
So Contractless has ways to solve this built in. Specifically there are two transaction types that allow miners to earn more. Those transactions are the swap transaction and the Contract Payment Transactions (loan payback) - see transaction types
Because these transactions cut out a lot of middlemen services that exist on other chains, we have special rewards built in these types of transactions that help miners earn more.
So when it comes to doing a token swap, both parties involved in the swap must tip the miner 1% of the token they are swapping.
So lets give an example.
Alice is swapping 100 ABC token with Bob
Bob is swapping 500 XYZ token with Alice
Alice must add an additional 1 ABC token as a tip to the miner.
Bob must add an additional 5 XYZ token as a tip to the miner.
There is an exception to this rule with is if one party is swapping an NFT. The person sending an NFT does NOT have to tip the miner seeing asd only 1 NFT would exist there is nothing to tip.
So this tip is in addition to the tx fee each party involved in a swap has to pay. This means the miner is earning anytime tokens are swapped and not only are they earning, they are actually earning the tokens themselves.
This works similarly when paying back loan contracts. Every single time the Borrower makes a successful payment, they must also tip the miner 1% of the payment in the same coin or token that was loaned to them.
This allows miners to earn not only from TX fees but they earn tips on approving trades and tips on ensuring successful loan payments.
So on contract miners earn 4 separate ways. Mining Rewards, Tx fees, Tips from approving token swaps, Tips from approving loan payments.
The hope in doing this is that miners can still setup services for things like listing NFTs for sales and for connecting borrowers and lenders, but there are not added fees because the miner has incenting to set these sites up and get users using these features as doing so causes ALL miners to earn more.
This would eliminate middlemen entirely from the equation while allowing miners to profit more and in more ways.