Unearned yield is not paid

A fixed daily rate is a promise. Engine income is not.

An investment on Zenboox accrues at a fixed daily rate for the length of its term. The engines that produce that income do not work at a fixed rate: their results vary from day to day and can be negative. Between the promise and the reality there has to be a rule, and that rule decides what kind of platform this is.

Ours is short to state: within a period, the total distributed to investors cannot exceed what the engines actually earned.

WHEN THE GATE CLOSES

Every day the accrual engine walks through the active investments and calculates each one's daily yield. Before anything is written to the ledger, it checks the distribution against realised engine earnings for the period. If paying an accrual would push the total past what was actually earned, the accrual is not paid. It is recorded as deferred.

Deferred means exactly what it says. A row is written and appears in your history, and no money moves: nothing is posted to the ledger and your balance does not change.

We could have skipped those days silently. We chose not to, for a short reason. "Why was there no yield today" is a question that deserves an answer somewhere other than a support conversation.

DEFERRED IS NOT LOST

An earlier version of this engine had a real defect. A deferred accrual was written once and never looked at again, so the yield for that day quietly disappeared.

Today, when earnings recover, a later run compensates deferred accruals. Compensation does not open a new row, it completes the existing one, and the transition is conditional: a row is only picked up while it is still deferred. Two runs starting at the same moment cannot pay the same day twice.

WHY NOT PAY FIRST AND SORT IT OUT LATER

Because a platform that pays today's promised yield out of today's new deposits is a specific and well known structure, and it works technically right up to the moment it fails economically. This gate is what keeps the daily rate a description of earnings rather than a description of cash flow.

Every accrual run also reports a solvency reading, healthy, warning or critical, so a bad stretch is visible while it is happening rather than afterwards.

WHAT IT COSTS YOU

This has a price, and we would rather state it than bury it. In a period when the engines underperform, your yield can be deferred. You will see it in your history as a deferred row. It is not a silent skip, it is not a rounding difference, and it is not gone. But it is also not in your balance that day.

That is the trade, and we think it is the right one.