The flow
Who signs what
A period follows the asset’s distribution calendar: monthly, quarterly, semiannual or annual, each with a record day and a payment lag. For a monthly fund, such as the example below, period end is month end.
Between Tx 1 and Tx 2, the venue freezes the plan: an operator executes it and an approver approves it, or, under a standing approval, NodeAsset’s scheduler does so itself. Where the price source states each holder’s distribution, the plan becomes payable only once that list agrees with it. Tx 2 to 5 repeat for each holder.
The fund rebases: its NAV is an index, and income arrives as units. Each holder’s income since its last distribution is computed gross from the NAV’s rise, the withholding tax is set aside on its record, and the net is paid in units, rounded down to the fund’s payout decimals.
Distributions apply to an asset that earns income on a price source’s NAV, such as a money-market fund. A tokenized deposit and a stablecoin are at par and pay no income here; gold has no distributions. For a product issued against the fund, the collateral’s income goes where the product is configured to send it: to its issuer, to its price, or through to its holders.
Worked example
One holder’s period (payouts rounded down, at the fund’s own decimals):
Tax is withheld on the income, never on the principal, at the rate the period-end NAV carries.
Controls
- The period’s distribution takes four eyes: an operator executes it and an approver approves it.
- A standing approval is the exception: it lets NodeAsset’s scheduler execute a fund’s period ends without a person each time. It takes two approvers besides its maker, lasts a year at most, caps the payout and the NAV’s growth, and runs only on a clean book (no hold, a current reconciliation with no finding, the price source’s NAV agreeing); one call revokes it.
- A period is distributed once, and the next cannot start while a paid line of the last is unbooked.
- A distribution leaves out a frozen investor and one the fund’s policy denies; an investor limited to “liquidate only” is paid. A frozen investor’s income stays on its record, and the first distribution after the freeze is lifted pays it, once.
- Every payout is checked: reconciliation matches each mint to a line of the frozen plan, and a mint nobody planned stops the book.