# Stewards **Stewards** serve as the key financial engine for the Brainstems ecosystem. Stewards participate by providing financial resources, in the form of STEMS or USDC, to finance Brainstem Deployments. Steward-based financing directly flows to Nodes incurring upfront computational costs associated with training the deployment's model on partner data. All Steward financing is locked in an escrow contract, released to Nodes after the successful verification of a Proof of Training. Note, a 2.5% fee will be applied to all Steward transactions, which will flow to Brainstem's Strategic Growth Fund. In return for their financial contributions, Stewards receive Brainstems Model Shares (BMS) representing an ownership stake in the success of the deployed models. Stewards are able to stake their BMS tokens to earn a 25% of the subscriptions paid by Federation Partners to access the intelligence generated by the Brainstem deployment. --- # Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question. Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter: ``` GET https://docs.intellex.xyz/intellex-ai-protocol-ecosystem/stewards.md?ask= ``` The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language. The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation. Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.