5% annually on a small portion of our allocation to customers isnt enough to get people excited about the payouts they would receive
Right, so the fact is that your properly-licensed US-based exchange is holding a Prime Controller solely so you can entice customers.
It is absolutely nothing at all to do with 'protecting the network', because a PC does nothing of the sort.
The truth is that you aren't doing it 'for the community', you aren't doing it to 'protect the network', you are doing it solely so you can offer your customers an incentive to trade XPY on your exchange which, as has already been acknowledged by Adam Matlack, lends legitimacy to XPY it would otherwise not have.