How it works
A coin tied to a number, judged against itself
The mechanism in full: what a launch creates, where every fee goes, how a reading gets on chain, and what a settlement can and cannot do.
Launch
Pick a company and a metric. One transaction deploys the market, the coin, its bonding curve, its empty Uniswap v4 pool, and the first question with the oracle, dated to the first event. The key is a hash of the ticker, the metric and the peer, so the same market cannot be opened twice.
Trade
The coin sells on a constant-product curve priced in ETH. Every trade pays 1%: half into the pot the market holds, three tenths to the creator's wallet, two tenths to the protocol. When the curve raises its bar it closes and the raise becomes locked liquidity on the pool.
Settle
After the event, anyone posts the reading and the date of the next event against a bond. Unchallenged for the window, it is final. Settling compares it with the last reading: a beat spends the whole pot buying and burning the coin; a miss leaves the pot where it is. Either way the next question opens.
The benchmark is always the previous reading
There is no target typed in at launch, and nothing for a creator to fix in their own favour. The first event's reading sets the benchmark and does nothing else: the pot rolls. From the second event on, every reading is judged against the one before it, in the direction the metric says. For revenue, bigger beats. For rank, smaller beats. For a gap against a peer, the reading can be negative and a smaller deficit still beats a larger one. Equal is a miss.
Beat and burn, miss and roll
The pot is the half percent of every trade that the market keeps for itself. It can only leave through one door: a settlement that finds a beat. On a beat the market collects everything the curve is holding, sends it to the curve, and the curve spends it buying the coin at no fee and destroying what it buys. Before graduation that buy happens on the curve itself and lifts the reserve; after migration it is a swap on the pool. On a miss nothing moves, so a run of misses builds a pot that the next beat spends all at once.
A beat that lands while the coin has graduated but nobody has opened its pool yet has nowhere to spend. The market keeps the money and remembers it as owed; once the pool exists, flush() spends it. A miss's pot is not reachable from flush().
Where a reading comes from
The oracle is optimistic, because there is no honest way to pretend a company's revenue arrives on chain by itself. After the event date, anyone may post a reading and the date of the next event, putting up a bond. If nobody challenges it within the window, anyone can finalise it and the bond goes back. If somebody matches the bond to challenge, the arbiter rules, and both bonds go to whichever side was right.
The next date is bounded. Every metric carries a minimum and a maximum gap between events, and the oracle refuses a proposal, or a ruling, that puts the next event outside it. A quarterly market cannot be stalled by scheduling its next earnings for the year 2100, and cannot be rushed by scheduling it for tomorrow.
The arbiter's power is bounded on every side. It can only answer a question that has actually been disputed, only once, only within a question a market opened itself, and it can never touch a curve, a reserve, a pool or a pot. Renouncing it leaves every undisputed question still answerable by anyone.
The curve and the pool
The curve is a constant product with virtual reserves. 800 million of the 1 billion supply are sold on it; 200 million are held back to seed the pool. The money-side virtual reserve is set so that selling the whole curve supply raises exactly the bar, which makes the bar and the end of the curve the same point and gives about a 15x run from the first buy to the last. Fees are held apart from the reserve, so a sell is always honoured whatever the pot is doing.
The pool is initialised in the launch transaction, empty, at the price the bar and the pool supply imply. That price is knowable at birth because a buy caps at the bar, so it cannot be front-run into existence at a worse one. At migration the whole raise and the held-back supply go in as a full-range position minted to the curve, and no function removes it. The pool's own 1% fee accrues to that position, and anyone may sweep it: the ETH side buys the coin, the coin side burns.
What the pad can and cannot do
- It keeps the list of metrics and can add to it, and it can change a metric's bar, which only affects launches after the change. It cannot edit what a metric means once it exists.
- It can set a launch fee and the fee vault. It has no function that reaches a market, a curve, a coin, a reserve, a pool or a pot.
- Every market copies the metric's direction and cadence into immutables at birth, and every curve copies its bar, its fee wallet and its fee vault. A registry change never reaches a market that is already open.
- The curve bytecode lives in a deployer the pad accepted once. It can never be pointed at different code.