How it works
Every ticker here is a trading desk
Buy a ticker and its trading fees stop being a tax. Half of every fee goes into a margin fund that one named person - the caller - trades on perps. When they win, three quarters of the profit buys the ticker back off the market and burns it.
Every round they run is public and permanent. That record is the thing you are actually buying.
The loop
- 01Someone buys the tickerA 1% fee comes off the trade.
- 02Half the fee funds the deskIt lands in a margin fund only that desk can use.
- 03The caller trades itPerps on Lighter. Long or short, their call, their name on it.
- 04A win buys the ticker back75% burns supply forever. 25% goes to the caller.
Fewer tokens, same demand. Then it starts again.
Where your 1% goes
One fee on every trade, split automatically by the contract. Nothing is held by the desk and nothing is discretionary.
Before bonding, on the curve
no desk account exists yet
- Caller
- 40%
- Treasury
- 30%
- Protocol LP
- 30%
After bonding - Standard tier
the caller share varies by tier
- Margin fund
- 50%
- Protocol LP
- 20%
- Treasury
- 10%
- Caller
- 20%
The caller's share after bonding is 20%, 25%, 30% or 40% depending on the tier the desk launched under. Every desk page prints the exact split that applies to it. Fees are taken in ETH or USDG at the router, so none of this requires selling the ticker. If the trader came in on a referral link, 10% of the fee comes out of the Protocol LP share and goes to the referrer - the trader pays the same fee either way.
The life of a desk
Four stages. A desk cannot skip one, and the page you are looking at always tells you which stage it is in.
Launch
minutes
A caller picks a name and ticker and makes the first buy - at least $50, in the same transaction. They are the first holder of their own ticker.
Bonding
hours to days
The ticker trades on a bonding curve until it reaches $15,000. There is no desk account yet, so nothing is being traded. Curve fees already pay the caller.
Graduation
automatic
At the threshold it graduates automatically - no button, no admin. Liquidity locks into a Uniswap v4 pool permanently and the desk's margin fund opens.
Rounds
ongoing
The caller opens and closes positions. Each closed round settles on-chain, splitting profit into a buyback-and-burn and the caller's cut. The record builds from here.
When a round closes
The caller wins
75% burned·25% caller
- The 75% buys the ticker off the open market and destroys it. Supply drops permanently.
- The caller's 25% is only paid on profit above the desk's previous peak, so nobody gets paid twice for recovering their own losses.
- The margin returns to the fund and the next round can be bigger.
The caller loses
nothing paid out
- The loss stays in the margin fund. No burn, and the caller earns no carry.
- The fund refills from trading fees, so a losing streak slows the desk down rather than ending it.
- The loss is on their public record forever, next to every win.
What a caller can and cannot do
The margin fund is held by the protocol, not by the caller. This is the part worth reading twice.
They can
- Open and close positions on their own desk
- Set leverage, take profit and stop loss
- Claim the fee share they have earned
- Roll their earned fees back into the margin fund
They cannot
- Withdraw the margin fund - it can only reach the settlement contract
- Touch your tokens, or anyone else's
- Change the fee split or the burn share
- Stop a closed round from settling - anyone can trigger that
The trading key
Callers sign a key in their own browser so they can place orders without approving each one in a wallet. The private key never leaves that browser and is never sent to a server. It can open and close that desk's positions and nothing else, and it can be revoked at any time - revoking stops new orders and leaves open positions exactly where they are.
Settlement is open to anyone
When a round closes, its profit sits in the protocol's account until someone settles it. The caller can, a holder can, a bot can. Until that happens nothing is burned and nothing is paid, and the desk page says so in plain words. Settlement applies the fixed split in one transaction - there is no version of this where a caller decides how much to burn.
If a desk goes quiet
30 days
with no round opened
The caller's share and the margin share both redirect into buying and burning the ticker - so roughly 70% of every fee goes straight back to holders. An abandoned desk pays you more, not less.
It reverses the moment the caller opens a round again. The protocol's own share is unchanged either way, so nobody benefits from a desk dying.
If you are buying
You are betting on a person, not just a chart.
- Read the caller's record before the ticker - rounds, win rate, lifetime PnL, every loss included.
- Check what the desk is doing right now, and how close its position is to liquidation.
- Burned supply is the part of your return that does not need another buyer to show up.
If you are calling
A desk costs about $50 to open and funds itself from there.
- You keep 40% of curve fees, then 20-40% of pool fees, plus 25% of every winning round.
- You never put up margin - trading fees fill the fund for you.
- Every round is public under your name, and that record follows you to every desk you ever run.
What can go wrong
The caller loses
Perps are leveraged. A liquidation empties whatever margin was committed, and the fund has to refill from fees. A long enough losing streak means no burns at all.
The desk never bonds
Below $15,000 there is no desk account and no trading - just a coin on a curve. Curve fees still pay the caller, which is worth knowing before you buy early.
The ticker still trades on sentiment
Burns reduce supply; they do not set a floor. A desk can be winning and the price can still fall. The record tells you about the caller, not about the next hour.
Under the hood
Everything above is enforced by contracts on Robinhood Chain. If you want to check rather than trust:
Launch and the curve
A desk is created through “MaxxSwapRouter.launch”, paid in ETH or USDG, with the first buy in the same transaction. The ticker then trades on a bonding curve priced in MAXX. Traders always pay and receive ETH or USDG - the router converts on every trade, so MAXX is internal to the curve and never held by a trader.
Graduation
Each launch has a target (“graduationQuote”) worth $15,000. The buy that crosses it graduates the launch automatically - no separate call, no admin action. Bonding reserves become a Uniswap v4 pool with liquidity locked permanently.
The vault and the Lighter account
Each graduated desk gets a vault contract, and that contract owns the Lighter perps account - not the caller's wallet. Registration happens after graduation, so “LighterVaultRegistry.vaultOf(token)” reads as the zero address until a keeper registers it. The Lighter account itself opens on the first margin deposit.
Orders
The caller registers a trading public key with “vault.setCreatorApiKey”, derived from a wallet signature. Orders are signed in the browser and sent to Lighter. Each market sets its own maximum leverage, minimum size and minimum quote. A short is a positive size and is displayed as Short.
Where the numbers come from
Three sources. The chain is live state and every protocol write. The indexer serves lists, candles, holders and activity - read-only, and it lags. Lighter is the venue for positions, orders and PnL. Quotes, balances, claimable fees and the phase checked before a trade always come from the chain or from Lighter; a cached indexer row is display data, never a source for those.
Referrals
A wallet registers one referral code on the “ReferralRegistry” - 3 to 32 lowercase letters or digits, set once and permanent. A wallet that arrives on a link binds to that code once, also permanently. For 365 days after binding, the referrer earns 10% of the fee on each of its trades, in the currency the trade settles in, taken from the Protocol LP share. The referrer also earns 5% of settled vault profit, in USDG, on desks the referred wallet launches after binding, again from the Protocol LP share. There is no reward when the referred wallet trades a desk the referrer launched. Rewards are held by the contract until the referrer claims them.
Risk controls
If leverage crosses a safe threshold, an automated reduce-only order is deployed; if that goes unfilled, a full position close is initiated. Unrealized and realized PnL are Lighter's figures, not a price from the indexer. If a vault's read-only access to its own trade history is ever revoked, that history is shown as unverified rather than quietly dropped.
Still the shortest version
Back a caller with a record. Their wins buy back the ticker you hold.