Pricing

Capital is the price

No oracle, no committee, no config file with an LTV in it. A token's terms are what happens to lender USDC on its way into the book — placed by public formulas, constrained by rate limits, and committed to its own quotes.

The capital path

From deposit to price in five steps

1 · depositBook capital has one primitive: a bid directed by judgment — your own (direct ticks, quoting your own prices) or delegated (a curator's sleeve — passive, full lending economics, the curator places it; see section 05). Same economics either way; a pro is just a curator with one client. Separately, plain pool LP (swap fees + IL only) backs no loans and never counts toward the mark; freely-pullable liquidity doesn't get a vote on solvency.

2 · the ladderBook capital is painted across price ticks as a defensive discount ladder — first bids about one expected adverse move below reference, thickening as discounts deepen. Every dollar becomes a firm bid at a price. Deposits are single-asset USDC — the book is one-sided bids, so lenders never need the market’s token. (Only optional door-3 pool LPs pair both tokens.)

3 · the splitThe borrow cap partitions it: up to ~80% lends out (those buckets hold debt claims — the cash left with borrowers); the un-lent ~20% stays as live cash bids — pool liquidity, stop-fill capacity, and exit buffer at once.

4 · the markThe marginal utilized tick (LUP) is every borrower's health mark. Effective LTV is emergent from where the capital rests — trades can't move it; only capital events can.

5 · the feeThe same measurements that placed the ladder price the entry fee and the bands. One engine, three outputs.

See it move

Volatility shapes the ladder; the ladder is the LTV

Same $100k of book capital, three volatility profiles. Watch the bids retreat and the terms follow:

REFERENCE $1.00

$0.83

$12k · 17% off

$0.73

$18k · 27% off

$0.63

$24k · 37% off

$0.53

$26k · 47% off

$0.43

$20k · 57% off

First bid

$0.83

Emergent max LTV

~67%

Max leverage

~3.0×

Entry fee · 30d

~1.3%

Band trigger

wide, rare

Deep trust, close bids: the book stands near the price, so borrowers get real leverage cheaply. The ladder is doing what a prime broker’s margin desk does — in public, with committed capital.

The risk engine

Three inputs, three outputs, all public

σ (vol)Estimated conservatively: max of short and long windows, rises fast and decays slowly, per-tier floors, and a fat-tail multiplier — long-tail assets jump, they don't diffuse. Engineered calm can't price a memecoin like ETH.

depthLocked seed + book + external venues. Feeds the manipulation budget (max debt stays below the cost of moving the reference) and the slippage model for tranche sizing.

utilizationLive, on-chain — drives the fee curve's base and the lender share of skims (up to 95% near full).

→ ladderσ-scaled discounts. Where the money rests = the LTV policy.

→ bandsPlaced so the buffer between trigger and insolvency exceeds σ × expected execution time given real depth — smaller, earlier tranches as vol rises or depth thins.

→ entry feebase(util) + λ·σ·√T·g(leverage) + slippage(size/depth) — an option premium, because every loan writes one.

Every quote is reproducible. The formulas are public contracts; the posted inputs are public state. "We are the pricing" means we author the formula and estimate its inputs — never that we hand-pick a number.

Time and trust

Markets earn their terms

maturationEvery market starts at the most conservative tier regardless of what it claims to be, and steps up caps and ladder tightness at 7 / 30 / 90 days of clean history. Class A imports external history and starts high — but not at the max. Behavior is priced; claims are not.

persistenceWhere a price must be proven (stops, settlements), the v4 hook's own record decides — volume-weighted, truncation-capped observations logged every swap. Windows calibrate to each market's measured correction speed; trading calendars gate RWA hours.

repricingTerms freeze at entry and reprice at rollover — vol spikes make rolls expensive, so exposure sheds in turbulence. Counter-cyclical by construction, all event-based cash.

Curation is a market, not a role

Nobody owns the vault. Judgment competes inside it.

The passive door has no single gatekeeper. Curators register permissionlessly, run sleeves side by side on the same book, and LPs delegate to whichever judgment has earned it — or to no one, and quote their own ticks. The vault is delegation plumbing; the product is the track record.

the open seatAnyone becomes a curator by posting the skin-in-the-game junior stake. That buys a sleeve — a segregated allocation book — and a row on the leaderboard. No license from us, no committee.

sleeves segregatedCapital and P&L attach to the curator that directed them. Followers of one curator share that ladder's outcomes pro-rata; never across sleeves — a reckless curator's conversions land on their own followers only. That's what keeps track records real and free-riding impossible. Switching sleeves is an internal reallocation, subject to the same utilization gates as withdrawal — delegation is never a backdoor exit.

the feeCuration fees are market-set: each curator prices their own sleeve, and competition disciplines the number. The protocol's flagship sleeve is the default for LPs who don't choose — same leaderboard, same rules, no privileged fee. It earns or it shrinks.

what every curator must acceptFormulas — ladder placement follows the engine's public formulas; the curator estimates inputs, the shape follows. Rate limits — ladder moves are banded per epoch; no one-move risk spike, even from a compromised key. Skin in the game — every quote is capital-committed; a bad ladder buys bad collateral with the sleeve's own money first, junior stake in front.

bright lineNo incentive program — ours or anyone's — ever discounts an entry fee, widens a cap, or shallows a ladder. Subsidies pay on top of honest prices; they never touch them.

The same doctrine as the book itself, one level up: payment follows the judgment that placed it. What these prices pay for lives on the Risk page; where the resulting cash flows go lives on the Yield page.