How to bond
Bond markets sell INVEST at a discount for reserve quote tokens. You hand the protocol a registered reserve asset; the Treasury keeps it and mints INVEST against it. This is the mechanism that grows backing.
Payouts vest as gINVEST notes, either on a cliff or as a stream.
What you can bond with
Quote tokens are registered reserve assets: USDG, WETH, tokenized Robinhood equities and ETFs,
and vetted bridged crypto. A market's quote token must be an enabled RESERVETOKEN both when the
market is created and on every deposit — that is a hard check, not a convention.
At genesis, mainnet opens exactly one market, quoted in USDG. Bond markets are created after
the fair launch, because baseSupply is zero before it (which would zero the capacity caps and
divide the price floor by zero).
The two vest modes
| Mode | Behaviour |
|---|---|
| CLIFF | All-or-nothing. Nothing is claimable until the note matures, then the whole payout redeems at once. This is the default. |
| LINEAR | The payout streams continuously from the moment the note is created until it matures. |
With a LINEAR note you can redeem the vested portion as often as you like while it continues to vest; the note closes only once it has been drawn in full.
The default term at launch is 5 days, cliff. Governance can open markets on other terms and in either mode, within bounds fixed when the protocol is deployed.
The price floor
A bond can never sell INVEST below its floor. The floor is the greater of two numbers, stamped into the market's terms for its whole life:
- 1.1× treasury backing, recomputed from oracle values every time a market opens; and
- the absolute USD floor the PolicyGuard carries — $0.90 per INVEST at mainnet genesis.
That absolute floor is set once, at deployment, and is lowering-only thereafter. Governance can lower it; nothing can raise it.
BondDepository.setPriceBand clamps every market's price to a range around an INVEST/USD reference
feed. It is deliberately not called at genesis: at t0 the reference is a 30-minute TWAP of a
freshly seeded pool with no history, so a band on it would either brick bonding or floor markets on
a manipulable number. It is armed by proposal once the pair has depth and checkpoint history.
Capacity caps
Every market is created through the PolicyGuard, which enforces:
| Cap | Value |
|---|---|
| Per-market capacity | ≤ baseSupply / 10 |
| Aggregate live capacity | ≤ baseSupply / 4 |
| Conclusion | within (now, now + 365 days] |
| Vesting | within [minVesting, maxVesting] |
| Initial price | ≥ the market's floor |
The Treasury re-audits its reserves before a market is created, so the floor is computed against a fresh mark rather than a stale one.
What happens on a deposit
- The quote token lands in the Treasury.
- Reserves are re-marked.
- New INVEST is minted only against the excess value that deposit created —
excessReserves() = totalReserves − baseSupply. - A gINVEST note is written for you with the market's vest term and mode.
An exact-delta check on the deposit means a fee-on-transfer or rebasing quote token cannot under-deliver silently.
Redeeming
Redeeming pays out whatever a note has vested and you have not already drawn. For a cliff note that is the whole payout once it matures, and nothing before. For a linear note it is the slice that has vested so far.
You can redeem several notes in one transaction, and choose whether to take the payout as gINVEST or have it staked into SHARES for you.
Pricing mechanics
Price follows a debt-decay curve — the standard Olympus bond shape. It rises as a market sells and decays back down over time, and it is floored: the quote you are shown and the price you actually pay are subject to the same floor, so it cannot be sidestepped.