The flywheel

Most treasury protocols need someone to keep funding them. Investors Center funds itself: it owns the market for INVEST, and every trade on that market pays a fee that buys assets to back INVEST.

INVEST itself is an ordinary token. Sending it costs nothing, holding it costs nothing, and a transfer moves exactly what you sent. The fee belongs to the pools, not to the token.

This page explains that loop end to end. Nothing else on the site is a prerequisite.

None of this is running yet

The five pools, the 60,000-INVEST supply and the fee collector are stage 2, and stage 2 has not run. Today one pool's vault is deployed and holds no liquidity, the other four do not exist, and INVEST total supply is zero — so there is nothing to trade, no fee being charged and no backing being bought. Read this page as a description of the machine, not of a market that is turning. What is actually on chain is in Deployment status.

The setup

Investors Center launches with five protocol-owned pools, all Uniswap V4, all pinned at a 5% fee. The whole INVEST supply — 60,000 tokens — is minted once, at launch, into those five positions and nowhere else. They are not the same kind of pool:

Pool	Share of supply	INVEST	Paired with	What its fee earns the treasury
INVEST / USDG — the anchor	60%	36,000	$10,000 of USDG — all of the protocol's cash	USDG, the dollar stablecoin native to Robinhood Chain
INVEST / RCAT — a sell wall	10%	6,000	nothing	RCAT — the tokenized stock itself
INVEST / WYFI — a sell wall	10%	6,000	nothing	WYFI — likewise
INVEST / HIMS — a sell wall	10%	6,000	nothing	HIMS
INVEST / DJT — a sell wall	10%	6,000	nothing	DJT

The anchor is an ordinary two-sided market: INVEST on one side, dollars on the other, across the whole price range. $10,000 against 36,000 INVEST is an opening price of about $0.2778 per INVEST — an opening market cap of about $16,667.

The four sell walls are one-sided. Each holds only INVEST, offered from a wall price of about $0.8333 — three times the opening price, a $50,000 market cap — upward. Below the wall there is nothing on the other side, so nothing trades there at all. A wall is not the protocol's money at risk: it is inventory the protocol already owns, offered at a price it is happy to sell at.

The stock pools are there on purpose, and they cost nothing to open. A pool's fee is charged in whatever the trader is spending, so quoting a pool in a real-world asset the treasury wants means every buy of INVEST pays the treasury in that asset directly — no purchase, no spread, no thin order book to push through. And the wall itself sells for that asset. Either way the protocol is paid a real-world asset it would otherwise have had to buy through a much thinner market. There is no ETH anywhere in the pipeline and no third-party liquidity provider to pay.

The protocol owns 100% of all five positions. The anchor is held for the Treasury as a share that cannot be transferred to anyone and cannot be redeemed, and it sits in the Treasury as a reserve like anything else. The four walls are not treasury reserves at all — the INVEST inside them is the protocol's own token, and the protocol never counts its own INVEST as backing. What they earn becomes backing; what they hold does not.

If you are trading INVEST

INVEST is a plain token in ordinary Uniswap V4 pools, so aggregators and the Uniswap app will index and route to all five of them. Three things are worth knowing before you do.

Every swap pays 5%, in both directions, in whatever you spend. Buying INVEST costs 5% of the USDG or stock going in; selling INVEST costs 5% of the INVEST going in. The fee is fixed in each pool's key and cannot be changed or switched off.

At launch only the anchor trades. The INVEST/USDG pool is the only one of the five with anything on both sides. The four stock pools hold INVEST and nothing else, offered from about $0.8333 upward — three times the opening price. Below that price they are empty.

You cannot sell INVEST into a wall. A wall holds no RCAT, WYFI, HIMS or DJT, so it has nothing to pay a seller with. If an aggregator quotes you INVEST → RCAT, the route either fails or is priced off some other venue entirely; the protocol's own pool cannot fill it. Buys below the wall price cannot fill either, for the same reason from the other side. Until INVEST trades above roughly three times its opening price, the anchor is the only venue where the protocol's liquidity is reachable at all — and that is the design, not a fault.

The loop

	Step	What happens
I	Someone trades	A buy or a sell of INVEST on any of the five protocol-owned pools.
II	The pool takes 5%	500 bps of whatever the trader is spending — USDG or one of the four stocks on a buy, INVEST on a sell — accrues to the protocol's own position in that pool.
III	The INVEST is sold; the stock is not	Anyone can sweep the accrued fees out of all five positions in one call. The INVEST is sold for USDG — only ever into the anchor pool, in small clips and never below an oracle-set floor. The USDG needs no sale. The stock fees go straight to the Treasury as themselves.
III b	A filled wall is banked	When a wall has actually sold INVEST, the stock it was paid for is inside the position, not in the fee. A separate permissionless call takes it out, hands it to the Treasury, and re-sets the wall higher. Until that call runs, the sale has not become backing.
IV	The stablecoin is allocated	The treasury's share of the USDG arrives at an accumulation desk, which splits it across the places governance has approved for it. At least half always goes to buying reserves.
V	The USDG buys reserves	That share buys a basket of real assets, which land directly in the Treasury.

Steps III, III b and V are the important ones. What arrives in the Treasury arrives as pure backing: it is not a deposit that mints new INVEST in exchange. Reserves go up; supply does not. And the stock skips the middle entirely — it is the reserve, delivered.

Why that pays stakers

The protocol can only mint INVEST against excess reserves — treasury value above what already backs the circulating supply.

excess reserves = total reserves − circulating supply

Staking emissions are capped at exactly that number. So when the flywheel adds reserves without adding supply, excess grows, and the emission budget grows with it.

Trading volume becomes backing, and backing becomes emissions.

The reverse is also true and deliberately so: in a quiet market with no excess, a rebase mints nothing. It does not fail, it does not go into debt, and staking is never stuck — it simply pays nothing until there is something real to pay from. The protocol never emits against reserves it does not have.

At launch there is no excess, so this number is zero. See the launch is deliberately under-backed below before reading anything above as a rate.

What the pools charge, and what they do not

• Buying INVEST pays 5% in the pool's other token — USDG, or RCAT / WYFI / HIMS / DJT, whichever you are spending.
• Selling INVEST pays 5% in INVEST — again, the currency you are spending.
• Sending INVEST to another wallet is free. So is holding it, staking it, bonding it and unstaking it. A pool charges a fee on a trade, and there is nowhere else it applies.
• Adding or removing liquidity is free too. The fee is on swaps, not on liquidity.

The rate cannot be changed. It is not a setting anyone forgot to lock: the fee is part of a pool's identity, alongside the two tokens and the price grid, and a pool with a different fee is simply a different pool. There is no setter, no governance vote and no emergency path.

And the protocol earns that fee for the ordinary reason anybody earns it — because it owns the liquidity the trade goes through.

Anyone can open a cheaper pool

That is the honest limitation, and it is worth being direct about. A fee is a property of a venue, not of a token. Someone can open their own INVEST pool at a lower fee, or add liquidity alongside the protocol in this one and take a share of the 5%. Because the fee is not levied by the token, there is no lever anywhere that could reach out and bring a new venue into it.

What keeps the flow here is a market rather than a rule:

• At launch these are the only INVEST markets, and together they hold the entire supply. A rival pool cannot quote a price until somebody funds it — and funding it means buying INVEST here first, at 5%.
• Routers send a trade to the best all-in price, and depth usually wins that comparison. A thin pool at a low fee beats a deep one only on dust.
• In the anchor the price grid is deliberately as coarse as Uniswap V4 allows, so nobody can concentrate a position tightly around the current price and skim the flow the protocol's own liquidity is earning. The most anyone can manage there is about two and a half times the efficiency of the protocol's own full-range position.

The four walls do not split the anchor's depth, because they hold no cash: every dollar the owner put in is in the anchor. What they cost instead is stated plainly. Their price grid has to be finer than the anchor's — a wall placed on the anchor's coarse grid would land at the wrong price by several times — and a finer grid means someone can concentrate a position around the wall, at roughly twenty times full-range efficiency. That is confined to the four wall pools, never the anchor; their position would be narrow while the protocol's runs to the top of the range; and to build one they must first buy INVEST from the anchor, which is exactly the price move the walls exist to sell into.

What the protocol gets in exchange is worth the trade. A token that took a cut of its own transfers could not be traded on Uniswap V4 at all — the pool checks what it actually received, finds it short, and cancels the swap — so being a plain token is the only way to be native to V4 and routable by every aggregator. Revenue arrives in things that never have to be sold — USDG from the anchor, and four real-world assets from the walls — which removes a standing source of sell pressure. And the Uniswap app treats INVEST as an ordinary token instead of putting it behind warnings and restrictions.

The team's share decays to zero

The 500 bps is split between the team and the treasury on a fixed thirty-day schedule that starts the moment the anchor pool is seeded, and it applies to every lane — the stablecoin and the four stocks alike:

Days since launch	Team bps of the 500	Treasury bps
0	400	100
7.5	300	200
15	200	300
22.5	100	400
≥ 30	0	500

The decay is smooth and continuous; the table just samples it. After thirty days the team's share is zero, permanently, and the entire 5% funds the treasury. The team is paid in kind as well as in USDG: a buy in the RCAT pool pays the team its share in RCAT.

Stated plainly, because the table alone understates it: at launch that is 400 bps of the 500 — 80% of the fee flow — going to the team rather than to backing, while backing is 85% short. What makes the expected cost of the in-kind half nevertheless zero at the launch sizing is the walls' placement: they open three times above the launch price, so no wall earns a unit of stock until INVEST has already trebled, by which time the team's share has decayed to zero.

This share is the team's whole compensation. There is no separate team token, no vesting cliff of protocol tokens, and no launch mint by default.

Why the sale cannot be gamed

Only the INVEST part of the fee has to be sold. The USDG is already the currency the treasury buys in and goes straight to the split; the four stocks are already assets the treasury wants and go straight to it as they are. And the INVEST is only ever sold into the anchor pool — a sale into a wall pool is refused outright, because a wall holds no cash to sell into in the first place.

Anyone can trigger the sale — it is permissionless. What nobody can do is choose the price. Two bounds apply, and a caller may only make them stricter, never looser:

• A clip limit. Each conversion sells at most 50 bps of the selling pool's INVEST leg, so one conversion moves that pool by roughly 50 bps at most. There is no way to dump the whole balance at once.
• A price floor. The fill has to land within 100 bps of a median price sampled over a window of thirty minutes to four hours. Spot price is never used. The pool's own fee is subtracted before the floor is applied, so the band is spent on price impact rather than on the fee — and the fee is not lost anyway, since it accrues to the protocol's own position.

The oracle behind that floor is a ring of sixteen readings, taken at most once every thirty minutes, of which the middle one in the window is used. It is fail-closed: with no valid reading, the conversion simply refuses rather than falling back to spot. Anyone can revive it with a single permissionless transaction and a thirty-minute wait.

Skewing a median is possible but not profitable. One bad reading changes nothing — you would have to move most of the readings in the window, each one a trade in, a reading, and a trade back out, and each of those round trips pays the pool's 5% twice into the protocol's own liquidity. The most that can be taken at the end of it is one capped conversion, which works out at roughly a tenth of what the attempt costs. What an attacker can do cheaply is keep the oracle out of band and stall the conversions, which delays the flywheel and takes nothing from it.

There is no cooldown between conversions, because they are self-limiting — each one pushes the pool further below the floor until the next one refuses.

Where the fee goes once it is stablecoin

Everything the fee earns for the treasury lands first at one place: the accumulation desk. It is a small contract that does exactly one thing — take the stablecoin that arrives and pass it on, split by weights — and it exists so that "what the protocol does with its revenue" is a decision somebody has to make out loud rather than a wire that was soldered at launch.

Three parties touch it, and they are deliberately unequal:

Who	What they decide	What they cannot do
Governance (a vote, then the timelock)	where money may go — it approves each destination, one at a time — and the floor under reserve accumulation	—
The operator (one key, no delay)	how much goes to each already-approved destination	add a destination, move a token, or push reserve accumulation below the floor
Anyone (in practice a keeper, every seven minutes)	when the split actually runs	anything else — triggering a fixed split is harmless, so it needs no permission at all

The floor is the number that makes the fast lane safe. It starts at 50%: however the mix is re-weighted, at least half of the treasury's share of the fee goes to buying reserves, and only a governance vote can change that. And approving a destination is genuinely a vote — an operator with a stolen key can shuffle money between places the protocol already chose, and nothing more.

At launch there is exactly one destination, and it is reserve accumulation at 100%. The desk is a pass-through until governance says otherwise, so nothing about the flow below changes on day one.

Stablecoin sitting at the desk is still backing. Each destination is registered with the Treasury as a place it trusts to be holding value on its behalf, so the audit counts what rests there. Two honest qualifications come with that, and both are deliberate limits rather than fine print:

• Value in flight is not value the treasury can spend. The redemption backstop pays out of what the Treasury actually custodies, and never out of a balance sitting somewhere else.
• Because of that, the total counted this way is capped at 25% of all backing. Anything above the cap simply is not counted. That is the bound on how much of the protocol's backing can ever be somewhere the Treasury can only watch.

One of those destinations is a prize draw

The first destination beyond reserve accumulation is a loss-less lottery. It is described in full in Treasury games, and the shape is:

• Lock gINVEST for at least a week — up to a year, with a longer lock earning a higher multiplier on your chance, up to four times.
• Once a day, five distinct addresses win, each address's chance proportional to its share of the total locked weight. They split the accumulated pot equally, and they claim it themselves.
• You cannot lose your deposit. The contract has no path that sends the locked token anywhere except back to the address that locked it, once its lock ends. There is no bet, no counterparty and no house.

The prizes come from the protocol, not from other players: it is the fee flywheel choosing to spend part of its own revenue on this instead of on reserves — which is why the floor above exists, and why switching the draw on took a vote.

The draw is played in a separate games app, not on this site. One thing to know before locking: while your gINVEST is locked you cannot vote with it, and it still counts toward the number of votes a proposal needs. That is a real trade-off and it is written up in Treasury games.

What the treasury buys

The accumulation share — at least half of the treasury's share, and all of it at launch — goes to an accumulator holding a governed basket: up to eight reserve assets with weights that add to 100%. It buys them through swap routes that governance has pinned in advance — specific, validated paths, so the accumulator cannot be steered into an arbitrary venue.

What goes in the basket is a position, not an index. The protocol is deliberately accumulating tokenized names with room to move — assets it wants the upside of — and it makes that safe by discounting them before they count rather than by avoiding them. A haircut is a percentage, so it scales with the position: appreciation flows through to backing at the discounted rate, and a fall was already assumed when the asset was listed. The protocol mints only against the discounted number, which is why a volatile reserve can add backing without ever adding supply against a price spike.

Every purchase is floored against the Treasury's own price feeds, not against the pool it is buying in. A purchase must deliver at least the feed value of what it spends, less a small tolerance for the venue's own fees. That is what stops a manipulated pool from selling the treasury an overpriced asset — the pool's price never sets the floor.

Purchases are also capped per fill and per rolling day, and a purchase that cannot meet its floor is skipped, not forced. The stablecoin waits in the buffer for the next cycle, and anything still unspent after a day goes into the Treasury as USDG rather than sitting idle.

The same engine can also rotate reserves — sell one treasury asset for another, immediately or spread out over time — under the same feed-based floors, returning the proceeds and any unspent input in the same transaction.

Owning the liquidity, not just the token

Holding a volatile asset and owning the market for it are two different things, and the protocol wants both. The second one has its own mechanism.

For any asset already listed as a reserve, an INVEST/<asset> Uniswap V2 pair can be created and its LP token registered as a reserve in its own right — valued by a fair-LP feed, discounted by at least the greater of 20% and the paired asset's own haircut, and capped by a price ceiling stamped on at listing.

The protocol then acquires that LP the same way it acquires anything else: by bonding. A bond market quoted in the LP token sells vesting INVEST at a discount to whoever hands over liquidity, and that liquidity becomes protocol-owned permanently. Two things follow, and both are deliberate:

• Bonding spends no reserves. The protocol pays in future supply, at a discount it sets, for a position someone else built.
• It marks the position off the paired leg only. The INVEST side of that LP is the protocol's own liability, valued at the $1.00 backing target and never at market — so the liquidity has to be worth owning on the reserve side alone before it counts as backing at all.

There is a second path, for pairs of assets the Treasury already holds: a governed position vault that funds a bounded, concentrated Uniswap V4 position from the Treasury's own reserves. It is the one place in the protocol that adds liquidity after genesis, and it is held to the same standard — every deposit is capped by policy and returns whatever did not enter the pool in the same transaction, the position is held as a non-transferable share marked at the price the legs' oracles imply and never at spot, fees flow back to the Treasury, and the exit needs no oracle at all. The accumulator itself only ever swaps.

The vault re-checks, on every deposit, that the position is still being counted at a discount at least as deep as the assets inside it and still priced off the same oracle feeds governance approved. If either has drifted, the next deposit is refused — while unwinding, fee collection and the guardian's emergency exit all keep working. It fails in the direction of taking in less, never of counting more.

Both mechanisms, including what listPair refuses to do and what bounds the vault, are in Reserves and listing.

Growing the main pools

Every pool is seeded once, at launch, and none is ever bought into on the open market. But the anchor is not frozen. Governance can make the anchor deeper using reserves the treasury already holds, by one of two votes:

• Move a V2 position in. An INVEST/USDG Uniswap V2 LP that the treasury owns — bonded in, or listed by the lister — earns the V2 pool's fee for whoever trades there, which is nobody's benefit but the traders'. A vote can pull that LP out, split it back into its two tokens, and put both into the protocol's own pool instead. The V2 pool shrinks by exactly the treasury's share of it; the protocol's pool grows by the same value, and starts earning the 5% fee the treasury actually collects.
• Deepen with USDG. The primary path. Treasury USDG goes into the anchor, paired with INVEST minted at the pool's live price.

Neither applies to a wall. A wall has no share to issue and no cash side to pair against, so there is nothing for either vote to act on. A wall grows only in the sense that it re-sets itself higher each time it is banked.

The second vote mints supply, so it is deliberately the slowest thing in the protocol: a full Boardroom vote, and the proposal has to name in advance the lowest INVEST price it is willing to mint at, quoted in the pool's own token rather than in dollars. If someone pushes the price down before the vote executes, the transaction fails rather than minting more INVEST for the same deposit. It is also capped in three further ways — how much of any one reserve can leave the treasury in a day, the excess-reserves gate that no mint may cross, and a hard ceiling on the INVEST minted. Whatever the pool's ratio does not consume does not sit anywhere: the leftover quote goes back to the treasury as backing, and leftover INVEST is burned.

That excess-reserves gate is the binding one at launch: with excess at zero, this path mints nothing at all until the gap below has closed. It is armed and available, and it will do nothing for as long as that stays true.

A pool share the treasury receives cannot leave it — a share can only ever move toward the treasury. That is also why there is no bond quoted in a pool share itself: a share is marked off its non-INVEST leg alone, so anyone contributing both sides would be credited for roughly half of what they handed over. The honest offer is the one above — bond USDG, or bond V2 LP, and let governance move it in.

The launch is deliberately under-backed

This is the most important thing on the page, and it is a decision rather than an accident. Read it before reading anything else here as a rate of return.

The protocol does not count its own INVEST as backing. The only thing it counts at launch is the anchor's cash side, marked off the USDG leg with a 10% discount applied:

Total supply	60,000 INVEST
Opening price (anchor)	$0.2778 per INVEST — a market cap of about $16,667
Counted backing	$9,000 — the anchor's $10,000 of USDG, less the 10% discount, and nothing else
Backing per INVEST	$0.15
The gap	$51,000 — 85% of the supply
Excess reserves	$0

Where the other 51,000 INVEST of supply sits, exactly:

60,000 INVEST  =   9,000   counted backing   (the anchor's cash, discounted)
               +  26,000   the anchor's own INVEST side, which is not backing
               +   1,000   the 10% discount on the cash
               +  24,000   the four sell walls' inventory, which is not backing either

Three consequences follow, and none of them is hidden:

1. Rebases pay exactly zero at launch. Not approximately: excess reserves are zero, so an epoch emits nothing. Staking still works, rebases still run and nothing reverts — your balance simply does not grow until backing has grown past the whole supply.
2. No bond can fill at launch. Every bond market sits under a hard floor of $0.90 per INVEST, which is about 3.2 times the opening price. The launch market is created and is inert; nothing fills until INVEST has risen that far. The floor is what stops bonds minting cheap INVEST into the gap, and it can only ever be lowered by a governance vote, never raised back.
3. Deepening the anchor with newly minted INVEST does nothing while excess is zero, for the same reason.

What the shape buys in exchange. Nothing here is marked at a price the protocol publishes. The one position the treasury counts is quoted in a dollar stablecoin. A sell wall holds no purchased asset, so a badly posted stock price can only ever overstate an asset the protocol was paid — never one the owner funded. And a wall costs nothing to open: the entire $10,000 went into the anchor.

How the gap closes

Two channels, and the smaller one is the fee lane:

• Fees. Every swap in any of the five pools pays 5%. Closing $51,000 through fees alone would take roughly $5.1 million of volume at the launch split, or $1.02 million once the team share has decayed to zero. That is an upper bound, because it counts fees only.
• The walls selling. This is the larger one. A wall hands the treasury the stock it was sold for, not a fee on it. The walls open at three times the launch price, and the first fourfold move above the wall delivers about $20,000 of stock across the four legs — twice the entire seed, and about two fifths of the gap. Half of a wall only sells at four times the wall price; ninety per cent needs a hundred times it.

INVEST price	Market cap	vs. launch	Share of each wall sold	Stock delivered, all four
$0.83 — the wall	$50,000	3×	0%	$0
$1.48	$88,889	5.3×	25%	$6,667
$3.33	$200,000	12×	50%	$20,000
$13.33	$800,000	48×	75%	$60,000
$83.33	$5,000,000	300×	90%	$180,000

This table describes what the walls would deliver if INVEST reached those prices. It is not a forecast and not a projection of returns; it is the shape of the inventory. At the launch price the walls have sold nothing at all — and today they do not exist, so they have sold nothing in the stronger sense too.

That is the flywheel starting cold. Every trade from the first one onward pushes it — once stage 2 has created something to trade.

Where to go next

• The fee flywheel — the same mechanism with its guarantees and limits set out in full.
• How to stake — how emissions reach you.
• Reserves and listing — what the treasury is allowed to buy, and how it values it.
• Treasury games — including the loss-less draw the fee funds.