The flywheel
Most treasury protocols need someone to keep funding them. Investors Center funds itself: every trade of INVEST pays a tax, and that tax buys assets that back INVEST.
This page explains that loop end to end. Nothing else on the site is a prerequisite.
The setup
Investors Center launches with a single protocol-owned pool — INVEST against USDG, the dollar stablecoin native to Robinhood Chain — seeded at $1.00 parity. There is no ETH anywhere in the pipeline and no third-party liquidity provider to pay.
The protocol owns 100% of that pool's liquidity. It is not rented, it cannot be withdrawn by anyone, and it sits in the Treasury as a reserve like anything else.
The loop
| Step | What happens | |
|---|---|---|
| I | Someone trades | A buy or a sell of INVEST on the protocol-owned pool. |
| II | The trade is taxed | 500 bps — 5% — of the transfer is taken in INVEST and held by the protocol. |
| III | The INVEST is sold | The collected INVEST is sold back into the pool for USDG, in small clips and never below an oracle-set floor. |
| IV | The USDG buys reserves | The treasury's share buys a basket of real assets, which land directly in the Treasury. |
Step IV is the important one. 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.
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.
What is taxed, and what is not
- Buying INVEST on the pool is taxed.
- Selling INVEST on the pool is taxed.
- Adding or removing liquidity through a router is taxed. The router is deliberately not exempt, so liquidity operations are not an untaxed side door.
- Sending INVEST to another wallet is free. The tax only applies to transfers that touch a registered trading pair.
Two mechanical notes for anyone reading the chain directly: a taxed transfer executes as two on-chain movements — the fee, then the remainder — so "received plus taxed" always equals "sent", and any tool that adds up transfer events has to count both. And a transfer small enough for the fee to round to zero passes untaxed, which is an artefact of integer arithmetic rather than an exemption anyone can use at size.
The rate is immutable. There is no setter, no governance vote and no emergency path that can change 500 bps or switch the tax off. It is fixed from the moment trading opens.
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 trading opens:
| 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.
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
Anyone can trigger the conversion of collected INVEST into USDG — 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 pool's INVEST reserve, so one conversion moves the 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 time-weighted average price measured over a window of thirty minutes to four hours. Spot price is never used.
The oracle behind that floor is fail-closed: if it has 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.
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.
What the treasury buys
The treasury's share 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.
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.
The opening gap
There is one honest wrinkle worth understanding, and it is by design.
At launch the protocol mints the INVEST side of the pool at $1.00 parity against the USDG seeded into it. But the protocol values that liquidity conservatively: it marks the position off the stablecoin leg, with a haircut applied, and it never marks the INVEST leg at market.
The protocol does not count its own INVEST as backing. So Investors Center opens slightly under-backed on paper — roughly 10% — which means excess reserves start at zero and rebases pay nothing until the tax has closed the gap.
The gap is proportional to the size of the launch pool, which is set at genesis and not yet fixed. Closing it takes taxed volume of about fifty times the gap at the launch treasury share of 100 bps, or about twenty times once the team share has fully decayed and the treasury takes the whole 500 bps.
That is the flywheel starting cold. Every trade from the first one onward pushes it.
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.