Buy and sell

On the curve

Before graduation, you trade with the token's own bonding curve, not with other people. While the curve is open it always has a price, so you can buy, and you can sell back what you bought. Once the market cap reaches the graduation mark, selling pauses until graduation (at most 7 days if graduation stalls, then the curve reopens). On a stock-quoted launch, trading also stops while the stock token's issuer has transfers paused.

• Buying pushes the price up. Selling pushes it down.
• Every buy and every sell pays a 1% fee to the creator (and, if the creator chose so, to holders).
• The money buyers pay in stays in the curve. It is there to pay sellers back and, at graduation, to become the pool. Nobody can take it out.
• You set the minimum you accept and a deadline. If the price moves past your limit, the trade simply fails: nothing is bought or sold, you only lose the gas.

Those two numbers come straight from the curve's formula, not from a forecast. Market cap is price times the full 1 billion supply. Each curve stores a parameter G (gradQuote()); it sells its 780M tokens out exactly as it reaches a price of G per 200M tokens, so it graduates at a market cap of 5 × G, and it starts at about a third of G (0.329 × G). On a USDG launch (G = 12,000) that is 0.00006 USDG per token and a $60,000 market cap at graduation, against 0.00000394 USDG and $3,945 at the start: about 15 times higher. The live price of any curve is readable with price() on its contract.

Graduation

When the market cap reaches the graduation mark, the curve closes and anyone can call graduate():

1. A Uniswap v3 pool is created for the token and its quote, in the 1% fee tier, at the curve's final price.
2. The 200M reserved tokens and everything in the curve go into the pool as liquidity.
3. The liquidity positions are sent to TrenchPOL, a custody contract with no withdraw function. Not for Vimen, not for the creator, not for anyone.

If graduation cannot complete, the curve stays closed for 7 days, then anyone can reopen trading so holders can still sell at curve prices.

After graduation

The token trades on Uniswap like any other token, against the same quote. The pool charges a 1% fee per trade. Those fees are collected from the custody and split by the FeeRouter: 50% creator side, 30% $TRENCH, 20% Vimen.

The pool's liquidity can never be pulled, but that does not hold the price up. If holders sell, the price falls.

Quick reference