Buying & selling

Trading works like any DEX. You pay in ETH, you receive the coin, and you can sell it back at any time. There is no lock-up, no vesting, no graduation event and no window where trading is disabled.

The router wraps your ETH into WETH and swaps it against the coin's pool. Because the pool starts as a single-sided range of coin with no WETH in it, early buys walk the price up the ladder the way a bonding curve does — the difference being that this is a real pool the whole time, and the price you see is a real pool price.

Selling is the same in reverse: the coin goes back to the pool for WETH, which the router unwraps to ETH.

Your sell never waits on the perp. Selling hits the pool's WETH depth, which the protocol deliberately keeps thick — the majority of a coin's capital stays in the pool and only the excess is hedged. A margin recall from Lighter takes minutes; your swap takes one block.

Why the price moves when nobody trades

Above the hedge floor, part of a coin's capital is a live perp position. When the underlying moves, that position gains or loses, and the protocol acts on it — buybacks lifting the price, or recalled margin redeployed as fresh depth beneath it.

So a chart can move on a quiet day. That isn't someone trading against you, it's the underlying doing its work. It also means the chart can bleed on a quiet day when the underlying goes against the coin.

Slippage and trade size

Every buy and sell takes a minimum-output parameter. The app fills it from your slippage setting; if you're calling the contracts yourself you must set it, because they apply no default tolerance and revert with Slippage(amountOut, minAmountOut).

A coin's depth is shown on its page. Liquidity sits in a concentrated range rather than spread full-range, so depth inside the range is thick and a trade large enough to run past it moves the price sharply — check depth before sizing. There's no dollar minimum, but integer rounding means a dust-sized trade can return zero output and revert.

Fees

The pool charges 1% on every swap, split 50/50 between the coin's creator and the protocol. The creator's half accrues per coin and is claimable at any time; the protocol's half accumulates in WETH and buys and burns the platform token.

Perp funding, venue fees and bridge costs are paid out of the hedge itself, so they show up as drag on the backing rather than as a charge on your swap. Funding runs continuously while a position is open — NAV, decay & funding covers how it accrues.

Where the chart comes from

Coins launch into pools hosted on the protocol's own Uniswap V4 PoolManager, with LpGuardHook attached to every one of them. The hook reverts beforeAddLiquidity for every sender except the launcher, which is what stops a sniper from LP-ing on top of the protocol's ladder and capturing the coin's whole revenue path. Swaps carry no hook at all — trading is exactly as permissionless as a hookless pool, and any V4-aware router can reach it.

The trade-off is real and worth knowing: aggregators and chart sites index the canonical Uniswap deployment, not the protocol's own PoolManager, so these pools do not appear on DexScreener-style trackers, and the canonical SwapRouter02 cannot reach them either. Prices, depth and history are served by the app's own chart, backed by an indexing subgraph.

Swaps route through MinimalV4Router; quotes come from V4Quoter, which is a simulate-and-revert lens rather than a view function.