The words,
in the order they matter.

The launchpad, and the brand. Every token launched on it runs the same contract. Launches differ only in the mode, the creator fee and the graduation market cap the launcher chose.

The platform’s own token. Its pool sits on the same hook as every launched pool, and each chain has one hook. $LODE is an Ethereum launch. The difference is that its pool forwards nothing, and every ETH launch’s $LODE cut ends up in it. Each ETH launch keeps its cut on its own pool until $LODE graduates. After that, a permissionless keeper sweeps it into $LODE’s backing. Its floor therefore depends on the platform’s ETH volume on Ethereum. Every other launch’s cut never reaches it: its chain’s LODE platform treasury holds that cut, in the launch’s own quote. After its raise its pool pays the LODE Platform fee like every other pool, 0.25% of every trade. The timed raise itself pays none. It sells its reserve on its own staircase.

2.5% of every inflow to a launched token’s vault, taken in the launch’s own quote before the pool counts it. The inflows are the raise, the skim, the floor’s share of staircase proceeds, ask proceeds and swept LP fees. Every launch pays it. An ETH launch’s cut goes to the $LODE vault. The launch books it on its own pool, and a permissionless keeper sweeps it across once $LODE has graduated. Every other launch’s cut goes to its chain’s LODE platform treasury, which holds each quote’s cut separately. The vault’s own money coming back from a redeployed bid is not an inflow, so it is never cut.

LODE’s fee on every trade, paid by the trader on top of every other fee: 1% on each buy from and sell to the sale, then 0.25% on every buy and sell in the pool after graduation. It is not part of the raise and never enters the vault, so it never moves the floor and pays no $LODE cut. The sale holds it until graduation, and then the pool owes it until it is swept to LODE’s team vault on its chain. LODE’s team key sets the two rates a new launch starts with: the sale’s never above 1%, the pool’s never above 0.5%, and 0 is allowed. Each launch keeps both of its rates for life, so a new setting reaches only launches created after it, and every launch page shows its own. $LODE’s own timed raise pays none, and its pool pays it after the raise.

Carpenter’s fee on every swap in a Carpenter pool, the exchange an Ethereum launch trades on after graduation. The vault’s own swaps pay it too. It is 0.05% on buys and on sells, taken on the ETH (or quote) side on top of the pool’s LP fee. It goes to Carpenter, not to LODE, the vault or the pool’s liquidity, so it never moves the floor. A ETH-paid buy that crosses two Carpenter pools pays it on each. Carpenter’s team key sets the rate, never above 0.1%. Each launch keeps the rate in force when it was created, and its pool charges that rate for life from graduation. With it, a trade on a graduated Ethereum launch pays six parts: the LP fee, the floor skim, the creator fee, the holder tax, the LODE Platform fee and the Carpenter Platform fee.

A fixed bundle chosen at creation, so buyers recognise the deal at a glance. The launchpad offers Moonshot, Cook and Bluechip, which graduate at $25k, $50k and $100k and sell their reserve on the staircase. Custom is anything within the hard caps: skim ≤ 10%, creator ≤ 5%, holder ≤ 10%. Its staircase follows from its graduation market cap. The near-floor ramp has the same shape in every mode.

The site: Explore, Create, Launch pages and Profile. It never holds funds. It deploys the contracts with the values you chose and reads the pool back to you.

The Uniswap v4 hook behind every launch. Each chain has one, and it keeps each launch’s accounting apart by pool. For every pool it skims ETH from swaps into that launch’s vault and deploys the vault as a standing bid band whose cheap edge is the floor price. It keeps the tokens the bid absorbs, re-lists them higher, and moves the floor only upward. The hook has no owner and no upgrade path.

The published floor price: the cheap edge of the bid band, and the lowest price any sell into the bid is paid. It sits one band (120 ticks, about 1.2%) under the price at which the vault’s ETH covers every token that could be sold into it: F = Q ÷ S, the vault’s backing over the tokens it has to answer for. The floor is the edge of a position in the pool that any router can see and fill. It cannot move down.

The floor as it sits in the pool: one all-ETH liquidity position that holds the whole vault, spanning a band of 120 ticks. Its cheap edge is the floor price. Its dear edge is where the backing solves, F = Q ÷ S, and where a sell fills first; that edge is the bid. A partial fill narrows the band from the dear side only, so the cheap edge stays where it is. Selling into it works like selling into any pool, except that the bid is always there.

ETH held for one launch’s floor, in a vault contract of its own. Only the hook can pay from it, and it can never pay out another launch’s ETH. It has no withdraw function and no owner. Every launch’s vault is a proxy on one beacon. The beacon’s implementation is set when it is deployed, and nobody can replace it. The floor’s ETH leaves the vault only as the bid, paid to someone selling tokens into it. The launch’s holder tax and its referrer’s share wait there too, booked apart from the floor and paid out only when claimed. On Ethereum they wait on the launch’s own pool, apart from its trading liquidity.

The vault expressed per token: how much ETH stands behind each token that could reach the bid. The bid band’s dear edge solves to it, so it is the quantity the ledger row and the cards' bar report as Backed. The published floor is one band under it.

What the bid must be able to absorb. It is total supply minus the vault’s inventory, the staircase’s unsold tokens, and the tokens locked inside the protocol-owned position at the floor price. It is smaller than total supply, which is why the bid can be 99% of the launch price with 100% of the raise.

Tokens the bid has bought. The vault keeps them, never burns them, and leaves them out of sellable supply. It re-lists them as the ask at no less than twice their cost, so every round trip through the vault adds to it.

Inventory re-listed as one continuous all-token band above the market. It runs from max(2× its cost, 2× the floor) four doublings up. When it fills, the ETH goes to the vault and the floor rises.

How every launch sells its reserve. On a preset, graduation places 69% of supply as fixed token-only steps, each one doubling of the price, from the graduation market cap up to about $1B, with 1% as an open tail above. On Moonshot each step holds the same number of tokens. On Cook and Bluechip each step up holds 1.04× the one below. A Custom launch takes one equal step for each doubling from its graduation market cap to about $1B, at most 16. The steps never move. Each doubling sells about the same number of tokens for twice the money, so the money the steps take grows with the market cap. At each ratchet that money is split by two numbers: the floor over the price, with a target of 20%, and the protocol-owned position’s money over the market cap, with a target of 15%. The one further short of its target gets more. When both are met, all of it goes to the floor. With ETH at $2,400, a steady climb on Cook leaves $308k in the vault at a $10M market cap and $41.0M at $1B. Along that climb, a sell of 3% of the market cap moves the price 7.5–9%. A Custom launch at its default split softens a 3% sell about as well from a graduation market cap of about $200k, and less below that or with a bigger sale share. $LODE runs its own staircase: 93% of its supply in steps from its open to about a $2.6B market cap, each step 0.95× the tokens of the one below, and a 1% open tail. The protocol owns the bottom 13% of those steps and the team the 80% above. Its protocol-owned position’s target is 20% of the market cap, with bids from 70% of the price up to it.

The 10% of supply seeded as a tokens-only position from the launch price to the top of the tick range. It also takes its share of what the staircase sells, placed as bids from 90% of the price up to the price. Those bids follow the price up and are never swept to the floor. The hook owns it for that launch’s pool, and it can never be withdrawn. Its LP fees are swept into the floor on every ratchet. At the floor price it holds tokens that can never reach the bid, so they are subtracted from sellable supply.

The fee on the ETH leg of every swap that feeds the vault. Far from the floor, each side pays its flat “far” rate, set by the mode. Within about 5× of the floor the sides diverge: buys slide to 0% at the floor and sells climb to a multiple of their far rate: 1.5× on a preset and on $LODE, and 1× to 5× on Custom, as its launcher picks. Only the skim ramps. The creator fee and holder tax stay flat.

The distance over which the skim slides from its far rate to its at-floor rate: 16,094 ticks, about 5× in price, measured to the bid band’s dear edge. The width is the same for every launch. The far rate changes with the mode, and both endpoints are that pool’s own settings (defaults: buys 0%, sells 10% at the floor).

The 0.25% Uniswap takes on the ETH leg of every swap, flat on both sides. The hook forces it onto every trade. The pool charges it on what is left after the skim, the creator fee, the holder tax and the LODE Platform fee, so the five takes compound rather than simply add. An Ethereum launch’s Carpenter pool charges the same 0.25%, and the Carpenter Platform fee comes on top of it, for six takes. On a LODE pool the liquidity earning it is largely the protocol’s own, and those fees are swept into the vault on every ratchet.

The permissionless maintenance call. It realises every position, sweeps fees, pays the caller’s bounty and re-solves the floor. It publishes the floor one band cheaper than the solve. It splits what the staircase sold between the floor and the protocol-owned position. Then it redeploys the ask and the bid. Anyone may call it. The caller earns a small bounty from the skim collected since the last call, never from the vault. There is no lift: the band’s cheap edge is the floor, so nothing is priced under it for a bot to buy.

What happens inside a sell that fills into the bid. A bid holding tokens would resell them at the floor, so the hook takes the filled bid out within that same sell. It keeps the tokens as inventory at cost and carries the price back up to the band’s dear edge across its own emptied band, which costs nothing. It then re-places the whole band with the ETH left. The floor is not re-solved and no bounty is paid; that waits for the next ratchet.

A flat fee on buys and on sells, at most 5% each, paid to the fee recipients on top of the floor skim. It is fixed at launch along with the recipients and their shares, and there is no setter. It never enters the vault, so it never moves the floor and $LODE takes no cut of it.

The wallets the creator fee is paid to. A launch names one to five recipients, each with a share, and the shares add up to 100%. By default it is the launcher’s own wallet at 100%. A recipient can also be an X, GitHub, Discord or Telegram handle, which resolves to the wallet that account signs in with. The recipients and their shares are written into the launch’s pool at launch, and neither the launcher nor the platform can change them afterwards. A handle that has not signed in yet holds its share until its owner claims that slot, once. The other recipients claim as usual. Anyone may trigger a payout, and each recipient receives only its own share.

Tokens handed to the vesting contract with a cliff and a linear schedule, for yourself or for another address. The schedule is written once: it cannot be revoked, unlocked early or given a new beneficiary. Anyone may trigger a claim, and only the beneficiary receives it. Locked tokens sit under the floor but earn no holder rewards. Locking opens only after the sale graduates, because until then the token is locked to the sale.

A holder destroying their own tokens. The hook reads supply live, so when supply falls, sellable supply falls against the same ETH and the floor rises for everyone else. Only you can burn what you hold. The vault keeps its inventory and never burns it. Burning opens only after graduation, because while the sale is bonding the token is locked to it.

Uniswap v4 measures price in ticks, and 6,932 ticks is a doubling. A band is liquidity concentrated between two ticks. The bid’s band spans 120 ticks, about 1.2%, which makes the bid an order at a known price rather than a curve. The pool uses a tick spacing of 60.

The FloorLaunch contract sells 30% of supply at a flat price in ten tranches, and holds the ETH it takes until graduation. The 1% LODE Platform fee that each buy and each sell pays is held apart from the raise. The buyer gets the tokens in the same transaction as the buy, so there is nothing to claim afterwards. Until the sale graduates the tokens are locked to it, and the sale itself is the only counterparty they can move to. On the launchpad this phase is labelled Bonding.

The moment the sale fills. One transaction releases the token’s sale lock for good, creates the pool, and places the staircase and the protocol-owned position. The same transaction turns 100% of the raise, less the $LODE cut, into the bid. The LODE Platform fees the sale held move to the pool’s own ledger for the team. On the launchpad the token reads Graduated from then on.

Price × total supply at the end of the sale. The mode sets it: $25k for Moonshot, $50k for Cook and $100k for Bluechip. A preset sells 20% of supply at that price, so it raises 20% of the cap: $5k, $10k and $20k. A Custom launch sets its own cap and split. The graduation market cap is not the amount raised.

What the sale collected for its tokens, in the launch’s quote (ETH, or a stock). The 1% LODE Platform fee paid on top is not part of it. All of the raise goes under the token: 97.5% to the bid and 2.5% as the $LODE cut. On a ETH launch the cut waits on the launch’s pool until a keeper sweeps it into the $LODE vault. On every other launch it goes to its chain’s LODE platform treasury. Founder allocation is 0% on every launch: the factory mints the whole supply to the sale.

One of the ten equal slices of the sale. FloorLaunch supports a slope from the first tranche to the last. LODE launches use a flat price, so the average equals the open and none of the floor is spent subsidising early buyers.

During the sale you can sell any part of what you bought for your own average price, less the 1% LODE Platform fee. The 1% paid on the buy is kept, so a round trip inside the sale costs 2% of the sale price. It is one transaction from your own wallet with no approval, and it can move only your own balance. The sale has no deadline and no minimum raise. It graduates when it sells out.

The wallets a team buy pays out to. A launch with a team buy names one to five team payees, each with a share, and the shares add up to 100%. By default it is the launcher’s own wallet at 100%. Each payee is paid its share of the team’s part of what the team steps sell for, of their unsold tokens after the lock, and of the team buy’s vested wallet part. A payee can also be an X, GitHub, Discord or Telegram handle, which resolves to the wallet that account signs in with. Its share waits until its owner claims that slot, once, and the other payees claim as usual. Nobody can change the payees or their shares after launch.

Wallets the launcher lists that may buy in the opening blocks without the anti-snipe tax. The list is public on-chain and chosen before launch.

The asset the token trades against, chosen at launch. It is either the chain’s own gas asset (ETH on Robinhood Chain and Base, BNB on BSC, HYPE on HyperEVM, ETH on Ethereum) or a tokenised stock LODE has approved on that chain. One factory per chain takes every approved quote.

Price × total supply, the way every tracker quotes it. The vault never burns the tokens it buys back, so they still count. Market cap can never fall below bid × supply.

Price × the tokens the vault does not hold: the part of the market cap that could still be sold into the bid. After a full dump the float is tiny, while the market cap is still bid × supply.

The standing bid as a share of the current price: how much of what you pay now already sits under the token as ETH the vault will pay out. It is 99% at launch. It drifts down as price runs ahead, and back up as the skim accrues. 100% means the market is trading at the floor.

Two rates for the same thing. Minimum is what the vault keeps if every swap paid only the far-from-floor skim. Measured is what the vault keeps once trades near the floor and ask fills are counted: 4.8% of volume at $1M a day.

The ETH leg of every swap, counted whether or not it was skimmed. A zero-skim buy at the floor is still volume. Both sides of a round trip count, as on every exchange.

An optional flat tax on buys and sells, at most 10% each, taken in the launch’s quote asset and owed to holders pro rata to their balance. It waits with the launch until each holder claims it. A claim pays what is owed at that moment, for one launch or for all of them at once. On EVM every wallet earns, and one contract per chain keeps the books. On Ethereum every wallet that has started earning does. A buy on LODE’s site starts it. A wallet that bought elsewhere or received its tokens by a plain send taps Start earning once, and the small record deposit it pays comes back when the record closes. Holders claim their rewards, and balances never rebase. The tax never moves the floor, and every point of it is a point that does not go under the token.

The tokens that earn holder rewards. On EVM that is everything in wallets. The pool manager, the launch’s vault, the hook, the launch contract, the vesting contract and the bridge adapter are excluded when the launch registers, so protocol positions, inventory and locked tokens never earn. On Ethereum it is the balances of every wallet that has started earning. A token account with no holder record earns nothing, and its share goes to the holders that have one. Pools, vesting escrows, program accounts and wallets that have not started all fall in that group.

The card on Explore: banner, token image, name and ticker, then one line with the phase (Graduated / Bonding), network, mode and age, then three figures. While the sale runs there is no pool, so the figures are Raised, Target and Filled. Once it graduates they are market cap, 24h volume and Floor, the market cap at the floor.

The band above the chart on a Launch page: identity first, with the chain’s mark before the name and the price under the name. Once the launch has graduated, the stats are, in order, the floor, the next step, market cap, vault and 24h volume. The floor is the bid band’s cheap edge and never moves down. The next step is the price at which the staircase sells next, and how far above the current price that is. On a wider screen the floor and the next step lead the stats, and every stat sits together at the header’s right. On a phone both wait in More info, and an upright iPad keeps the floor beside market cap and 24h volume. While the sale runs there is no pool and so no bid, and the stats are Raised, Target (or, on a timed sale, how long until it ends), Filled, what is left to raise and the graduation market cap instead. Filled is never on the header’s line: it is the first entry in More info, at every width. Holders is the last of these in both. A wallet that holds a graduated launch also sees Bag after it, which is that holding priced at the floor. Bag is the first stat to move into More info. Market cap and 24h volume lead the other stats, on the price’s row on a phone, where a sale shows Raised and what is left instead. The other stats fill the width the header has, on one line, and More info opens the ones that do not fit.

The Launch page’s working area: chart, tape and ticket as three panes separated by hairlines. Drag a divider to resize the panes. The divider turns amber while you hold it.

The live list of swaps. A sell that hits the bid is labelled Sell → bid, because that is the floor doing its job.

The buy / sell panel: what you put in, what you get out, and one Fee. The Fee sums the LP fee, floor skim, creator fee, holder tax and LODE Platform fee at the launch’s own rates and at the price you are trading at, not at the ramp’s endpoints. On Ethereum it adds the Carpenter Platform fee. It moves as the distance to the bid moves, and it differs between the two sides. During the sale the Fee is the launch’s LODE Platform fee alone (1% today), on a buy and on a sell. A launch that charges none shows no Fee row.

The thin band under the chart showing where the visible window sits within the token’s full history.

A card’s badges are Graduated or Bonding, its network, its mode, its creator fee and LODE. The mode is Cook, Bluechip, Moonshot or Custom, and an older launch may show Meme. The creator fee badge is green at ≤ 0.5%, amber at ≤ 1% and red above that.