How it works
The bonding curve
One formula sets the opening price, every price after it, and the exact point a coin graduates. Nobody sets a price by hand and nobody adds liquidity.
Before graduation a coin has no order book and no liquidity providers. It trades against a bonding curve: a contract that holds the whole supply, sells tokens for OKB, buys them back, and prices all of it from one formula.
The formula is constant product, the same one an AMM uses. The curve holds a quote balance and a token balance, and their product never changes:
Buy, and OKB goes in while tokens come out: the token side shrinks, the quote side grows, and the price between them rises. Sell, and it runs backwards. There's no setting to adjust.
The phantom reserve#
A curve starting with zero OKB would price the first token at zero. So every launch starts with a phantom reserve of 30 OKB: a quote balance the contract counts for pricing but that nobody deposited and nobody can withdraw.
It's the only number that needs picking. Everything else follows from it:
| Term | Value | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Phantom reserve | 30 OKB | Set by the launchpad. Virtual. |
| Graduation threshold | 75 OKB | Set by the launchpad. Real OKB in. |
| Supply | 1,000,000,000 | Minted once, entirely onto the curve. |
| Opening market cap | 30 OKB | Equal to the phantom reserve. |
| Sold on the curve | 71.43% | 75 ÷ (30 + 75) |
| Reserved for the pool | 28.57% | 30 ÷ (30 + 75) |
| Price at graduation | 12.25× | ((30 + 75) ÷ 30)² |
| Market cap at graduation | 367.5 OKB | (30 + 75)² ÷ 30 |
Every coin opens at a 30 OKB market cap and graduates at 367.5, having taken in 75 OKB of real money. No exceptions.
What a trade costs#
Price impact is whatever constant product says. A buy that takes 10% of the tokens off the curve moves the price about 23%; one that takes half of them moves it fourfold. Early buyers get a better price than late ones, and the curve is public before anyone trades.
Walking a launch from open to graduation:
| OKB in | Progress | Supply sold | Price (OKB) | Market cap (OKB) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | 0% | 0 | 0.0000000300 | 30.0 |
| 7.5 | 10% | 200,000,000 | 0.0000000469 | 46.9 |
| 15 | 20% | 333,333,333 | 0.0000000675 | 67.5 |
| 37.5 | 50% | 555,555,556 | 0.0000001519 | 151.9 |
| 60 | 80% | 666,666,667 | 0.0000002700 | 270.0 |
| 75 | 100% | 714,285,714 | 0.0000003675 | 367.5 |
Before fees. The 1% base fee comes off the OKB leg of every trade in both directions, so reaching 75 OKB takes about 75.76 OKB of gross spending. Fees and earnings has the rest.
Selling#
You can sell back to the curve any time before it graduates, at whatever the formula prices your tokens at. No lockup, no vesting, no cooldown.
The one moment selling is closed is the instant the curve runs out of supply and before its pool exists — a window of one transaction. Anyone can settle the graduation themselves and trade the pool instead, so nothing gets stuck.
The last buy#
The curve stops at 71.43% of supply sold. The rest is the pool's allocation and the curve won't sell into it.
A buy that would cross that line gets filled up to it and refunded the difference rather than rejected. You get the tokens that were left, you're charged only for those, and the rest of your OKB comes back in the same transaction. Reverting instead would let anyone grief the final buy of a launch by slipping a small trade in ahead of it.
Your slippage bound still applies to a partial fill, read as a bound on the price you paid rather than the quantity you got. A fill you weren't charged for can't fail a minimum you set for one you were.
Progress#
The progress bar is the OKB sitting on the curve against the 75 OKB threshold. At 100% the coin graduates. Sells take OKB back off, so progress falls as well as rises — a coin at 90% isn't 90% of the way to anything guaranteed.
Reading it live
Price, market cap and progress all come from the curve's two balances, so you can read them straight off the contract. Trade a token shows how.