The bonding curve

Before graduation a coin has no order book and no liquidity providers. It trades against a bonding curve: a contract holding the entire supply, which sells tokens for OKB and buys them back, at a price it works out from a single formula.

The formula is constant product — the same one an AMM uses. The curve keeps 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 — the ratio between them — rises. Sell, and it runs backwards. Nobody adjusts anything; there is no setting for it.

The phantom reserve#

A curve that started with zero OKB in it 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 is the only number that needs choosing, and everything else follows from it:

So a coin opens at a 30 OKB market cap and graduates at 367.5 OKB, having taken in 75 OKB of real money. Every coin on the board, without exception, has those same three numbers.

What a trade costs#

Price impact is whatever constant product says it is: a buy that takes 10% of the tokens off the curve moves the price about 23%, and 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, so that is a fact of the design rather than a surprise in it.

Walking a launch from open to graduation:

Figures are before fees. The 1% base fee comes off the OKB leg of every trade in both directions, so reaching the 75 OKB threshold takes about 75.76 OKB of gross spending. Fees and earnings has the rest.

Selling#

You can sell back to the curve at any point before it graduates, for whatever the formula prices your tokens at. There is no lockup, no vesting and no cooldown on a coin you bought.

The one moment selling is closed is the instant the curve runs out of sellable supply and before its pool exists — a window of one transaction, and a permissionless one: anyone can settle the graduation themselves and trade the pool instead. Nothing gets stuck.

The last buy#

The curve stops at exactly 71.43% of supply sold. The remainder is the graduated pool's allocation and the curve will not sell into it.

A buy that would cross that line is filled up to it and refunded the difference, rather than rejected. You get the tokens that were left, you are charged only for those, and the rest of your OKB comes back in the same transaction. The alternative — reverting — 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 on the quantity you received. A fill you were not charged for cannot fail a minimum you set for a fill you were.

Progress#

The progress bar on a coin's page is the OKB sitting on the curve measured against the 75 OKB threshold. At 100% the coin graduates. A sell takes OKB back off the curve, so progress falls as well as rises — a coin at 90% is not 90% of the way to a guaranteed outcome.