How it works
Five stages, from a description of a market to a token that trades.
A preset is a description of a market that Robinhood Chain does not list: a benchmark, a category, and a basket of Stock Tokens chosen to move with it. The registry stores the composition, the weights, the methodology hash and a Replication Score. Nothing is deployed with money at this stage — a preset sits at Upcoming until someone opens a round for it.
A round has a target in USDG and a deadline. Anyone deposits, and the deposit stays in the pool contract under the depositor's own address until the round resolves. No fee is charged. If the target is reached before the deadline, execution unlocks; if the deadline passes first, the round fails and every depositor withdraws their own USDG.
Execution is permissionless: once raised is at or above target, any address can call execute. The pool spends the whole balance on the fixed composition through the DEX router, in one transaction, at the published weights. The bought Stock Tokens land in the vault. The composition cannot be changed between the deposit and the buy.
The vault mints an ERC-20 — sWHEAT, sCOPPER, and so on — against the basket it now holds. Depositors claim their share pro rata. From then on the token's NAV is the oracle value of the basket divided by supply, readable on chain at any time on the backing page. Mint and redeem stay open at 0.20%, or 0.10% for SGT stakers.
A surrogate/USDG pool is seeded so the token trades continuously instead of only through the vault. Arbitrage between the pool price and NAV is what keeps the two close. The DEX fee is not protocol revenue — it stays with the liquidity providers.
A round that misses its deadline never reaches Executing; it ends where it started, with the USDG back in the depositors' wallets. A Live market whose oracle feed degrades is marked Degraded and mint is paused until the feed recovers.
A surrogate is an ERC-20 backed by a basket of tokenized equities selected to move with an external benchmark. It is not the benchmark, and it is not the underlying commodity. Holding sWHEAT gives you a claim on the Stock Tokens in the sWHEAT vault — not on wheat, not on a futures contract, and not on any redemption in physical goods.
Into the FundingPool contract for that preset, credited to your address. Nobody can move it out except through the two paths written into the contract: execution, which spends it on the published basket, and withdrawal or refund, which returns it to you. There is no treasury step in between.
It is a number in basis points describing how closely the chosen basket has tracked the benchmark in backtest — 9100 means 91.00. It is an estimate of fit, not a guarantee and not a yield. A high score means the basket has historically moved with the target; it says nothing about whether the target itself goes up.
Nothing is bought and no token is minted. After the deadline each depositor calls refund and takes their own USDG back. Refunds are pull-based on purpose: there is no keeper to pay, no batch to fail halfway, and no deadline on claiming your money back.
Funding deposits: 0%. Vault mint and redeem: 0.20%, or 0.10% for addresses that meet the SGT staking minimum. Management: 0.50% per year, accrued against the vault. DEX swaps carry the pool's own fee, which goes to liquidity providers and not to the protocol.
The equity feeds behind the Stock Tokens run 24/5, following the exchanges they quote. Outside trading hours the last mark is from the previous close, so NAV, basket values and price age all sit still. This is the feed working as designed, not an outage — the vault holds the same tokens whether or not the market is open.