For most of history, whoever struck the coins took a cut. The word for it is seigniorage, from seigneur, the lord: the gap between what a coin is worth and what it costs to make, kept by the authority that makes it. A lord who ran a mint earned on every coin struck – a fee for turning raw silver into money the realm could actually use. Honest enough, in principle. Minting is a service, and the minter is paid for performing it.

The abuse that shadows seigniorage is debasement. A ruler short of money could mix cheap metal into the coin, strike the same face value out of less silver, and pocket the shortfall. Henry VIII debased the English coinage so thoroughly that he earned the name "Old Coppernose," the silver wearing off the high point of his portrait to show the base metal beneath. Debasement is seigniorage's evil twin. Instead of charging a visible fee to the person buying new money, the minter takes a little from everyone already holding it. The first is a price. The second is a theft wearing the costume of a price.

Every enterprise that issues a claim on itself faces a version of this choice, because someone has to be paid for building the thing. A startup pays its founders in shares; a token project pays them in tokens. And the standard method has always been the one closest to debasement: mint the founder a large allocation up front, out of the very supply everyone else will later buy. Whatever the vesting schedule wrapped around it, the structure is a pile of the enterprise's own money, created for the person at its centre, hanging over the market and waiting to be sold. When it is sold – and it is almost always sold – everyone who bought in earlier is diluted by it. The crypto era gave the pattern its own vocabulary: the premine, the founder dump, the "team unlock" that markets learn to dread on a calendar.

The failure here is not that founders get paid. Founders should get paid; the person who takes the risk of starting a thing is precisely who a healthy system rewards, and rewards well. The failure is the form of the payment – a stock of tokens, minted for an insider at a price no outsider ever paid, that can be turned into money only by selling it back into the same people the founder is supposed to be building for. It welds the founder's reward to an act that harms his own backers. That is debasement with extra steps.

A caper pays its founder the other way: as seigniorage, in the open, and never as a stock of the token. When someone buys into a caper, they pay a little above the curve's bare price, and that small premium is the founder's cut – skimmed off the payment in the base money the buyer brought, and dropped into a vault only the founder can open. The founder is never handed a heap of the caper's own token. He earns from the newcomer's overpayment, not by minting himself a claim on the treasury his backers are busy filling. There is no founder stack hanging over the market, because there is no founder stack at all.

Two design choices make this honest rather than merely rebranded. First, the cut comes out of the buyer's own premium, not out of what existing holders own – a fee on new money, in the exact seigniorage sense, rather than a debasement of old money. A sliver of it is routed to a shared pool, the Commons, that every caper on the platform feeds, so each new venture launched thickens the common treasury standing behind all of them. Second, and less obvious, the cut is front-loaded in rate but self-terminating: the founder's share of each buy is heaviest at the very first purchase and thins steadily as the token distributes, until it reaches zero and stays there. Past that point the curve is the buyer's only counterparty, and neither founder nor protocol takes anything further. The reward is concentrated where the risk is – the cold open, when a founder is asking strangers to back something with no history – and it switches off once the thing is established, instead of curdling into a permanent tax on a mature token.

There is a subtlety in this that cuts against the usual launch-day greed. The rate is heaviest at the start, but the founder's actual take is not, because at the start the price is near nothing, and a large share of nearly nothing is nearly nothing. The real money arrives only as real backers do: the cut swells with genuine demand and then fades as the rate winds down. A founder cannot get rich by sniping his own launch, because at launch there is nothing there to snipe. He is paid in proportion to the interest he actually attracts – which is the only thing you would ever want a founder paid for. His incentive is fused to the single activity that also serves his backers: bringing real demand to the thing they hold.

This is an old problem in a new mint. Any enterprise built around a person has to answer how that person eats without letting them loot the enterprise to do it. Salaried from the treasury, they drain the common pool. Paid in a founder's stack, they carry an overhang that punishes the faithful. The caper keeps the mint's honest half and discards its dishonest one – a visible fee on the making of new money, paid by the party who chooses to buy it, in money that already exists – and then does something no historical mint ever did: it turns the fee off once the coin is in wide circulation and the risky work is behind it.

Seigniorage built palaces, and when it curdled into debasement it toppled the currencies that paid for them; the line between the two was always whether the one minting the money was charging a fair price or picking a pocket. For most of financial history that line was a matter of the minter's character, policed weakly if at all. A caper draws it in the contract instead. The founder is paid, well and early, out of what newcomers freely offer and never out of what holders already own – and when the enterprise no longer needs bootstrapping, the cut simply ends. The person at the centre is compensated for the risk they took by the very mechanism that once let sovereigns rob their subjects, running honestly for the first time.