Buying into a caper

You buy into a caper by sending $XRD to its bonding curve from the swap panel on the caper's own page. The curve releases tokens to you on the spot and sets the price itself, so there is no counterparty to find, no order to fill and no listing to wait for. The smallest buy the contract accepts is 0.001 $XRD. The token you get carries three things a plain token does not: a claim on a treasury the group owns, weight in the votes that spend it, and a right to leave with your share.

What am I buying?

Tokens released from the caper's own inventory. Every caper's whole supply is created once, at launch, into a vault the contract holds, and nobody can mint more or burn any. A buy takes your tokens out of that vault and a sell puts them back.

Holding those tokens is what makes you part of the caper rather than a spectator. Your balance counts towards your vote weight and towards your share of the treasury when you leave. There is no separate membership token to acquire and no application to be accepted.

How is the price set?

By the curve, not by a market. The price of the next token depends only on how much of the supply has already been sold: it starts near zero, rises steadily through the early range, and steepens sharply as the supply runs out. Every buy raises the price for the buyer after you, and every sell lowers it. There is no order book, no market maker, no oracle and nobody quoting a spread.

A large buy walks up the curve as it fills, so the average you pay is above the price you saw before you pressed the button. That is slippage, a property of the curve's shape rather than a fee anyone charges. The swap panel guards against it: the transaction it builds aborts rather than fill much worse than the quote it showed, and your wallet's Customize Guarantees can tighten the floor further. A headless signer building its own manifest gets neither and has to set the floor itself.

Where does my money actually go?

Every buy and every sell pays the skim, the only trade charge, and the rest of your $XRD goes into the curve's reserve, the pool that pays sellers. The skim is split three ways:

1. The caper's own treasury, in $XRD: the pot the members govern and the exit pays out of.
2. Whoever holds the caper's founder badge, in $XRD and in a slice of the tokens the buy releases. It rewards launching the caper, and it goes to the badge holder, never to the treasury.
3. The Commons, the treasury of the $CAPER caper, as a small slice of tokens.

Nobody can change the split from inside the running platform. It changes only if the platform's shared logic is replaced, through an UPGRADE proposal that only the $CAPER caper can raise.

The skim is not flat. It is highest when a caper is new and falls as more of its supply is sold, so the earliest buyers pay the most of it, while the reserve behind their tokens is thinnest. It never reaches zero, so the founder-badge holder earns a share of every trade for the life of the caper. What a founder can take covers that side in full.

Is my money safe? What backs the token?

Part of it is backed by $XRD and part of it is not. The reserve holds the $XRD buyers paid in, less the skim, and it can buy back every token in circulation, each sale walking the price down the curve. It was never sized to pay every holder today's price for every token: the difference is a claim on buyers who have not arrived yet, and if nobody else ever buys, that part is not there. Any bonding curve has this shape, and it is better known before you buy than discovered after.

What the reserve does guarantee is that the sell side always works. You can never hold tokens and fail to find a buyer, because the curve is the buyer and the vault is already funded.

Can I sell, and how much do I get back?

Yes, at any time, at a price the curve sets rather than one anyone negotiates. Selling walks the same curve backwards. There is one curve in both directions, with no separate buy and sell price and no bid–ask spread, so the price you sell at is the price the next buyer would pay to reach that same point. The skim comes off the payout on the way out, split as it is on a buy.

Because you are selling back down a rising curve, selling into a caper that has grown since you bought returns more than you paid, and selling one that has shrunk returns less. Nothing in the mechanism protects you from that, and nothing in it depends on anyone else agreeing to trade with you.

Does buying give me a say?

Yes, in both of the two phases a caper decides in. In the first, any holder of at least one token can cast a ranked ballot on a proposal, for a vote fee of 100 $XRD that goes into the caper's treasury, and the leading option passes only if it clears a supermajority of the weight cast. In the second, a proposal that won its ballot opens a market window, and its action executes only if the token's average price across the window holds at or above where it stood when the window opened. Holding through the window is consent, buying is support and selling the price down is the objection, so your position keeps counting after the vote is over. Voting has the detail.

Buying earns no vote tokens. Each ballot you cast earns them, and they carry your vote weight and your right to exit. They cannot be transferred, and since the redeploy of 11 September 2026 they cannot be bought: until then buys and sells earned them too, so one transaction could buy a position, earn a claim on the treasury and redeem both.

Your vote weight grows with your holding and with the ballots you have cast, and the same weight sets your share of the treasury when you leave. A big bag alone can't capture control, and a holder who has never voted has no weight at all.

What are my ways out?

Two, and they pay from different places.

Sell back to the curve. The route above. The reserve pays you the curve's price and the tokens return to inventory for the next buyer. It is fast, always open, and pays you nothing from the treasury.

Exit. The right the whole model is built around: you hand in your tokens and your vote tokens together, and leave with your fair share of the treasury plus the curve's price for the tokens. Your share grows with how much you hold and how many ballots you have cast, not with which way you voted. An account that has never voted holds no vote tokens and has no exit to take.

Plan for that before you need it. Vote tokens come only from voting while a proposal is open, and there is no way to earn them after the fact. One caveat: an account whose deposit rules refuse unfamiliar tokens does not receive the vote tokens a ballot earns, though the ballot still counts. Leaving a caper covers the exit in full.

The two are not alternatives to pick between when you buy. The curve answers “what is my token worth right now”, and the exit answers “what is my share of what we built”.

What buying does not give you

Stated plainly, because the gap between these and what a token sale usually implies is where people get hurt:

• No yield. Holding tokens pays nothing by itself. A caper’s treasury grows or shrinks by what its members pass proposals to do with it.
• No claim on the founder. Their half of the skim is theirs once taken, and no mechanism claws it back.
• No guaranteed floor. The reserve backs the curve price at the current circulation, not the price you paid.
• No veto you can cast for free. Blocking a proposal means selling the price under its baseline, which costs you the position. Objecting is meant to be expensive; that is the design, and it is the trade-off to weigh before you buy into a caper whose treasury you would not want spent.
• No say in whether the caper does anything. A treasury sits until somebody raises a proposal and the market lets it through; see Paying someone from a caper’s treasury.

Will the price go up?

Nobody can tell you, and this page will not try. The curve fixes what a token costs at a given point in its supply; it fixes nothing about whether anyone else will buy. A caper's price rises when people buy and falls when they sell, and there is no emission schedule, no yield and no mechanism in the contract that pushes it in either direction.

What you can assess in advance is not a price path but three things readable on-chain now: how much $XRD sits in the reserve behind the token, how much sits in the treasury the exit would pay out of, and whether the caper has ever passed a proposal and spent any of it. A group that has never executed anything has not yet shown it can turn money into work.

How do I buy into a caper?

1. Open the caper's page from the roster on caper.network. Every caper has one.
2. Connect a Radix wallet holding $XRD. You need $XRD for the purchase itself and a little more for the network fee.
3. Enter an amount, at least 0.001 $XRD, in the swap panel, which is set to $XRD → the caper's token by default. The panel shows the tokens you would receive, and SWAP builds the transaction.
4. Sign. The tokens arrive in the same wallet and you are a member from that transaction onward, though not yet one who can exit: the vote tokens the exit needs come from casting a ballot, not from the buy.
5. Watch the proposals. There is nothing to opt into: from here your position counts every time a proposal settles against the price.

Before you buy into any caper, read its treasury and its proposal history rather than its description. Both are on-chain and both are on the caper's page.

Where next

What is a caper covers the model itself, and Leaving a caper the exit right in full. For the pricing mathematics rather than the buyer’s view, see Bonding curve and Trading. If you are on the other side of this – launching rather than backing – start at Getting started. If you are reading this through an AI agent, Querying a caper from an AI agent documents the MCP servers that expose a caper’s live treasury and proposal history – free to read, with no key.