Topic Backing a caper · the buy side What you buy Newly minted caper tokensTokens released from the caper's fixed supply – not someone else’'s Counterparty The curve itse…r buyer needed Minimum 0.001 $XRD Backed by 2/3 of market capitalisation held as XRD reserve at genesis Also earns Nothing towards the exit – since 11 September 2026 only a cast ballot mintearns the soulbound stakvote tokens the exit is gated onneeds Ways out Sell back to the curve (always); exit for a treasury share (holders who have cast at least one ballotwith your fair share of the treasury (members who have voted) Related Leaving a caper (/…rading (/wiki/markets/trading)

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…the contract accepts is 0.001 $XRD. What you get back is a token thaThe token you get carries three things a plain…ight to leave with your share.

What am I buying? Tokens released from the caper’'s own inventory. Every caper’'s fullwhole supply of 100,000,000,000 tokens is created once, at launch, into an inventory vault held by the contract, and the token is built with no mint role and no burn role (CaperDao::new in contracts/core/src/caper_dao.rs). A buy takes your tokens out of that vault and a sell puts them back, so your purchase moves circulation up the cap by however much your XRD pays for. The contract refuses any buy that would push circulation past the cap 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…aper rather than a spectator. The sameYour balance is read three ways: as your stake in the treasury, as the multiplier oncounts towards your votinge weight, and as the amount you can redeemtowards your share of the treasury when you leave. There is no s…no application to be accepted.

How is the price set? By a formulathe curve, not by a market. The price o…pends only on how much of the curvesupply has already been sold. Writing s for the fraction in circulation – tokens sold divided by the 100bn cap – the marginal price is P(s) = 0.001 × √s / (1 − s) which: it starts near zero, rises as a square rootsteadily through the early range, and steepens sharply as the curve approaches fully sold. Every buy advances s, so esupply runs out. Every buy raises the price for the buyer after you. That is the whole pricing mechanism:, and every sell lowers it. There is no order book, no market maker, no oracle, and nobody quoting a spread. Because the price is a function of circulation, a large buy does not clear at one price. ItA large buy walks up the curve as it fills, so the average you pay is worse thanabove the price you saw before you … the button. That is slippage, and it is a property of the curve's shape rather than a fee anyone charges. The swap panel does guard the size ofguards against it: the transaction it builds asseborts a minimum output 2% below the quote it displayed, so a buy that would fill worse than that aborts rather than fillingrather than fill much worse than the quote it showed, and your wallet's Customize …d has to set the floor itself.

Where does my money actually go? Your XRD is split three ways before any of it prices your tokens: - The treasury’s share of the skim. 49.5% of the collateralization skim, in XRD, into the treasury of the caper you are buying. It is not a lever anyone can pull: the division is compiled into the platform's logic component and the deployed CaperMain exposes no setter, so changing it means deploying a fresh logic component and moving the registry's current_main to it through a governed UPGRADE proposal. - The founder’s share of the skim. Half of it: 45% of the skimEvery 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: - The caper's own treasury, in $XRD: the pot the members govern and the exit pays out of. - Whoever holds the caper's founder badge, in $XRD, and another 5% asin a slice of the tokens the buy releases. This is the founder’sIt reward fors launching, and it is deliberately front-loaded. The last 0.5% of the skim is a smaller token slice for the Commons treasury. - The remainder into the reserve. Everything else lands the caper, and it goes to the badge holder, never to the treasury. - 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 inf the curve vault, whplatform's shared logich is the pool that pays sellers and backs the token. The skim is the part a buyer should understand before committing, because it is not flat. It is largest at s = 0, the empty curve, where it is the whole peak of 100%: the first buyers pay about 2.06 times the curve price for each token they keep. It falls fast as circulation grows: half the peak once 1.99% of the curve is in circulation, 1% by 21.4%, and a halving every 20% of the supply after that, so a slice reaches the founderreplaced, 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 onf every trade for the life of the caper. The contract bounds the peak too, so the founder’s slice of any one mint can never exceed 5% – that ceiling is peak × 50% × 10% at the live peak of 1, and a further 0.5% of the mint goes to the Commons treasury rather than the founder. The practical reading: you pay the most skim for being early, and the earliest buyers pay it precisely because the reserve behind their tokens is thinnest What a founder can take (/wiki/foundations/what-a-founder-can-take) covers that side in full.

Is my money safe? What backs t…e token? Part of it is backed by $XRD and part of it is not, and the split is a known number rather than a promise. At genesis a caper’s curve holds two thirds of its market capitalisation as XRD in the reserve vault. That is not a policy choice – it falls out of the curve’s shape. A curve priced as supply to the power n holds exactly 1/(n+1) of its capitalisation in reserve, and caper’s curve is a pure square root at the origin, so n = ½ and the fraction is 2/3. The other third. 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. I, and if nobody else ever buys, that thirdpart is not there. This is the honest shape of any bonding curve and it is worth stating plainly rather than discovering later: the reserve can pay every holder the curve price at the current circulation, but it was never sized to pay every holder what the token is nominally worthAny bonding curve has this shape, and it is better known before you buy than discovered after. What the reserve does guaran…t the sell side always works. There is no scenario where youYou can never hold tokens and cannotfail to find a buyer, because the cur…d the vault is already funded.

Can I sell, and how much do I get back? Yes, at any time, and the amount is computed in closed formt a price the curve sets rather than one anyone negotiateds. Selling walks the same curve backwards: the payout is the reserve required at your circulation before the sale minus the reserve required after it. 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 exactly the price the next buyer would have paidpay to reach that same point. The…ff the payout on the way out, dividedsplit as it is on a buy. The consequence people underestimate: bBecause you are selling back do… shrunk returns less. Nothing aboutin the mechanism protects you from that, and nothing aboutin it depends on anyone else agreeing to trade with you.

Does buying give me a say? Yes, and it gives you two of them. A caper decides in two phases, and buying puts you in both. In phin both of the two phases a caper decides in. In the first, any holder of at leaset one youtoken can cast a ranked ballot on a proposal – any holder of at least one token can, for a, for a vote fee of 100 $XRD fee – and the ballots are folded into a Borda tally that passes an option only on a supermajority of 1.5 / option_countthat goes into the caper's treasury, and the leading option passes only if it clears a supermajority of the weight cast.In phase twothe second, a proposal that won its ballot is triggered, which locks the trailing time-weighted average price as a baseline and opens the market window; it executes only if the TWAP over thatopens a market window, and its action executes only if the token's average price across the window iholds at or above the baselinewhere it stood when the window opened. Holding through the window is consent, buying is support, and selling the price under the baseline is the veto. So your say is your vote and your position both – and thedown is the objection, so your position keeps talkcounting after the vote is over. Buying does not accrue the second, soulbound Voting (/wiki/governance/voting) has the detail. Buying earns no vote tokens. Only a cast ballot does, and it mints exactly one – VOTE_MINT = 1, fused into the vote call itself. Until the redeploy of 11 September 2026 buys and sells minted it too, at 0.01 per XRD of gross value, and that is the single change a returning reader most needs to know: one transaction could buy a position, mint the record that opens the exit, and redeem on both. The tokens cannot be transferred or sent to anyone – the depositor role is bound to the caper’s own component – and they can no longer be bought either, at any rate, by anyone. They are earned by turning up to a vote. The formula those stake tokens feed is Your weight grows with the ballots you cast, not with the size of your holding alone. where t is your governance-token balance, v your stake tokens, V the total stake supply, and T the tokens in circulation. It does double duty, and that is the point of it: it weights your ballot in phase one, and it prices your exit – whatEach 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 you take when you leave – using the identical helper. A large balance genuinely. A big bag alone can't capture counts for more, and so does having voted rather than merely held, because both terms sit in the numerator and a zero in either produces zerorol, and a holder who has never voted has no weight at all.

What are my ways out? Two, and they pay from different potlaces. Sell back to the curve. The route above. You are paid out of tThe reserve vault atpays you the curve's price, and the tokens return to inventory for the next buyer. FIt is fast, always availableopen, and it pays you nothing from the trea…le model is built around: you surrender governance tokens and soulbound stakhand in your tokens and your vote tokens together, and take aleave with your fair share of the treasury the caper has accumulatedplus the curve's price for the tokens. Your share grows with how mu…how many ballots you have cast –, not with which way you voted. It also gates on stake: you need some of both, so aAn account that has never voted haolds no exit to take rather than a zero-valued one. Plan for that before you need it. Until 11 September 2026 a buy opened the door by itself; since the redeploy removed the trade-side mint, the only way to acquire stake is tovote tokens and has no exit to take. Plan for that before you need it. Vote tokens come only from voteing while a proposal is open, and there is no way to acquire itearn them after the fact. One caveat worth knowing: the mint deposits with try_deposit_or_refund, so an account whose deposit rules reject unknown resources forfeits the accrual rather than aborting the ballot: 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 (/wiki/foun…/leaving-a-caper) covers the mechanicsexit in full. The two are not alternatives to pick between at the moment you buy. They answer different questions: twhen you buy. The curve answers “what is my t…is my share of what we built”.

Will the price go up? Nobody can tell you, and this page will not try, and you should treat anyone who does tell you as selling something. The curve fixes what a token costs at a given circulationpoint in its supply; it fixes nothing about wheth… anyone else will buy. A caper’'s price rises when people buy …le, no yield and no mechanism anywhere in the contract that pushes it in either direction. So the question “how do I invest in a caper” is worth reframing before you act on it. What you can actually assess in advance is not a price path but three things that are all readable on-chain right now: how much $XRD sits in the reserve behind…wn it can turn money into work – which is the only thing that would make its treasury worth more than the XRD already in it.

How do I buy into a caper? - Open the caper’'s page from the roster on cap…onnect a Radix wallet holding $XRD. You need $XRD for the purchase itself an…network fee. - 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 at the current circulation, and SWAP builds the transact…r from that transaction onward –, though not yet an exiting one: the soulbound stake the exit is gated onone who can exit: the vote tokens the exit needs comes from casting a ballot, not fr…into: from here your position is already counteds every time a proposal resolvsettles against the price. Before y…hain and both are on the caper’'s page – a caper that has never passed a proposal has never demonstrated it can spend what it has raised.

Does buying give me a say? Ye…a those stake tokens feed is w = (t × v) / (V × T)Your weight grows with the ballots you cast, not with the size of your holding alone. where t is your governance-t… zero in either produces zero.

What are my ways out? Two, and…e tokens together, and take a fair share of the treasury the caper has accumulated. Your share is (t × v) / (V × T), so the exit pays out ongrows with how much you hold and how many ballots you have cast – not onwith which way you voted. It also gates on stake: exit takes both amounts, asserts each is positive and withdraws them from your own accountyou need some of both, so an account that has never…is my share of what we built”.

Does buying give me a say? Ye…tion_count of the weight cast.In phase two, a proposal that … zero in either produces zero.

What are my ways out? Two, and…rather than a zero-valued one.Plan for that before you need …is my share of what we built”.

Where does my money actually g…n grows: half the peak once 1.0199% of the curve is in circulation, 1% by 10.821.4%, and a halving every 120% of the supply after that, s…hind their tokens is thinnest.

Where does my money actually g…y of it prices your tokens: - A trade feThe treasury’s share off the gross. 0.5%, and it is not a lever anyone can pull. The rate is a field written once whenskim. 49.5% of the collateralization skim, in XRD, into the treasury of the caper you are buying. It is not a lever anyone can pull: the division is compiled into the platform's logic component is instantiated;and the deployed CaperMain exposes no setter for it, so changing it means deployi…ADE proposal. - The founder’s collateralization skim. A slice of what is left, taken partlyshare of the skim. Half of it: 45% of the skim in XRD, and partlyanother 5% as a sharlice of the tokens the buy releas… is deliberately front-loaded. The last 0.5% of the skim is a smaller token slice for the Commons treasury. - The remainder into the rese… the first buyers pay about 2.506 times the curve price for eac…any one mint can never exceed 32.265% – that ceiling is peak × 1/3 × 30/3150% × 10% at the live peak of 1, and the remaining thirty-first of the token lega further 0.5% of the mint goes to the Commons treasury …cal reading: you pay the most to the founderskim for being early, and the earl…hind their tokens is thinnest.

Can I sell, and how much do I …aid to reach that same point. A trade feeThe skim comes off the payout on the way out, divided as it is on a buy. The consequence people under…se agreeing to trade with you.

What buying does not give you …- No claim on the founder. Their half of the skim is theirs once taken, an…paying-someone-from-a-caper) .

Where does my money actually g…n grows: half the peak once 1.301% of the curve is in circulation, 1% by 10.8%, and then a floor of 0.5%a halving every 10% of the supply after that, so a slice reaches the found…hind their tokens is thinnest.

Where does my money actually g…st at s = 0, the empty curve, andwhere it is the whole peak of 100%: the first buyers pay about 2.5 times the curve price for each token they keep. It falls fast as circulation grows: half the peak once 6.751.3% of the curve is in circulation, and still 0.74% with all of it sold, so a small1% by 10%, and then a floor of 0.5%, so a slice reaches the founder on …any one mint can never exceed 1.6132.26% – that ceiling is peak × 1/3 × 30/31 at the live peak of 0.051, and the remaining thirty-fir…hind their tokens is thinnest.

You buy into a caper by sendin…e caper’s own page. The curve mints you new tokensreleases tokens to you on the spot and sets the pric…ight to leave with your share.

What am I buying? Tokens that did not exist until you bought them. A caper does not sell you inventory another holder is unloading – the curve mints against a fixed notional cap of 100,000,000,000 tokens, andreleased from the caper’s own inventory. Every caper’s full supply of 100,000,000,000 tokens is created once, at launch, into an inventory vault held by the contract, and the token is built with no mint role and no burn role (CaperDao::new in contracts/core/src/caper_dao.rs). A buy takes your tokens out of that vault and a sell puts them back, so your purchase moves circulation up thate cap by however much your XRD …no application to be accepted.

Where does my money actually g…rtly as a share of the tokens mintedthe buy releases. This is the founder’s reward… reaches the founder on every buytrade for the life of the caper. Th…hind their tokens is thinnest.

Where does my money actually g…because it is not flat. It is a straight-line taper: largest at s = 0, falling steadily, and exactly zerolargest at s = 0, the empty curve, and falls as circulation grows: half the peak once 306.75% of the curve is in circulation. Past that point every buy is, and still 0.74% with all of it sold, so a small split between the trade fee and the reserve alone, and the founder takes nothing further from new buyce reaches the founder on every buy for the life of the capers. The contract bounds the peak too, so the founder’s sharlice of thany one mint can never exceed roughly 51.61% – that ceiling is peak × 1/3 × 30/31 at the live peak of 0.05, and the remaining thirty-fir…hind their tokens is thinnest.

What are my ways out? Two, and…y you voted. It also gates on the stake bucket: exit asserttakes both buckeamounts, are non-emptysserts each is positive and withdraws them from your own account, so an account that has never…is my share of what we built”.

Topic Backing a caper · the bu…eserve at genesis Also earns 0.01 soulbound stake tokens per XRD of gross outlay – the thingNothing towards the exit – since 11 September 2026 only a cast ballot mints the soulbound stake token the exit is gated on Ways ou…); exit for a treasury share (any holder carrying stake tokenss who have cast at least one ballot) Related Leaving a caper (/…rading (/wiki/markets/trading)

Does buying give me a say? Ye…ter the vote is over. Buying alsodoes not accrues a the second, soulbound token. The contract mints 0.01 stake tokens per XRD of your gross outlay – gross meaning before the trade fee and the founder skim, the whole of what you sent. Selling accrues them too, on the gross curve payout, and so does voting: a 100 XRD balloOnly a cast ballot does, and it mints exactly one – VOTE_MINT = 1, fused into the vote call itself. Until the redeploy of 11 September 2026 buys and sells minted it too, at 0.01 per XRD of gross value, and that is the single change a returning reader most fnee at that same 0.01 rate mints exactly 1. Theyds to know: one transaction could buy a position, mint the record that opens the exit, and redeem on both. The tokens cannot be transferred or sent…o the caper’s own component – butand they can certainly be acquired, by anyone, at that published rate; what you cannot do is buy someone else’sno longer be bought either, at any rate, by anyone. They are earned by turning up to a vote. The formula those stake tok… for more, and so does having traded or voted rather than merely received tokensheld, because both terms sit in th… zero in either produces zero.

What are my ways out? Two, and…on how much you hold and how much stake you have accrued – by trading, and by casting ballotsany ballots you have cast – not on which way you voted.…pty, so an account that has neither traded nover voted has no exit to take rather than a zero-valued one. Since stake accrues on the trade itself, your first buy opens the door without waiting on a proposalPlan for that before you need it. Until 11 September 2026 a buy opened the door by itself; since the redeploy removed the trade-side mint, the only way to acquire stake is to vote while a proposal is open, and there is no way to acquire it after the fact. One caveat worth knowing: th…rual rather than aborting the trade – you get the tokens, not the stakeballot. Leaving a caper (/wiki/foun…is my share of what we built”.

How do I buy into a caper? - O…kens arrive in the same wallet, along with the soulbound stake tokens the buy accrued, and you are a member from that transaction onwardnd you are a member from that transaction onward – though not yet an exiting one: the soulbound stake the exit is gated on comes from casting a ballot, not from the buy. - Watch the proposals. There… can spend what it has raised.

Does buying give me a say? Ye…red, which locks the trailing 7-day time-weighted average price as a baseline and opens a 48-hourthe market window; it executes only if t… zero in either produces zero.

Where next What is a caper (/…m-an-ai-agent) documents the read-only MCP servers that expose a cape… treasury and proposal history – free to read, with no key.

What are my ways out? Two, and…exit pays out on how much you boughthold and how much stake you have traded, not on howaccrued – by trading, and by casting ballots – not on which way you voted. It also gates on t…pty, so an account that has nevither traded nor voted has no exit to take rather tha…ke accrues on the trade itself rather than on any later act of governance, your first buy opens the door without waiting on a proposal. One caveat worth knowing: th…is my share of what we built”.

Does buying give me a say? Yes, and buying is the whole of it. There is no ballot to cast iit gives you two of them. A caper decides in two phases, and buying puts you in both. In phase one you can cast a ranked ballot on a proposal – any holder of at least one token can, for a 100 XRD fee – and the ballots are folded into a Borda tally that passes an option only on a casuper. A proposalmajority of 1.5 / option_count of the weight cast. In phase two, a proposal that won its ballot is triggered, which locks the trailing 7-day time-weighted average price when it is raised and resolvesas a baseline and opens a 48-hours later, passing if and only if the live spot price is then window; it executes only if the TWAP over that window is at or above thate baseline. Holding through the…der the baseline is the veto. YSo your say is your position, and it is expressed by what you do with it rather than by turning up to vote.vote and your position both – and the position keeps talking after the vote is over. Buying also accrues a second,…too, on the gross curve payout. They cannot be transferred or bought; they only ever arrive by trading, and they are what the exit is gated on, and so does voting: a 100 XRD ballot fee at that same 0.01 rate mints exactly 1. They cannot be transferred or sent to anyone – the depositor role is bound to the caper’s own component – but they can certainly be acquired, by anyone, at that published rate; what you cannot do is buy someone else’s. The formula those stake tokens feed is w = (t × v) / (V × T) where t is theyour governance-tokens you hand back, v the stake tokens you hand back balance, v your stake tokens, V the total stake supply, an… T the tokens in circulation. Read it carefully, because its name It does double duty, and that is the point older writing is misleading:f it: it weights your ballot in phase one, and it prices anyour exit, not a vote. It decides – what share of the treasury you take when you leave, and nothing else – using the identical helper. A large balance genuinely co…re, and so does having traded or voted rather than merely received to… zero in either produces zero.

Topic Backing a caper · the buy side What you buy Newly minted caper tokens – not someone else’s Counterparty The curve itself – no order book, no other buyer needed Minimum 0.001 XRD Backed by 2/3 of market capitalisation held as XRD reserve at genesis Ways out Sell back to the curve (always); exit for a treasury share (once a ballot you cast has been released) Related Leaving a caper (/wiki/foundations/leaving-a-caper) , Bonding curve (/wiki/markets/bonding-curve) , Trading (/wiki/markets/trading)

Where does my money actually go? Your XRD is split three ways before any of it prices your tokens: - A trade fee off the gross. Governance sets the rate, and the contract caps it at 10%. Do not read a rate quoted anywhere as permanent – read the cap, which is the part the contract guarantees. - The founder’s collateralization skim. A slice of what is left, taken partly in XRD and partly as a share of the tokens minted. This is the founder’s reward for launching, and it is deliberately front-loaded. - The remainder into the reserve. Everything else lands in the curve vault, which is the pool that pays sellers and backs the token. The skim is the part a buyer should understand before committing, because it is not flat. It is a straight-line taper: largest at s = 0, falling steadily, and exactly zero once 30% of the curve is in circulation. Past that point every buy is fee-split between the trade fee and the reserve alone, and the founder takes nothing further from new buyers. The contract bounds the peak too, so the founder’s share of the mint can never exceed roughly 5% however governance is tuned – that ceiling is peak × 1/3 × 30/31, and the remaining thirty-first of the token leg goes to the Commons treasury rather than the founder. The practical reading: you pay the most to the founder for being early, and the earliest buyers pay it precisely because the reserve behind their tokens is thinnest.

Does buying make me a voter? Buying makes you a member; it does not by itself give you weight. Caper’s vote weight is w = (t × v) / (V × T) where t is the balance you have staked into the caper's ballot box, v is how many votes you have cast, V is the total votes cast across the caper, and T is the tokens in circulation. Your holdings are a multiplicative factor, so a large balance genuinely counts for more – but so is your participation, and a zero anywhere in the numerator produces zero weight. That has a consequence worth knowing before your first proposal: a member’s very first vote carries zero weight, because their vote count is still zero at the moment it is recorded. Weight is something you accumulate by turning up, and a holder who never votes never converts their balance into influence. Buying a large position the day before a contested vote does not buy the vote.

What are my ways out? Two, and they pay from different pots. Sell back to the curve. The route above. You are paid out of the reserve vault at the curve price, and the tokens return to inventory for the next buyer. Fast, always available, and it pays you nothing from the treasury. Exit. The right the whole model is built around: you surrender your tokens and take a proportional share of the treasury the caper has accumulated. Your share is your vote weight – the same (t × v) / (V × T) – so the exit pays out on participation as well as holdings. It also gates on it: vote tokens are minted one per accepted ballot – at release, once the proposal's voting window has closed, rather than at the moment you cast – and exit asserts a non-empty vote-token bucket. So a buyer who never votes has no exit to take rather than a zero-valued one, and a buyer whose first ballot is still awaiting release does not have one yet. Leaving a caper (/wiki/foundations/leaving-a-caper) covers the mechanics in full. The two are not alternatives to pick between at the moment you buy. They answer different questions: 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 vote to do with it. - No claim on the founder. 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 control proportional to money alone. Weight needs participation, per the formula above. - No say in whether the caper does anything. A treasury sits until a proposal passes; see Paying someone from a caper’s treasury (/wiki/foundations/paying-someone-from-a-caper) .

How do I buy into a caper? - Open the caper’s page from the roster on caper.network (/) . Every caper has one. - Connect a Radix wallet holding XRD. You need XRD for the purchase itself and a little more for the network fee. - 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 receive at the current circulation, and SWAP builds the transaction. - Sign. The tokens arrive in the same wallet, and you are a member from that transaction onward. - Stake some of those tokens into the caper's ballot box. Voting weighs the staked balance, and this step is easy to skip: a cast from an account with nothing staked banks the vote fee and records no ballot at all. - Vote on something. It is the only thing that converts your balance into weight, and the token it earns you arrives when the proposal's ballots are released. 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 – a caper that has never passed a proposal has never demonstrated it can spend what it has raised.

Topic Backing a caper · the buy side What you buy Newly minted caper tokens – not someone else’s Counterparty The curve itself – no order book, no other buyer needed Minimum 0.001 XRD Backed by 2/3 of market capitalisation held as XRD reserve at genesis Also earns 0.01 soulbound stake tokens per XRD of gross outlay – the thing the exit is gated on Ways out Sell back to the curve (always); exit for a treasury share (any holder carrying stake tokens) Related Leaving a caper (/wiki/foundations/leaving-a-caper) , Bonding curve (/wiki/markets/bonding-curve) , Trading (/wiki/markets/trading)

Where does my money actually go? Your XRD is split three ways before any of it prices your tokens: - A trade fee off the gross. 0.5%, and it is not a lever anyone can pull. The rate is a field written once when the platform's logic component is instantiated; the deployed CaperMain exposes no setter for it, so changing it means deploying a fresh logic component and moving the registry's current_main to it through a governed UPGRADE proposal. - The founder’s collateralization skim. A slice of what is left, taken partly in XRD and partly as a share of the tokens minted. This is the founder’s reward for launching, and it is deliberately front-loaded. - The remainder into the reserve. Everything else lands in the curve vault, which is the pool that pays sellers and backs the token. The skim is the part a buyer should understand before committing, because it is not flat. It is a straight-line taper: largest at s = 0, falling steadily, and exactly zero once 30% of the curve is in circulation. Past that point every buy is split between the trade fee and the reserve alone, and the founder takes nothing further from new buyers. The contract bounds the peak too, so the founder’s share of the mint can never exceed roughly 5% – that ceiling is peak × 1/3 × 30/31, and the remaining thirty-first of the token leg goes to the Commons treasury rather than the founder. The practical reading: you pay the most to the founder for being early, and the earliest buyers pay it precisely because the reserve behind their tokens is thinnest.

Does buying give me a say? Yes, and buying is the whole of it. There is no ballot to cast in a caper. A proposal locks the trailing 7-day time-weighted average price when it is raised and resolves 48 hours later, passing if and only if the live spot price is then at or above that baseline. Holding through the window is consent, buying is support, and selling the price under the baseline is the veto. Your say is your position, and it is expressed by what you do with it rather than by turning up to vote. Buying also accrues a second, soulbound token. The contract mints 0.01 stake tokens per XRD of your gross outlay – gross meaning before the trade fee and the founder skim, the whole of what you sent. Selling accrues them too, on the gross curve payout. They cannot be transferred or bought; they only ever arrive by trading, and they are what the exit is gated on. The formula those stake tokens feed is w = (t × v) / (V × T) where t is the governance tokens you hand back, v the stake tokens you hand back, V the total stake supply, and T the tokens in circulation. Read it carefully, because its name in older writing is misleading: it prices an exit, not a vote. It decides what share of the treasury you take when you leave, and nothing else. A large balance genuinely counts for more, and so does having traded rather than merely received tokens, because both terms sit in the numerator and a zero in either produces zero.

What are my ways out? Two, and they pay from different pots. Sell back to the curve. The route above. You are paid out of the reserve vault at the curve price, and the tokens return to inventory for the next buyer. Fast, always available, and it pays you nothing from the treasury. Exit. The right the whole model is built around: you surrender governance tokens and soulbound stake tokens together, and take a share of the treasury the caper has accumulated. Your share is (t × v) / (V × T), so the exit pays out on how much you bought and how much you have traded, not on how you voted. It also gates on the stake bucket: exit asserts both buckets are non-empty, so an account that has never traded has no exit to take rather than a zero-valued one. Since stake accrues on the trade itself rather than on any later act of governance, your first buy opens the door. One caveat worth knowing: the mint deposits with try_deposit_or_refund, so an account whose deposit rules reject unknown resources forfeits the accrual rather than aborting the trade – you get the tokens, not the stake. Leaving a caper (/wiki/foundations/leaving-a-caper) covers the mechanics in full. The two are not alternatives to pick between at the moment you buy. They answer different questions: 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. 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 (/wiki/foundations/paying-someone-from-a-caper) .

How do I buy into a caper? - Open the caper’s page from the roster on caper.network (/) . Every caper has one. - Connect a Radix wallet holding XRD. You need XRD for the purchase itself and a little more for the network fee. - 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 receive at the current circulation, and SWAP builds the transaction. - Sign. The tokens arrive in the same wallet, along with the soulbound stake tokens the buy accrued, and you are a member from that transaction onward. - Watch the proposals. There is nothing to opt into: from here your position is already counted every time a proposal resolves 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 – a caper that has never passed a proposal has never demonstrated it can spend what it has raised.

You buy into a caper by sendin…to its bonding curve from the buyswap panel on the caper’s own page…ight to leave with your share.

How is the price set? By a for…han a fee anyone charges. The buyswap panel does guard the size of …d has to set the floor itself.

How do I buy into a caper? - O…– at least 0.001 XRD – in the buyswap panel, which is set to XRD → the caper’s token by default. The panel shows the tokens y…ive at the current circulation, and SWAP builds the transaction. - Sign. The tokens arrive in… can spend what it has raised.

How is the price set? By a for…her than a fee anyone charges. The buy panel does guard the size of it: the transaction it builds asserts a minimum output 2% below the quote it displayed, so a buy that would fill worse than that aborts rather than filling, and your wallet's Customize Guarantees can tighten the floor further. A headless signer building its own manifest (/wiki/foundations/build-on-caper-as-an-agent) gets neither and has to set the floor itself.

Topic Backing a caper · the bu…it for a treasury share (once you have vota ballot you cast has been released) Related Leaving a caper …rading (/wiki/markets/trading)

Does buying make me a voter? B… (t × v) / (V × T) where t is what you holdthe balance you have staked into the caper's ballot box, v is how many votes you have…ed vote does not buy the vote.

What are my ways out? Two, and…ote tokens are minted one per ballot cast,accepted ballot – at release, once the proposal's voting window has closed, rather than at the moment you cast – and exit asserts a non-empty vote-token bucket, s. So a buyer who never votes has no exit to take – notrather than a zero-valued one, and a buyer whose first ballot is still awaiting release does not have one yet. Leaving a caper (/wiki/foun…is my share of what we built”.

How do I buy into a caper? - O…om that transaction onward. - Vote on something. It costs little and it is the only thing that converts your balance into weightStake some of those tokens into the caper's ballot box. Voting weighs the staked balance, and this step is easy to skip: a cast from an account with nothing staked banks the vote fee and records no ballot at all. - Vote on something. It is the only thing that converts your balance into weight, and the token it earns you arrives when the proposal's ballots are released. Before you buy into any cape… can spend what it has raised.

Topic Backing a caper · the bu…ays out Sell back to the curve, or (always); exit for a treasury share (once you have voted) Related Leaving a caper (/w…rading (/wiki/markets/trading)

What are my ways out? Two, and…icipation as well as holdings. It also gates on it: vote tokens are minted one per ballot cast, and exit asserts a non-empty vote-token bucket, so a buyer who never votes has no exit to take – not a zero-valued one. Leaving a caper (/wiki/found…is my share of what we built”.

Topic Backing a caper · the buy side What you buy Newly minted caper tokens – not someone else’s Counterparty The curve itself – no order book, no other buyer needed Minimum 0.001 XRD Backed by 2/3 of market capitalisation held as XRD reserve at genesis Ways out Sell back to the curve, or exit for a treasury share Related Leaving a caper (/wiki/foundations/leaving-a-caper) , Bonding curve (/wiki/markets/bonding-curve) , Trading (/wiki/markets/trading)

You buy into a caper by sending XRD to its bonding curve from the buy panel on the caper’s own page. The curve mints you new tokens 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. What you get back is a token that 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 that did not exist until you bought them. A caper does not sell you inventory another holder is unloading – the curve mints against a fixed notional cap of 100,000,000,000 tokens, and your purchase moves circulation up that cap by however much your XRD pays for. The contract refuses any buy that would push circulation past the cap. Holding those tokens is what makes you part of the caper rather than a spectator. The same balance is read three ways: as your stake in the treasury, as the multiplier on your voting weight, and as the amount you can redeem when you leave. There is no separate membership token to acquire and no application to be accepted.

How is the price set? By a formula, not by a market. The price of the next token depends only on how much of the curve has already been sold. Writing s for the fraction in circulation – tokens sold divided by the 100bn cap – the marginal price is P(s) = 0.001 × √s / (1 − s) which starts near zero, rises as a square root through the early range, and steepens sharply as the curve approaches fully sold. Every buy advances s, so every buy raises the price for the buyer after you. That is the whole pricing mechanism: no order book, no market maker, no oracle, and nobody quoting a spread. Because the price is a function of circulation, a large buy does not clear at one price. It walks up the curve as it fills, so the average you pay is worse than the price you saw before you pressed the button. That is slippage, and it is a property of the shape rather than a fee anyone charges.

Where does my money actually go? Your XRD is split three ways before any of it prices your tokens: - A trade fee off the gross. Governance sets the rate, and the contract caps it at 10%. Do not read a rate quoted anywhere as permanent – read the cap, which is the part the contract guarantees. - The founder’s collateralization skim. A slice of what is left, taken partly in XRD and partly as a share of the tokens minted. This is the founder’s reward for launching, and it is deliberately front-loaded. - The remainder into the reserve. Everything else lands in the curve vault, which is the pool that pays sellers and backs the token. The skim is the part a buyer should understand before committing, because it is not flat. It is a straight-line taper: largest at s = 0, falling steadily, and exactly zero once 30% of the curve is in circulation. Past that point every buy is fee-split between the trade fee and the reserve alone, and the founder takes nothing further from new buyers. The contract bounds the peak too, so the founder’s share of the mint can never exceed roughly 5% however governance is tuned – that ceiling is peak × 1/3 × 30/31, and the remaining thirty-first of the token leg goes to the Commons treasury rather than the founder. The practical reading: you pay the most to the founder for being early, and the earliest buyers pay it precisely because the reserve behind their tokens is thinnest.

Is my money safe? What backs the token? Part of it is backed and part of it is not, and the split is a known number rather than a promise. At genesis a caper’s curve holds two thirds of its market capitalisation as XRD in the reserve vault. That is not a policy choice – it falls out of the curve’s shape. A curve priced as supply to the power n holds exactly 1/(n+1) of its capitalisation in reserve, and caper’s curve is a pure square root at the origin, so n = ½ and the fraction is 2/3. The other third is a claim on buyers who have not arrived yet. If nobody else ever buys, that third is not there. This is the honest shape of any bonding curve and it is worth stating plainly rather than discovering later: the reserve can pay every holder the curve price at the current circulation, but it was never sized to pay every holder what the token is nominally worth. What the reserve does guarantee is that the sell side always works. There is no scenario where you hold tokens and cannot 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, and the amount is computed in closed form rather than negotiated. Selling walks the same curve backwards: the payout is the reserve required at your circulation before the sale minus the reserve required after it. There is one curve in both directions – no separate buy and sell price, no bid–ask spread – so the price you sell at is exactly the price the next buyer would have paid to reach that same point. A trade fee comes off the payout on the way out. The consequence people underestimate: 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 about the mechanism protects you from that, and nothing about it depends on anyone else agreeing to trade with you.

Does buying make me a voter? Buying makes you a member; it does not by itself give you weight. Caper’s vote weight is w = (t × v) / (V × T) where t is what you hold, v is how many votes you have cast, V is the total votes cast across the caper, and T is the tokens in circulation. Your holdings are a multiplicative factor, so a large balance genuinely counts for more – but so is your participation, and a zero anywhere in the numerator produces zero weight. That has a consequence worth knowing before your first proposal: a member’s very first vote carries zero weight, because their vote count is still zero at the moment it is recorded. Weight is something you accumulate by turning up, and a holder who never votes never converts their balance into influence. Buying a large position the day before a contested vote does not buy the vote.

What are my ways out? Two, and they pay from different pots. Sell back to the curve. The route above. You are paid out of the reserve vault at the curve price, and the tokens return to inventory for the next buyer. Fast, always available, and it pays you nothing from the treasury. Exit. The right the whole model is built around: you surrender your tokens and take a proportional share of the treasury the caper has accumulated. Your share is your vote weight – the same (t × v) / (V × T) – so the exit pays out on participation as well as holdings. Leaving a caper (/wiki/foundations/leaving-a-caper) covers the mechanics in full. The two are not alternatives to pick between at the moment you buy. They answer different questions: 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 vote to do with it. - No claim on the founder. 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 control proportional to money alone. Weight needs participation, per the formula above. - No say in whether the caper does anything. A treasury sits until a proposal passes; see Paying someone from a caper’s treasury (/wiki/foundations/paying-someone-from-a-caper) .

How do I actually do it? - Open the caper’s page from the roster on caper.network (/) . Every caper has one. - Connect a Radix wallet holding XRD. You need XRD for the purchase itself and a little more for the network fee. - Enter an amount – at least 0.001 XRD – in the buy panel. The panel shows the tokens you receive at the current circulation. - Sign. The tokens arrive in the same wallet, and you are a member from that transaction onward. - Vote on something. It costs little and it is the only thing that converts your balance into weight. 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 – a caper that has never passed a proposal has never demonstrated it can spend what it has raised.

Where next What is a caper (/wiki/foundations/what-is-a-caper) covers the model itself, and Leaving a caper (/wiki/foundations/leaving-a-caper) the exit right in full. For the pricing mathematics rather than the buyer’s view, see Bonding curve (/wiki/markets/bonding-curve) and Trading (/wiki/markets/trading) . If you are on the other side of this – launching rather than backing – start at Getting started (/wiki/foundations/getting-started) . If you are reading this through an AI agent, Querying a caper from an AI agent (/wiki/foundations/querying-a-caper-from-an-ai-agent) documents the read-only MCP servers that expose a caper’s live treasury and proposal history.

Topic Backing a caper · the buy side What you buy Newly minted caper tokens – not someone else’s Counterparty The curve itself – no order book, no other buyer needed Minimum 0.001 XRD Backed by 2/3 of market capitalisation held as XRD reserve at genesis Ways out Sell back to the curve, or exit for a treasury share Related Leaving a caper (/wiki/foundations/leaving-a-caper) , Bonding curve (/wiki/markets/bonding-curve) , Trading (/wiki/markets/trading)

You buy into a caper by sending XRD to its bonding curve from the buy panel on the caper’s own page. The curve mints you new tokens 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. What you get back is a token that 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 that did not exist until you bought them. A caper does not sell you inventory another holder is unloading – the curve mints against a fixed notional cap of 100,000,000,000 tokens, and your purchase moves circulation up that cap by however much your XRD pays for. The contract refuses any buy that would push circulation past the cap. Holding those tokens is what makes you part of the caper rather than a spectator. The same balance is read three ways: as your stake in the treasury, as the multiplier on your voting weight, and as the amount you can redeem when you leave. There is no separate membership token to acquire and no application to be accepted.

How is the price set? By a formula, not by a market. The price of the next token depends only on how much of the curve has already been sold. Writing s for the fraction in circulation – tokens sold divided by the 100bn cap – the marginal price is P(s) = 0.001 × √s / (1 − s) which starts near zero, rises as a square root through the early range, and steepens sharply as the curve approaches fully sold. Every buy advances s, so every buy raises the price for the buyer after you. That is the whole pricing mechanism: no order book, no market maker, no oracle, and nobody quoting a spread. Because the price is a function of circulation, a large buy does not clear at one price. It walks up the curve as it fills, so the average you pay is worse than the price you saw before you pressed the button. That is slippage, and it is a property of the shape rather than a fee anyone charges.

Where does my money actually go? Your XRD is split three ways before any of it prices your tokens: - A trade fee off the gross. Governance sets the rate, and the contract caps it at 10%. Do not read a rate quoted anywhere as permanent – read the cap, which is the part the contract guarantees. - The founder’s collateralization skim. A slice of what is left, taken partly in XRD and partly as a share of the tokens minted. This is the founder’s reward for launching, and it is deliberately front-loaded. - The remainder into the reserve. Everything else lands in the curve vault, which is the pool that pays sellers and backs the token. The skim is the part a buyer should understand before committing, because it is not flat. It is a straight-line taper: largest at s = 0, falling steadily, and exactly zero once 30% of the curve is in circulation. Past that point every buy is fee-split between the trade fee and the reserve alone, and the founder takes nothing further from new buyers. The contract bounds the peak too, so the founder’s share of the mint can never exceed roughly 5% however governance is tuned – that ceiling is peak × 1/3 × 30/31, and the remaining thirty-first of the token leg goes to the Commons treasury rather than the founder. The practical reading: you pay the most to the founder for being early, and the earliest buyers pay it precisely because the reserve behind their tokens is thinnest.

Is my money safe? What backs the token? Part of it is backed and part of it is not, and the split is a known number rather than a promise. At genesis a caper’s curve holds two thirds of its market capitalisation as XRD in the reserve vault. That is not a policy choice – it falls out of the curve’s shape. A curve priced as supply to the power n holds exactly 1/(n+1) of its capitalisation in reserve, and caper’s curve is a pure square root at the origin, so n = ½ and the fraction is 2/3. The other third is a claim on buyers who have not arrived yet. If nobody else ever buys, that third is not there. This is the honest shape of any bonding curve and it is worth stating plainly rather than discovering later: the reserve can pay every holder the curve price at the current circulation, but it was never sized to pay every holder what the token is nominally worth. What the reserve does guarantee is that the sell side always works. There is no scenario where you hold tokens and cannot 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, and the amount is computed in closed form rather than negotiated. Selling walks the same curve backwards: the payout is the reserve required at your circulation before the sale minus the reserve required after it. There is one curve in both directions – no separate buy and sell price, no bid–ask spread – so the price you sell at is exactly the price the next buyer would have paid to reach that same point. A trade fee comes off the payout on the way out. The consequence people underestimate: 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 about the mechanism protects you from that, and nothing about it depends on anyone else agreeing to trade with you.

Does buying make me a voter? Buying makes you a member; it does not by itself give you weight. Caper’s vote weight is w = (t × v) / (V × T) where t is what you hold, v is how many votes you have cast, V is the total votes cast across the caper, and T is the tokens in circulation. Your holdings are a multiplicative factor, so a large balance genuinely counts for more – but so is your participation, and a zero anywhere in the numerator produces zero weight. That has a consequence worth knowing before your first proposal: a member’s very first vote carries zero weight, because their vote count is still zero at the moment it is recorded. Weight is something you accumulate by turning up, and a holder who never votes never converts their balance into influence. Buying a large position the day before a contested vote does not buy the vote.

What are my ways out? Two, and they pay from different pots. Sell back to the curve. The route above. You are paid out of the reserve vault at the curve price, and the tokens return to inventory for the next buyer. Fast, always available, and it pays you nothing from the treasury. Exit. The right the whole model is built around: you surrender your tokens and take a proportional share of the treasury the caper has accumulated. Your share is your vote weight – the same (t × v) / (V × T) – so the exit pays out on participation as well as holdings. Leaving a caper (/wiki/foundations/leaving-a-caper) covers the mechanics in full. The two are not alternatives to pick between at the moment you buy. They answer different questions: 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 vote to do with it. - No claim on the founder. 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 control proportional to money alone. Weight needs participation, per the formula above. - No say in whether the caper does anything. A treasury sits until a proposal passes; see Paying someone from a caper’s treasury (/wiki/foundations/paying-someone-from-a-caper) .

Will the price go up? Nobody can tell you, this page will not try, and you should treat anyone who does tell you as selling something. The curve fixes what a token costs at a given circulation; 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 anywhere in the contract that pushes it in either direction. So the question “how do I invest in a caper” is worth reframing before you act on it. What you can actually assess in advance is not a price path but three things that are all readable on-chain right 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 – which is the only thing that would make its treasury worth more than the XRD already in it.

How do I buy into a caper? - Open the caper’s page from the roster on caper.network (/) . Every caper has one. - Connect a Radix wallet holding XRD. You need XRD for the purchase itself and a little more for the network fee. - Enter an amount – at least 0.001 XRD – in the buy panel. The panel shows the tokens you receive at the current circulation. - Sign. The tokens arrive in the same wallet, and you are a member from that transaction onward. - Vote on something. It costs little and it is the only thing that converts your balance into weight. 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 – a caper that has never passed a proposal has never demonstrated it can spend what it has raised.

Where next What is a caper (/wiki/foundations/what-is-a-caper) covers the model itself, and Leaving a caper (/wiki/foundations/leaving-a-caper) the exit right in full. For the pricing mathematics rather than the buyer’s view, see Bonding curve (/wiki/markets/bonding-curve) and Trading (/wiki/markets/trading) . If you are on the other side of this – launching rather than backing – start at Getting started (/wiki/foundations/getting-started) . If you are reading this through an AI agent, Querying a caper from an AI agent (/wiki/foundations/querying-a-caper-from-an-ai-agent) documents the read-only MCP servers that expose a caper’s live treasury and proposal history.

Topic Backing a caper · the buy side What you buy Newly minted caper tokens – not someone else’s Counterparty The curve itself – no order book, no other buyer needed Minimum 0.001 XRD Backed by 2/3 of market capitalisation held as XRD reserve at genesis Ways out Sell back to the curve, or exit for a treasury share Related Leaving a caper (/wiki/foundations/leaving-a-caper) , Bonding curve (/wiki/markets/bonding-curve) , Trading (/wiki/markets/trading)

You buy into a caper by sending XRD to its bonding curve from the buy panel on the caper’s own page. The curve mints you new tokens 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. What you get back is a token that 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 that did not exist until you bought them. A caper does not sell you inventory another holder is unloading – the curve mints against a fixed notional cap of 100,000,000,000 tokens, and your purchase moves circulation up that cap by however much your XRD pays for. The contract refuses any buy that would push circulation past the cap. Holding those tokens is what makes you part of the caper rather than a spectator. The same balance is read three ways: as your stake in the treasury, as the multiplier on your voting weight, and as the amount you can redeem when you leave. There is no separate membership token to acquire and no application to be accepted.

How is the price set? By a formula, not by a market. The price of the next token depends only on how much of the curve has already been sold. Writing s for the fraction in circulation – tokens sold divided by the 100bn cap – the marginal price is P(s) = 0.001 × √s / (1 − s) which starts near zero, rises as a square root through the early range, and steepens sharply as the curve approaches fully sold. Every buy advances s, so every buy raises the price for the buyer after you. That is the whole pricing mechanism: no order book, no market maker, no oracle, and nobody quoting a spread. Because the price is a function of circulation, a large buy does not clear at one price. It walks up the curve as it fills, so the average you pay is worse than the price you saw before you pressed the button. That is slippage, and it is a property of the shape rather than a fee anyone charges.

Where does my money actually go? Your XRD is split three ways before any of it prices your tokens: - A trade fee off the gross. Governance sets the rate, and the contract caps it at 10%. Do not read a rate quoted anywhere as permanent – read the cap, which is the part the contract guarantees. - The founder’s collateralization skim. A slice of what is left, taken partly in XRD and partly as a share of the tokens minted. This is the founder’s reward for launching, and it is deliberately front-loaded. - The remainder into the reserve. Everything else lands in the curve vault, which is the pool that pays sellers and backs the token. The skim is the part a buyer should understand before committing, because it is not flat. It is a straight-line taper: largest at s = 0, falling steadily, and exactly zero once 30% of the curve is in circulation. Past that point every buy is fee-split between the trade fee and the reserve alone, and the founder takes nothing further from new buyers. The contract bounds the peak too, so the founder’s share of the mint can never exceed roughly 5% however governance is tuned – that ceiling is peak × 1/3 × 30/31, and the remaining thirty-first of the token leg goes to the Commons treasury rather than the founder. The practical reading: you pay the most to the founder for being early, and the earliest buyers pay it precisely because the reserve behind their tokens is thinnest.

Is my money safe? What backs the token? Part of it is backed and part of it is not, and the split is a known number rather than a promise. At genesis a caper’s curve holds two thirds of its market capitalisation as XRD in the reserve vault. That is not a policy choice – it falls out of the curve’s shape. A curve priced as supply to the power n holds exactly 1/(n+1) of its capitalisation in reserve, and caper’s curve is a pure square root at the origin, so n = ½ and the fraction is 2/3. The other third is a claim on buyers who have not arrived yet. If nobody else ever buys, that third is not there. This is the honest shape of any bonding curve and it is worth stating plainly rather than discovering later: the reserve can pay every holder the curve price at the current circulation, but it was never sized to pay every holder what the token is nominally worth. What the reserve does guarantee is that the sell side always works. There is no scenario where you hold tokens and cannot 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, and the amount is computed in closed form rather than negotiated. Selling walks the same curve backwards: the payout is the reserve required at your circulation before the sale minus the reserve required after it. There is one curve in both directions – no separate buy and sell price, no bid–ask spread – so the price you sell at is exactly the price the next buyer would have paid to reach that same point. A trade fee comes off the payout on the way out. The consequence people underestimate: 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 about the mechanism protects you from that, and nothing about it depends on anyone else agreeing to trade with you.

Does buying make me a voter? Buying makes you a member; it does not by itself give you weight. Caper’s vote weight is w = (t × v) / (V × T) where t is what you hold, v is how many votes you have cast, V is the total votes cast across the caper, and T is the tokens in circulation. Your holdings are a multiplicative factor, so a large balance genuinely counts for more – but so is your participation, and a zero anywhere in the numerator produces zero weight. That has a consequence worth knowing before your first proposal: a member’s very first vote carries zero weight, because their vote count is still zero at the moment it is recorded. Weight is something you accumulate by turning up, and a holder who never votes never converts their balance into influence. Buying a large position the day before a contested vote does not buy the vote.

What are my ways out? Two, and they pay from different pots. Sell back to the curve. The route above. You are paid out of the reserve vault at the curve price, and the tokens return to inventory for the next buyer. Fast, always available, and it pays you nothing from the treasury. Exit. The right the whole model is built around: you surrender your tokens and take a proportional share of the treasury the caper has accumulated. Your share is your vote weight – the same (t × v) / (V × T) – so the exit pays out on participation as well as holdings. Leaving a caper (/wiki/foundations/leaving-a-caper) covers the mechanics in full. The two are not alternatives to pick between at the moment you buy. They answer different questions: 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 vote to do with it. - No claim on the founder. 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 control proportional to money alone. Weight needs participation, per the formula above. - No say in whether the caper does anything. A treasury sits until a proposal passes; see Paying someone from a caper’s treasury (/wiki/foundations/paying-someone-from-a-caper) .

How do I actually do it? - Open the caper’s page from the roster on caper.network (/) . Every caper has one. - Connect a Radix wallet holding XRD. You need XRD for the purchase itself and a little more for the network fee. - Enter an amount – at least 0.001 XRD – in the buy panel. The panel shows the tokens you receive at the current circulation. - Sign. The tokens arrive in the same wallet, and you are a member from that transaction onward. - Vote on something. It costs little and it is the only thing that converts your balance into weight. 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 – a caper that has never passed a proposal has never demonstrated it can spend what it has raised.

Where next What is a caper (/wiki/foundations/what-is-a-caper) covers the model itself, and Leaving a caper (/wiki/foundations/leaving-a-caper) the exit right in full. For the pricing mathematics rather than the buyer’s view, see Bonding curve (/wiki/markets/bonding-curve) and Trading (/wiki/markets/trading) . If you are on the other side of this – launching rather than backing – start at Getting started (/wiki/foundations/getting-started) . If you are reading this through an AI agent, Querying a caper from an AI agent (/wiki/foundations/querying-a-caper-from-an-ai-agent) documents the read-only MCP servers that expose a caper’s live treasury and proposal history.