---
title: "Leaving a caper: the exit right"
url: "https://caper.network/wiki/foundations/leaving-a-caper"
updated: 2026-08-11
license: CC-BY-4.0
license_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
---

# Leaving a caper: the exit right

| Mechanic | Exit right |
| --- | --- |
| Contract method | `exit` (`contracts/logic/src/lib.rs`) |
| Approval needed | None. No proposal, no vote, no council |
| You hand over | Vote tokens (burned) + governance tokens |
| You receive | Pro-rata treasury share + curve sell-back |
| Waiting period | None in the contract |

A caper is a group of people who raise a treasury together and govern it on-chain. The exit right is the part that decides what that membership is actually worth: at any point, a member can take their share of the treasury and go, without asking anyone. This page answers what leaving involves, in the order people ask it.

## Can I leave a caper?

Yes, at any time, and nobody can stop you. Leaving is a single method call on the caper's contract, named `exit`. It is not a proposal, so it is not voted on, not scheduled, and not subject to a council or a founder's approval. There is no motion to table and no quorum to reach.

The only thing the contract checks is that you hold the tokens you claim to hold. It asserts that your vote-token amount is greater than zero, that your governance-token amount is greater than zero, and that both are that specific caper's own resources rather than some other token. Your holdings are the credential. There is no membership list to be removed from.

## What do I get when I leave?

Two separate payouts, and it is worth keeping them apart because they come from different places.

1. **A pro-rata share of the treasury.** Your share of the XRD the caper holds, plus a matching share of any other resources in the treasury you name when you exit. Members whose caper has invested in other assets get those too, not only the XRD.
2. **The proceeds of selling your governance tokens back to the bonding curve.** The contract prices the sale against the curve and takes the caper's standard trade fee, the same fee any sale on that curve pays. The sale emits an ordinary sell event on the caper's trade feed.

Both legs settle in the same transaction. You do not exit and then separately go and find a buyer.

## How is my treasury share calculated?

By the same formula that decides how much your vote counts. Caper does not run one arithmetic for governance and a different one for money, which is the whole point of the design: the number that gives you influence is the number that gives you your share.

The contract computes:

`share = (tokens_redeemed × votes_burned) / (vote_supply × tokens_in_circulation)`

Read plainly: your share rises with how many governance tokens you redeem _and_ with how many vote tokens you burn, measured against the caper's total vote supply and its circulating token supply. Both terms are multiplicative. Holding more tokens increases your share; so does having accumulated more vote tokens. If either is zero the formula returns zero, and the contract rejects the exit before it gets that far.

The same function is used when you cast a vote. See [how voting works](/wiki/governance/voting) for the governance side of it.

## What happens to my vote tokens?

They are burned. The contract pays your treasury share first, then destroys the vote tokens you handed over, then runs the sell leg. Vote tokens are soulbound, so they were never transferable in the first place; burning them on exit is what stops a departing member's accumulated governance weight from outliving their stake in the caper.

This is also why the treasury share is computed before the burn rather than after. The weight you leave with is the weight you had.

## Is there a lock-up or a waiting period?

No. The contract's `exit` path contains no epoch check, no notice period and no vesting gate. There is nothing in it that defers your payout to a later block, and nothing another member can do to delay it.

This matters more than it sounds. A great many DAO exit provisions are real on paper and unreachable in practice, because the exit itself has to be approved by the people it inconveniences, or because it runs through a multisig that can simply not sign. An exit that somebody has to authorise is a request. See [how DAOs fail](/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/analysis/how-daos-fail) for the shapes that recur.

## What is different about the $XRD caper?

One caper is a special case. $XRD has no bonding curve, so it has no sell leg: exiting it pays the treasury share and returns your governance tokens to you untouched, rather than selling them. Everything else about the exit is identical.

The reason is that its members hold native XRD, whose total supply cannot be read on-ledger at all. Radix creates XRD without supply tracking, so the contract substitutes a fixed constant for the circulating-supply term. Erring high there only makes exits conservative, which keeps the sum of every member's share inside the treasury.

## How does this compare to a DAO rage quit?

The lineage is Moloch's rage quit, and the difference is what the right is attached to. A rage quit is usually scoped to a specific proposal and a specific window: you may leave because you object to something that just passed, during the grace period before it executes. Outside that window, there is nothing to exercise.

In a caper the exit is not attached to a proposal at all. It is a standing property of holding the tokens, available on any day, whether or not anything is being voted on and whether or not you object to it. There is no window to miss.

The essay [The Exit Right](/blog/the-exit-right) works through why that difference changes how the rest of the governance behaves.

## What if I want to reduce my stake without leaving?

Selling governance tokens on the curve is a separate operation from exiting, and it does not burn your vote tokens or touch your treasury claim. See [trading](/wiki/markets/trading). Exiting is the operation that settles everything at once and ends the membership.

## Related

- [What is a caper](/wiki/foundations/what-is-a-caper) — the object this right belongs to
- [Getting started](/wiki/foundations/getting-started) — joining, the cashtag fee ladder, and what a caper costs to start
- [Voting](/wiki/governance/voting) — the other half of the same weight formula
- [FAQ](/wiki/help/faq) — shorter answers, including divestment and upgrades