A sole trader carries their business in their own body. The debts are their debts, the reputation is their reputation, and when they stop, it stops. Incorporation was the invention that broke that identity apart: it gave the enterprise a body of its own, one that could hold property, take on backers, outlive its founder and be walked away from. It was built for groups, and for four centuries it stayed out of reach of a single person with something worth funding.

A personal caper is that move applied to one individual. You launch a caper with no co-founders, no company and no application. From the first transaction you have a token that trades, a treasury that accumulates, backers who hold a claim on it, and an exit right that lets any of them – including you – convert their stake back into money without asking permission. This page answers the questions a person asks before doing that, and every mechanic below is read from the contracts rather than described.

Can one person start a caper?

Yes. create_caper is declared PUBLIC on the platform's shared logic component, so anyone holding a Radix wallet can call it. It takes a name, a description, a cashtag, an optional info URL, a logo and a payment, and it returns a founder badge. Nothing in the call counts founders, checks a company, asks for a second signature or queues you for approval. A caper with one member is a caper on the same terms as a caper with a thousand.

The practical floor is a funded wallet. You need the registration fee in XRD on the connected account before you submit, plus the ordinary Radix network fee for the transaction. Connecting and signing in cost nothing: caper authenticates with ROLA, which is a signature rather than a transaction.

How much does it cost to start a personal caper?

One payment, priced by the length of your cashtag: ten to the power of seven minus the number of characters. A six-character cashtag costs 10 XRD, and each character you drop multiplies the fee by ten. Cashtags run one to six characters, uppercase A to Z or digits 0 to 9. Getting started carries the full ladder and the fee's destination.

Beyond that there is no listing charge, no subscription, no minimum treasury and no revenue share on the way in. The registration fee is banked in the treasury of the $CAPER caper, whose own holders vote and can exit on the same terms as anyone else.

How much of my own token do I keep?

None at launch, and that is the design rather than an omission. There is no founder allocation to configure, because there is nothing to allocate: at zero circulation the token supply is zero. Your stake comes from other people's trades, one trade at a time.

Every trade pays the founder, buys and sells alike, in the same composition the bonding curve itself holds – two thirds backed, one third claim. Two thirds of the skim comes as XRD taken off the trade’s gross, alongside the trade fee rather than after it. One third comes as a slice of the tokens the trade moves, tithed thirty to one between you and the Caper Commons. The rate is highest at the start and falls in a straight line to zero once 30% of the curve is circulating. On the live deployment the peak rate is 0.075, so at zero circulation the XRD leg is 5% of the trade’s gross and your share of the token leg is just under 2.5% of the tokens moved. Both shrink as circulation grows.

Two consequences follow, and they are the reason this shape exists. Nothing hangs over your holders, because nothing was created before they arrived. And your cut is self-terminating: the further your token spreads, the smaller each new slice, until it reaches zero and stays there. You claim what has accrued with withdraw_founder. The Founder's Cut works the argument through in full.

Do I need a website, a company, or a team?

None of the three. The info URL field on Create a caper is optional, and leaving it blank points at the caper's own page. There is no legal entity to register, no jurisdiction to choose and no document to file before the token exists. Whether to wrap what you build in a legal entity later is worth deciding on its own terms, and DAO legal structures sets out the options. Nothing on the platform waits for that decision.

Who are my backers, and what do they get?

Anyone who buys your token is a member. There is no allowlist, no round, no cap table and no separate act of joining: holding is membership, and it starts the moment the purchase settles. Buying into a caper covers what that looks like from their side.

What they hold is a claim on your treasury and a say in what it does. Voting weight is the product of stake and record – w = (t · v) / (V · T), defined by compute_vote_weight in contracts/common/src/lib.rs – so a balance that has cast no ballot counts for nothing however it was acquired – bought on the curve, migrated in or transferred – and a long voting record with no stake counts for nothing either. The record is earned on one surface only – 1 per ranked ballot cast – so a buyer does start from zero, and stays there until they vote. Trading minted the record too, at 0.01 per XRD of gross value, until the redeploy of 11 September 2026 removed it. The same number decides what a member takes out when they leave. Influence and exit value are one quantity, which is what stops the two drifting apart.

Can I pay myself out of my own treasury?

Only by proposal. The founder badge identifies you and lets you claim the founder’s cut; it does not open the treasury. Money leaves through a Payout proposal that is raised, voted on, ratified by the market and executed on-chain like any other, and the same is true of the treasury’s other executive actions: Invest, Divest, Metadata and Upgrade. Paying someone from a caper’s treasury walks one through end to end.

There are three fees rather than two, and all three land in your own caper’s treasury rather than with the platform. Raising a proposal costs 500 XRD and casting a vote costs 100 XRD on the live deployment. The third is the execution fee, and it is the only one with a size: 10% of the winning action’s XRD-equivalent amount, priced at the relevant curve’s trailing time-weighted average price at the moment the proposal is triggered (proposal_fee_rate, which reads 0.1 on the live logic component). A 10,000 XRD payout to yourself therefore carries a 1,000 XRD fee. Which side pays it is the ballot’s second question: “treasury” nets to a waiver, because the fee’s destination is that treasury either way, and a treasury-pays trigger is free and permissionless; “proposer” means the 1,000 XRD has to be in your wallet at the moment you trigger. Metadata and Upgrade carry no amount, so their basis is zero and they attract no execution fee at all.

Can I pass a proposal on my own?

Not by voting alone, because the vote is only half of it. A proposal on Caper settles in two phases: the ballot legislates and the market ratifies. Both have to go your way, and only the first is a vote.

Phase one, the ballot. Caper sets no quorum: there is no minimum turnout and no minimum number of members. What it sets is a threshold. Options are ranked by Borda count over complete rankings, and the leader carries only if its share of the weight actually cast reaches 1.5 divided by the number of options – 75% on a two-option proposal, 30% on a five-option one – and only if that leader is not a “no”. Every ballot answers a second question alongside the first, decided by plain weight rather than by Borda: whether the proposer or the treasury pays the execution fee.

The catch in phase one is the weight formula. Your record v is the vote tokens you have accumulated, and the deployed contract mints them on exactly one surface a member can reach: 1 per ranked ballot cast (VOTE_MINT, contracts/logic/src/lib.rs, fused into the vote call itself). Buying, selling and migrating mint nothing – a buy and a sell each minted 0.01 per XRD of gross value until the redeploy of 11 September 2026, and the vote_rate field that priced it is gone from the component. Because a first ballot would otherwise weigh zero, the vote snapshots v and the total supply inclusive of its own mint, so a first-time voter counts. What follows is that a founder who has only ever bought into their own caper carries no record at all until they vote, and a holder who has neither voted nor holds tokens – a founder drawing the founder’s cut and nothing else, or a migrated position – has v of zero, and a zero there zeroes the whole product. The way round it is not something you can buy: turn up to the ballot.

Phase two, the market. A legislative pass executes nothing by itself. Someone has to call the trigger, which locks your caper’s trailing time-weighted average token price as a baseline – three days on the live deployment, a logic constant a future logic can retune – and opens an optimistic window. When that window closes, the proposal is ratified only if the time-weighted average price over the window itself sits at or above that baseline. Holding is consent, and buying is consent; the only thing that blocks a passed vote is selling that holds the price below the baseline for a real share of the window. Because the verdict is integrated across the window rather than read at the moment someone cranks it, an atomic buy→resolve→sell round trip buys no verdict, and a late crank reads the same answer a prompt one does. A “debate” option is the exception: it is a position rather than an action, so it is terminal at the tally and never opens a window at all.

So the honest answer for a caper of one is that you can pass a proposal on your own, and phase two is the reason it is not quite automatic. With no other holders nothing trades inside your window, and a silent window resolves on one comparison: whether your token’s price at the trigger sits at or above its own trailing three-day mean. Sell into your own curve on the way to the vote and you can fail your own proposal. The moment a backer arrives that stops being an accounting quirk and becomes the point of the design: their selling is a veto you hold no ballots against. Voting covers the ballot arithmetic and Execution covers the trigger, the window and the settlement.

Can I shut it down?

No. The logic package exposes no method that dissolves a caper, deletes it or winds up its treasury, and none of the five executive actions a proposal can carry does it either. Once registered, a caper persists.

What you can do is leave. Hand back your tokens together with your vote record – the contract requires both – and take the treasury share your weight entitles you to. No majority approves it and no window has to be open. Your holders have exactly the same right against you, on the same terms, from the day they buy in. Leaving a caper covers both routes out.

That asymmetry is the point of the whole arrangement. A personal caper is not a following you can dissolve when it stops being convenient; it is a body you have brought into existence and then have to live alongside.

Why would anyone do this?

Because the alternatives to incorporation have always been worse for an individual. Advances and grants pay once and ask for a plan first. Subscriptions pay a little forever and buy the payer nothing they can sell. The personal tokens of 2020 issued a claim on a person with no treasury behind it and no way out when trust broke, and that wave died accordingly.

What a caper adds to a personal token is the two things a corporation has always had and a social token never did: assets held by the body rather than the person, and a right of exit that does not depend on finding a buyer. Organizations are scarce and people are not. If self-incorporation works at all, most of the institutions that eventually exist on this platform will be one person each.

Where next

Getting started for the five steps and the fee ladder. What is a caper for the model in five minutes. The Personal Caper argues the case at length. If you are reading this as an agent rather than a person, Build on Caper as an agent documents launching one with your own key.