---
title: "Starting a personal caper"
url: "https://caper.network/wiki/foundations/starting-a-personal-caper"
updated: 2026-08-19
license: CC-BY-4.0
license_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
---

# Starting a personal caper

|  |  |
| --- | --- |
| **Topic** | Self-incorporation – one person, one caper |
| **Members needed** | One. The contract counts no founders and requires no co-signer |
| **Cost to launch** | 10 XRD for a six-character cashtag, ten times that per character shorter |
| **Founder allocation at launch** | None. There is no premine to configure |
| **Verified against** | `contracts/logic/src/lib.rs`, `contracts/ballot/src/lib.rs`, `contracts/common/src/lib.rs`, and the live logic component on 19 August 2026 |
| **Related** | [Getting started](/wiki/foundations/getting-started) · [What is a caper](/wiki/foundations/what-is-a-caper) · [Leaving a caper](/wiki/foundations/leaving-a-caper) · [The Personal Caper](/blog/the-personal-caper) |

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](/wiki/foundations/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 is minted by other people's purchases, one buy at a time.

Each buy pays the founder 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 payment; one third comes as a slice of the newly minted tokens, 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 0.15, which puts the XRD leg at 10% of a post-fee payment for the first buyer and the token leg below 5% of the mint, both shrinking with every purchase after that.

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](/blog/the-founders-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](/create-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](/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/membership/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](/wiki/foundations/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 at `contracts/common/src/lib.rs:169` – so a large balance that has never voted counts for very little and a long voting record with no stake counts for nothing. 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 and settled on-chain like any other, and the same is true of the treasury's other executive actions: Invest, Divest, Vote and Upgrade. [Paying someone from a caper's treasury](/wiki/foundations/paying-someone-from-a-caper) walks one through end to end.

Raising a proposal costs 500 XRD and casting a vote costs 100 XRD on the live deployment. Both are paid into your own caper's treasury rather than to the platform, so in a caper of one they circulate rather than drain.

## Can I pass a proposal on my own?

Not your first one, and the reason is worth knowing before you try. Caper sets no quorum: there is no minimum turnout and no minimum number of members. What it sets is a threshold. A proposal settles by [Borda count over complete rankings](/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/voting/ranked-and-alternative-ballot-methods), and it passes only if the leading option takes at least 1.5 divided by the number of options of the total weight cast, and only if that leading option is not a "no".

The catch is the weight formula. Your record `v` is the vote tokens you have accumulated, and those are minted after the cast window closes, strictly later than the cast itself, so that every ballot in an election reads the same pre-mint numbers. On your first ever vote `v` is zero, so your weight is zero, the total weight cast is zero, and the proposal fails no matter what you ranked. That first ballot still mints your record. From the second proposal onward a lone founder carries the full weight and clears the threshold.

Design around it rather than against it: spend the first proposal on something you are content to lose, or wait until a backer with a record of their own is voting alongside you. [Voting](/wiki/governance/voting) covers the arithmetic in detail.

## 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](/wiki/foundations/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](/wiki/economics/personal-tokens).

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](/wiki/foundations/getting-started) for the five steps and the fee ladder. [What is a caper](/wiki/foundations/what-is-a-caper) for the model in five minutes. [The Personal Caper](/blog/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](/wiki/foundations/build-on-caper-as-an-agent) documents launching one with your own key.