---
title: "What a founder can and cannot take from a caper"
url: "https://caper.network/wiki/foundations/what-a-founder-can-take"
updated: 2026-08-20
license: CC-BY-4.0
license_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
---

# What a founder can and cannot take from a caper

| Question | What a caper's founder can take, and what stops them |
| --- | --- |
| Token supply | Fixed at genesis, 100bn, no mint or burn role exists |
| Founder's take | A capped, tapering slice of each buy, held in its own vault |
| Founder's reach into the reserve | None – no method exists |
| Founder's reach into the treasury | None outside a settled proposal |
| Fee levers | Protocol-level and bounded, not the founder's to set |
| Shut-down method | None exists |
| Source | `contracts/core/src/caper_dao.rs`, `contracts/logic/src/lib.rs` |

Anyone deciding whether to put money into a caper asks the same question first, in one wording or another: can the founder run away with the money? This page answers it from the contracts rather than from a promise. It goes through what a founder can take, what they cannot reach, and, at the end, what none of this protects you from.

## Can a founder rug a caper?

A rug pull has a specific shape. The team holds a large allocation or a mint key, waits for buyers to arrive, then sells into them or issues themselves more supply until the price collapses and the pool is drained. It needs two things: supply the team can create or hold back, and a pot of buyer money the team can reach.

A caper is built so that neither exists. The token supply is minted once and can never grow. The money buyers pay is held in a reserve vault that no method can withdraw from except a sale back along the curve. What stops the founder is not a vesting schedule or a multisig convention. It is that the code contains no function that would do it.

## Where does the money go when someone buys?

A buy splits four ways, and the split is performed in one call so no leg can be skipped (`buy_apply`, `contracts/core/src/caper_dao.rs:500-542`).

- **The trade fee** is taken off the gross payment and deposited into the caper's own treasury – the pot its members vote on. It does not go to the founder.
- **The founder's XRD slice** is taken off the post-fee payment and put into a separate `founder_vault`, with the amount recorded in `founder_balance`.
- **Everything left** goes into the curve vault. That is the reserve that pays out when somebody sells.
- **The tokens** come out of an inventory vault that already holds the entire supply. A slice goes to the founder's token vault, a smaller slice to the Commons, and the rest to the buyer.

Who holds the funds, then, is a question with three answers: the reserve holds the bulk, the treasury holds the fee, and the founder's two vaults hold the skim. They are separate vaults with separate access rules, and that separation is what the rest of this page rests on.

## Can the founder mint more tokens?

No. The full supply – 100 billion, the same for every caper (`CURVE_CAP`, `contracts/common/src/lib.rs:22`) – is minted once at creation into the inventory vault, and the resource is built with no mint role and no burn role at all (`caper_dao.rs:307-337`). The comment in the source states the reason plainly: it is the load-bearing guarantee, and it holds even against a future version of the protocol's own logic.

The same construction closes two adjacent doors. The resource is created with `OwnerRole::None`, and the builder sets no freeze role and no recall role, so there is no owner who could add either later. Nobody can freeze your tokens in your account, and nobody can claw them back out of it.

## What is the founder's cut, and what caps it?

The founder is paid a collateralization fee on each buy, split in the curve's own composition: two thirds in XRD taken off the payment, one third as a slice of the tokens that buy releases, tithed 30:1 between the founder and the Commons (`contracts/logic/src/lib.rs:262-286`, `:1038-1052`).

Two properties bound it. The rate **tapers to zero**: it is at its peak when circulation is zero and falls linearly to nothing at 30% of the supply sold, after which the founder is paid nothing on any further buy (`collateralization_rate`, `lib.rs:290-296`). And the peak itself is **capped by the contract**, not chosen per caper: `update_fees` rejects any peak above 0.15 (`lib.rs:2076-2086`). The ceiling on the token leg is `peak × (1 − 2/3) × 30/31`, which at the maximum permitted peak is slightly under 5%. Because the cap is asserted in the contract rather than configured, that ceiling is a property of the protocol rather than a current setting.

Note what the taper does to the incentive. A founder earns most where a caper is smallest and nothing once it is established, which is the reverse of the schedule that makes founder dumping worth doing.

## Can the founder sell their tokens?

Yes, and this is deliberate. The founder's slice is ordinary supply that came out of the same inventory at the same price as the buyer's, so it can be sold back along the same curve on the same terms as anybody else's. There is no privileged exit and no privileged price.

What the founder cannot do is take more than has accrued. Withdrawal runs through `withdraw_founder` (`lib.rs:1210-1224`), which requires the caper's own founder badge and asserts the requested amount against the recorded balance on each leg (`founder_take` and `founder_take_tokens`, `caper_dao.rs:579-601`). Those two vaults are the founder's entire reach. There is no method anywhere on the component that moves XRD out of the curve reserve to a founder.

## Who can spend the treasury? Can the team steal it?

The treasury's movement methods – `treasury_withdraw`, `treasury_transfer`, `treasury_exit` – are all restricted to the admin role (`caper_dao.rs:110-116`). The badge that satisfies that role is not held by the founder or by any member. It lives with the registry, which vends a transient proof only when the protocol's logic component calls `authorize`, and the proof is dropped at the end of the call (`lib.rs:756-760`).

So the question becomes: which of logic's methods spends the treasury on somebody's instruction? One does. `execute_proposal_payout` (`lib.rs:1674-1691`) calls `execute_payout`, which binds the frozen winner of a settled proposal, asserts that the winning option is a payout, and transfers to the recipient, currency and amount that were stored in the option people voted on (`caper_dao.rs:1090-1106`). It is once-only. The caller cannot substitute a recipient or an amount, because neither is a parameter – both are read from the settled proposal.

The practical answer is that treasury money moves when a vote says so and not otherwise. See [proposals](/wiki/governance/proposals), [voting](/wiki/governance/voting) and [paying someone from a caper's treasury](/wiki/foundations/paying-someone-from-a-caper).

## Can the founder change the fees or the rules?

No, on both counts. `update_fees` is the only method that moves any fee, it is restricted to the protocol admin rather than to a caper's founder (`lib.rs:661`), and every value it accepts is bounded: the trade fee to [0, 0.1], the collateralization peak to [0, 0.15], the proposal fee to at least the settlement gas budget (`lib.rs:2076-2092`). A founder has no fee lever of their own to pull.

Changing the logic itself runs through governance as an upgrade proposal, which is voted on like any other. The state tier that holds the vaults and the fixed supply is a separate, immutable package underneath it, which is why an upgrade cannot reach the mint role that does not exist.

## Can a caper be shut down?

No. Across the logic package's public surface there is no dissolve, delete or wind-up method, and none of the executive proposal kinds does it either. A caper has no off switch, so there is no version of this where a founder closes the thing and everyone else discovers the door is locked.

The way out is the [exit right](/wiki/foundations/leaving-a-caper): any member who has taken part can hand back their vote tokens and governance tokens and take their pro-rata share of the treasury plus their sell-back along the curve, without a proposal and without anyone's approval. The founder holds that right on exactly the same terms as everybody else, and cannot revoke anybody's.

## What happens if the founder leaves?

Nothing stops. The curve keeps quoting both sides, the treasury keeps paying out what proposals decide, and the exit right keeps working, because none of those paths passes through the founder. A founder who walks away takes whatever has accrued in their two vaults and gives up any further collateralization fee. The caper carries on without them.

This is the structural difference from a project where the team is a dependency. There is nothing here that a founder has to keep doing for the mechanism to keep working.

## What this does not protect you from

The guarantees above are narrow on purpose, and it is worth being exact about their edges.

- **They say nothing about price.** The curve will always quote a sell, but what it quotes depends on where circulation stands. You can exit at a loss.
- **They say nothing about judgement.** A treasury spent badly by a real majority vote is spent as thoroughly as one taken. Governance protects you from theft, not from being outvoted.
- **They say nothing about what the caper is for.** Whether the group does anything worth backing is a question about the people, and no contract answers it.
- **Governance-settable levers move within their bounds.** The fees quoted here are stated as the contract's limits, not as today's settings. Read the current values off the caper itself.

What the contracts do settle is the narrower thing: the founder cannot create supply, cannot reach the reserve, cannot spend the treasury without a vote, and cannot stop you leaving. Everything else is ordinary risk, and it stays yours.

## Related

- [Buying into a caper](/wiki/foundations/buying-into-a-caper) – what you get, how the price is set, how to sell.
- [Leaving a caper: the exit right](/wiki/foundations/leaving-a-caper) – the full mechanic and its preconditions.
- [Starting a personal caper](/wiki/foundations/starting-a-personal-caper) – the same questions from the founder's side.
- [Bonding curve](/wiki/markets/bonding-curve) – the reserve and the pricing function.
- [Principal–agent problem](/wiki/economics/principal-agent) – the general form of the problem this page is about.
- [Token unlocks and vesting schedules](/wiki/economics/token-unlocks-and-vesting) – how the rest of the industry addresses it.