A caper is an organization that anyone can launch in one click. Each caper has its own token, treasury, and community of holders who steer it by raising proposals and trading against them. Caper is the protocol those organizations run on: it creates the token, the treasury and the decision procedure together, and nothing can separate them afterwards.
The four promises:
- Launch and raise instantly. No paperwork, no team, no upfront capital. Pick a name, sign one transaction, and your token is live with a market open for backers.
- Always tradeable. Every caper has a built-in market – buy in or cash out at any time against a pool that never disappears.
- Real say. Every proposal that would spend is settled by the market it spends against: it passes only if the price holds up over its window. Selling is the veto, so the people carrying the cost decide. No insiders with hidden allocations.
- Exit on demand. Every ballot you cast mints a soulbound stake token; hand it back with your governance tokens and walk away with your share of the treasury. A holder who has never voted can still sell on the curve at any time.
The three permanent components
- A fixed-supply governance token – 100 billion units, minted once at genesis. The resource has no mint or burn role, so supply is structurally unchangeable.
- A treasury that holds XRD and any tokens the DAO accumulates.
- A perpetual bonding-curve AMM that mediates every buy and sell of the governance token.
All 100bn tokens are minted into a single inventory vault on the curve. There is no upfront founder allocation and no pre-allocated Caper Commons bucket – both accrue continuously, as a small fraction of every buy, every sell and every exit.
The life of a caper
1 – Launch. One transaction creates the token, the treasury, and the curve, and hands the founder a badge. Nothing else is needed – see Raising funds for what the founder does and doesn't get.
2 – Trade. Backers buy and sell against the bonding curve at a price set by a fixed formula, not by matching counterparties – so the market exists from the first second and can never be rugged away. Every buy and every sell pays the skim, and 49.5% of it flows into that caper's own treasury in XRD; there is no separate trade fee. Trading earns no governance record at all. It did, at 0.01 soulbound stake tokens per XRD of gross value, until the redeploy of 11 September 2026 removed the trade-side mint – so what opens the exit is a cast ballot, not a purchase. Details in Trading.
3 – Govern. Any holder of at least one governance token can raise a proposal, and a proposal carries exactly one on-chain action: Payout (send treasury funds to a recipient), Invest (spend treasury XRD buying another caper's token), Divest (sell a token this treasury already holds back into that caper's curve for XRD), Upgrade (swap the platform's shared logic, reserved to the $CAPER caper itself), or Metadata (rewrite the mutable presentation keys on this caper's own token). It is decided in two phases. First a ranked ballot: members rank every option (one is always a “Do nothing”) for 100 XRD a ballot, and a Borda tally passes the leader only if its share of the weight cast clears 1.5 / option_count.
A pass then makes the proposal triggerable – unless the winning option is a Debate position, which the contract refuses to trigger, so a proposal can now pass and do nothing – and the trigger locks the trailing time-weighted average price as a baseline and opens the market window; when it closes, anyone can resolve, and it passes if and only if the TWAP over the window itself is at or above that baseline. Holding through the window is consent and buying is support; the only way to block a proposal the ballot carried is to sell the price under its baseline before the window shuts. The full set is broken down in Proposals.
4 – Exit. At any time, a holder can surrender governance tokens together with soulbound stake tokens and receive a share of the treasury equal to (t × v) / (V × T) – the tokens tendered, times the stake tokens tendered, over total stake supply times circulating tokens. The call takes both amounts, asserts each is positive and withdraws both from the member’s own account, so an account that has never cast a ballot has no exit to take rather than a zero-valued one – and that now includes an account that has traded heavily and voted on nothing.
Stake accrues on a cast ballot and on nothing else a member can do, so the door opens with your first vote. Until 11 September 2026 a trade opened it too; removing that mint is what stopped a single transaction buying a position and the claim on the treasury together. This is the strongest form of the rage-quit right pioneered by MolochDAO: not a proposal, not a grace period – a standing door.
Founder economics
Founders are paid by the market, not by a pre-mine. On every buy and every sell a skim is taken, and half of it goes to the founder. It starts high and falls fast: the first buyers pay about 2.06 times the curve price for each token they keep, it is 1.08% of a trade by the time a fifth of the supply has sold, and it halves again with every further fifth sold. There is no floor, and it never reaches zero.
The founder's half comes in two parts: 90% of it is XRD taken off the trade, and 10% is a slice of the tokens the trade moves. The rest of the skim goes 49.5% to the caper's own treasury in XRD and 0.5% to the Caper Commons in tokens, so every caper launched strengthens the commons. The slice shrinks as the token distributes, so a founder's upside comes from growing the caper, not from dumping an allocation. Full mechanics in Raising funds.
Capers in the DAO landscape
A caper is a DAO in the strict sense – treasury, on-chain execution, holders who decide – but it bundles into one contract what most DAOs assemble from parts: a token launch, an AMM pool, a treasury custody solution, a decision procedure, and an execution layer. It also replaces the part most DAOs struggle with: instead of a ballot almost nobody returns, the decision rides the market that is already pricing the treasury. That single-contract design closes the gaps where DAO failures historically live – unfunded treasuries, governance that can't execute, and members trapped behind treasuries they can't reach. Where it sits in the industry's arc – and what it inherits from a decade of experiments – is covered in the history of DAOs.
The fee structure
A caper charges fees on four occasions. Every buy and every sell pays the skim, a share of the trade that falls fast as the curve fills: 100% of a trade at launch, 1% once 21.4% of the supply has sold, and half of whatever is left every 20% sold after that – there is no floor, and it never reaches zero. The skim divides three ways: 49.5% to the traded caper’s own treasury in XRD; 50% to the founder, 90% of it in XRD and the rest in the caper’s own token; and 0.5% to the $CAPER treasury in the token.
Opening a proposal costs 1% of its largest option, at least 500 XRD, kept whether it passes or fails; casting a ranked ballot on one costs 100 XRD; and triggering a proposal that won its ballot is free, for anyone. Nothing is burned: apart from the founder’s half of the skim, every fee lands in a treasury, and two of them feed the $CAPER treasury, which collects a slice of every caper on the platform.