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 making proposals and voting. Caper is the launchpad that creates these organizations and keeps them honest.

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. Holders vote on every meaningful decision, and voting weight is the product of the tokens you hold and the votes you have actually cast. No insiders with hidden allocations.
• Exit on demand. Once you have voted, burn your stake and walk away with your share of the treasury. The door is never locked on a member who has taken part.

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, per buy, as a small fraction of each trade.

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. A 0.5% fee on each trade is what funds the system; the buy-side fee flows into that caper's own treasury. Details in Trading.

3 — Govern. Any member can raise a proposal, and a proposal is either legislative – a signal-only vote that records an outcome and touches nothing on-chain – or executive, in which case each option carries exactly one of five on-chain actions: 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), Vote (cast this caper's treasury weight in another caper's governance — capers can be members of capers), or Upgrade (swap the platform's shared logic, reserved to the $CAPER caper itself). The full set is broken down in Proposals. Ballots are complete rankings settled by a Borda count rather than an instant runoff: every voter must rank every option, and a partial or duplicated ballot is rejected outright. Voting weight rewards commitment twice over: it scales with both the tokens you have staked into the caper's ballot box and the soulbound vote tokens you have earned by participating in past votes. See Proposals and Voting.

4 — Exit. At any time, a member who has voted can burn their stake and receive their share of the treasury — computed by the same formula as their voting weight, so influence and exit rights can never drift apart. The call surrenders governance tokens and soulbound vote tokens together and asserts both buckets are non-empty, so a holder who has never voted has no exit to take rather than a zero-valued one. Vote tokens are minted when a proposal's ballots are released, so the door opens on your first released ballot rather than on your first cast. 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 each buy, a small and steadily shrinking slice of the newly-sold tokens routes to the founder's vault instead of the buyer, and 1/31 of that slice goes to the $CAPER treasury — so every caper launched strengthens the commons. The slice tapers to zero as the token distributes, which means 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, token-weighted votes, on-chain execution — but it bundles into one contract what most DAOs assemble from parts: a token launch, an AMM pool, a treasury custody solution, a voting system, and an execution layer. 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 six fees. Trading fees are small and paid in XRD; the founder reward is paid in the curve’s own composition — two thirds in XRD, one third in the caper’s own token — and fades to zero as the curve fills. Nothing is burned — every fee recycles into a treasury, and two of them feed the $CAPER treasury, which collects a slice of every caper on the platform.