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 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. 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. Trading accrues a soulbound stake token; hand it back with your governance tokens and walk away with your share of the treasury. The door is never locked on a member who put money in.

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. 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 asserts both buckets are non-empty, 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 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, 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 six occasions, and the governance ones come in two tiers. Trading fees are small and paid in XRD. Opening a proposal costs a flat 500 XRD, kept whether it passes or fails; casting a ranked ballot on one costs 100 XRD; and executing a proposal that won its ballot costs a further 10% of what it moves, charged at the trigger and waived outright when the ballot itself returns “treasury pays”. 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.