A caper is a fundraising vehicle as much as a governance one. Launching one costs a single transaction — and from that moment your project can take in money from anyone, anywhere. There are two sides to the flow of capital:

• Raising. Every buy on your bonding curve moves XRD in and tokens out to the buyer. A slice of each buy is skimmed off the payment in XRD and accrues to you, the founder — held in a badge-gated vault you can withdraw from at any time, so your proceeds grow with demand instead of being fixed up front. Trade and governance fees flow into your caper's treasury.
• Deploying. Treasury capital doesn't sit idle. Holders pass proposals to spend it — PAYOUT sends XRD or tokens to a contributor, vendor, or cause; INVEST buys into another caper's curve and books the position back into your treasury.

Because the curve guarantees a market in both directions, there is always someone to raise from and a way for backers to exit.

The founder slice

Unlike a fixed founder allocation minted up front, a caper pays its founder out of curve activity — and it pays them in XRD, not tokens. On each buy the protocol takes a collateralization slice sized by the curve's position, split at a fixed 30:1 ratio between the founder and the protocol-wide $CAPER treasury (the "Commons"). The two legs are denominated differently, and that is the whole point: the founder's 30/31 is skimmed in XRD off the payment before it funds the curve and lands in a badge-gated vault you can withdraw from at any time, while the Commons' 1/31 is minted as caper tokens against the curve and routed to the $CAPER treasury. Because no caper tokens are ever minted to the founder, the token carries no founder-stack sell-pressure overhang — the founder realizes value directly in the buyer's over-collateralization overpayment, instead of holding tokens they would later have to sell back into the curve.

Crucially the slice is front-loaded, not perpetual: it tapers linearly from its configured peak at genesis down to zero once ~30% of the supply is in circulation. Past that point every buy is slice-free — the curve is the buyer's only counterparty and neither founder nor protocol takes any further cut. This rewards the founder for the risky early bootstrap without imposing a permanent tax on a mature, liquid token. For vampire capers bound to an origin token the founder still earns this same per-buy slice; what differs is that holders of the origin token can migrate into the caper — a free mint that advances circulation without an XRD buy, with the resulting reserve gap backfilled by a fee on subsequent direct buys.

The two fee legs

Capers charge a flat 0.5% trade fee, but the two legs land in different places — a distinction worth understanding:

• Buy-leg fee → your treasury. The 0.5% taken off each incoming XRD payment is deposited straight into your caper's own treasury, alongside the proposal fee (500 XRD) and vote fee (100 XRD) paid when members create proposals and vote.
• Sell-leg fee → the base $XRD caper. The 0.5% taken when someone sells back into the curve doesn't touch your caper — it accrues to the treasury of the protocol's root $XRD caper (the base caper native-XRD holders migrate into) and is shared pro-rata with its members when they exit. So a caper earns from the buy-side demand it attracts, while sell-side churn flows out to the wider XRD holder base — distinct from the $CAPER commons, which is funded by the 1/31 founder-slice above.

The result is a treasury that grows with genuine buy-side interest and governance activity, deployed only by vote. For how the broader industry stewards what it raises — diversification, runway, and custody — see DAO treasury management.

Launching a caper

One transaction mints the token, treasury, and bonding curve and hands the founder a badge. The only cost is a registration fee that scales with how short — how rare — the ticker is, and it can start fresh or migrate an existing token.