How Backed works

Overview

$BACKED is a fixed-supply token that sits on a growing vault of tokenized real stocks (AAPL, NVDA, TSLA…) on Robinhood Chain. Every trade of the token pays a 3% ETH tax; that ETH buys more stock into the vault, where it stays as backing. Because the stock accumulates instead of being paid out, the token appreciates and its floor — the amount each token can be redeemed for — only rises.

The token

A plain ERC-20 with a supply fixed at 1,000,000,000 at launch. There is no mint function — supply can only ever decrease, when someone redeems and their tokens are burned. Fewer tokens against the same or larger reserve means every remaining token is more backed.

The token trades on a single Uniswap v4 BACKED/ETH pool, so liquidity and attention stay in one place.

The 3% tax

A Uniswap v4 hook takes a 3% fee in native ETH on every buy and every sell of $BACKED, and forwards it straight to the vault. It's taken on the specified side in beforeSwap and the unspecified side in afterSwap, so both directions pay. This is the same fee-taking mechanism The Index runs in production — 100% of it goes to the vault (no LP-deepening split).

The vault

The vault is the reserve. It holds the ETH tax until a keeper converts it to stock, then holds the stock — permanently. Nothing is ever distributed to holders; value accrues to the vault, and therefore to the token.

No rug surface. There is no owner or keeper path to withdraw stocks or ETH. The only way value leaves the vault is a holder's own redemption. The owner cannot drain the reserve — it's enforced in code, not promised.

Buying the backing

A keeper turns pending ETH into stock every cycle, through two routes:

• Rialto (primary). Tokenized stocks trade best on Rialto, Robinhood Chain's tokenized-stock venue. The vault sells native ETH for stock using the API's calldata — no approval, no signature.
• Uniswap v4 (fallback). If Rialto has no quote, the vault buys each stock on its ETH pool directly.

The keeper only supplies slippage floors (minOut). It can never inject the router — that's resolved on-chain from Rialto's registry — and the vault credits only the measured stock it received. A compromised keeper can grief a single buy within its own minOut and nothing more.

Redemption & the floor

Anyone can call redeem(amount): it burns your tokens and sends you your pro-rata slice of the entire vault — every stock plus any pending ETH — in-kind. No oracle, no permission, any block.

A 5% redemption fee stays in the vault. That makes every exit accretive: when someone leaves, the backing per token for everyone who stays goes up. The floor is monotonic — it only climbs.

Why it can't go to zero

Redeemability pins the market price to the backing by arbitrage. If $BACKED ever trades below its floor, buying it and immediately redeeming is risk-free profit — so buyers close the gap. The floor isn't a promise or a peg; it's the balance of real equities the contract will hand you on demand.

Two forces push the price up: the volume engine (every trade's tax buys more backing, even in a flat market) and the market engine (the stocks themselves appreciate). Supply only shrinks. The floor only rises.

Baskets

A coin launched on pons or Party names a basket treasury as its creator-fee recipient. From then on the treasury collects those fees, buys what the creator picked, and pushes it out to whoever holds the coin — pro-rata on balance, nothing to claim and nothing to stake. Backed keeps 10% of the fees routed through and runs the keeper; the creator chooses how much of the rest to keep.

It is the inverse of the vault. The vault accumulates stock and never pays it out, so the value sits in the token. A basket buys and pays straight to holders, so the value lands in their wallets. Same venues, same keeper design, opposite destination.

Binding proves itself. A treasury will only bind a coin whose launchpad names that treasury as the fee recipient — checked on-chain, against pons' launch registry or Party's locker. Nobody can point a basket at a coin that does not pay it, which is why the call needs no permission at all: anyone may repair a basket whose creator launched and forgot.

Whatever the venues can fill. Every buy is quoted at both Rialto and Uniswap and takes the better fill — measured, not assumed: Uniswap came out ahead on Take-Two by 1.9% and on Roblox by 0.05%, and never behind. Rialto reaches its own inventory, Uniswap reaches any public pool, and between them a basket can hold equities, funds and the coins this chain actually launches. There is deliberately no price oracle: gating a swap on a feed would mean the names without one — Roblox above all — could be configured but never bought. The fill is protected instead by the floor carried from the quote, which the treasury verifies against the real balance delta.

Fees arrive in whatever the coin was paired against. Only two of the pairs pons approves are money; the rest are stocks, and it keeps adding them — about a fifth of recent launches pair against one. Where a basket holds the very asset its fees arrive in, nothing is bought at all: buying it would mean selling it to itself across a spread, so the treasury moves it across its own books instead and the round costs nothing to fill. That entry is tracked separately from the balance, which is what keeps the creator's withheld share and the unspent fees out of a payout. Party pays part of its fees in the launched coin itself; that side is burned.

What the keeper cannot do. It runs the cycle but is not trusted with the money: it can only reach two routers — the one Rialto's registry publishes and Uniswap's, fixed in the treasury's own bytecode — only buy names already in the basket, never sell one back out, and never spend more of the quote asset than it declares, which is measured rather than asserted. It never sets payout weights either; those are read from balanceOf(coin) on-chain, over a list that must be strictly ascending so no address can be paid twice in a round.

What the creator cannot do. Pause their own payouts, and that is all. There is no owner path to the bought stock or the quote asset, and exclusions — the pool and the launch's bonding curve, which hold coin without being holders — are keeper-set and may only ever name contracts, so nobody can exclude the cap table and leave one wallet as the whole denominator.

Rounds are economic, not clockwork. A round buys only once its slice is worth the trip, and pays out only when the gas to hand it out is a small share of what it is handing out. Since that gas is per holder, the threshold moves with the list rather than sitting as a fixed number — a round worth 0.01 ETH is fine for 200 holders and absurd for 20,000. Waiting costs holders nothing: what has been bought is already in the treasury.

Every basket's page is built from its own events, so what it collected, bought and paid can be checked against the chain rather than taken on trust. Browse the live ones or build one.

Other products

Three more things run on Robinhood Chain under the same brand and the same wallet — connect once and each one recognises you. None is wired into the $BACKED contracts above.

• Prediction markets. Binary questions settled in native ETH: back a side, and if it wins you take your stake back plus a pro-rata slice of the losing pot. 3% on every buy, trading closes 30 minutes before a market ends, and each position mints its own non-transferable YES/NO token.
• Perps. A perpetual-futures terminal on Lighter's Robinhood Chain deployment — equities listed and pre-IPO, ETFs and crypto, margined in USDG. Its own repo and its own deploy.
• Spend. Gift cards, eSIM data and mobile top-ups for 2,000+ brands, fulfilled by CryptoRefills. They settle in a stablecoin on an L2, which Robinhood Chain is not, so the payment is bridged through LI.FI onto the order's own deposit address: you sign one transaction in whatever you hold, and upstream sees an ordinary payment. Nothing custodial happens in between — we never hold the funds.

The fees the first two earn are used to buy tokenized stock into the vault, so activity on either one lifts the floor under $BACKED. The shop earns a supplier commission instead, which is not on-chain and does not touch the vault.

What it takes is deliberately short: $BACKED and the eight tokenized shares, and nothing else. A share of Apple buying an Apple gift card is the whole idea; a picker padded out with stablecoins says something blander. Anything else is still reachable by pasting its address, so the list is a shortcut rather than a gate.

$BACKED can be spent directly, and what that costs is worth stating: the bridge sells it on Robinhood Chain and moves the proceeds, so the sale pays the same 3% hook tax and 1% LP fee any sale pays — measured at 3-4% all-in on $25 orders, against the real pool price. A tokenized share costs close to nothing by comparison. The checkout prints the figure for whatever is chosen, so the trade is visible rather than assumed, and the 3% goes where every other 3% goes: into the vault.

Trust model

• No fund extraction. Owner and keeper cannot withdraw stocks or ETH; the only exit is redemption.
• Bounded keeper. Keeper supplies only minOuts; the router is on-chain-resolved; buys are measured by real balance delta and capped by maxSpendPerBuy.
• Capped fee. The redemption fee can never be set above 10%.
• Sequencer. Robinhood Chain has no public mempool, so there's no MEV sandwiching; the sequencer operator remains a trust assumption.
• Not yet audited. The hook mirrors The Index's production code; the vault is new code with unit + fork tests. Treat it accordingly.

Contracts

All live on Robinhood Chain (chain 4663). Click any address to verify it on the Blockscout explorer.

Reads on this site go through the public RPC rpc.mainnet.chain.robinhood.com. Prices come from DexScreener, with the on-chain pools as fallback.

FAQ

Do I earn dividends?

No — and that's the point. Instead of paying stock out, Backed keeps it in the vault so the token itself appreciates. You realize the gain by selling or redeeming.

Are these real shares?

They're tokenized stocks on Robinhood Chain — real exposure, but not brokerage shares; no voting rights or dividends.

What if everyone redeems?

Then the vault unwinds fairly — everyone takes their pro-rata share. The 5% fee cushions and rewards whoever stays. It's an orderly exit, not a failure.

Can the team run off with the reserve?

No. There is no withdraw path for stocks or ETH. The only way out is your own redemption.

Can I actually spend $BACKED on something?

Yes — Spend sells gift cards, eSIM data and mobile top-ups across 2,000+ brands, and takes $BACKED or any of the eight tokenized shares straight from this wallet. The code arrives by email in about a minute; there is no account and no ID. Selling $BACKED to pay costs the usual 3% tax and 1% LP fee, which the checkout shows before you sign — and that 3% lands in the vault like every other trade's.