06 — The token
$SPREAD pays for the book.
The vault that takes the other side of your trade has to be funded by something. It is funded by $SPREAD's own transfer tax — not by the coins you trade, whose fees are their own business and never reach us.
Source
5% on every $SPREAD transfer
Charged by the token itself, on buys and sells alike. It is the only inflow the treasury has, and it does not depend on anyone trading a single perp.
Destination
Straight into the vault
Collected tax is swept into the same USDC vault that escrows positions. Deeper vault, higher caps — the tiers move with what is actually there, not with what we hope will be.
Limit
A hard daily budget
Across all markets the treasury will book at most $3,000 of net loss in a day, metered hourly. Past that, opens stop until the window rolls. The floor under the vault is a parameter, not a hope.
What that buys, and what it doesn't
A tax on our own token is a real, ongoing inflow that scales with our own volume and nothing else. It means we never have to charge a listing fee to a coin, never have to ask a launch for a cut, and never have an incentive to list something thin because it pays.
It is not a guarantee. The tax is an inflow, not a backstop: what actually protects the vault is that every position is escrowed in full before it opens, and that the caps and the daily budget bound the worst day we can have. The tax decides how large the book can grow. The escrow decides whether it can ever fail to pay.