Rakeback — Protocol Spec (v1, implementation draft, 10 Sep 2026)

Source of truth for product behaviour. AGENTS.md §1 lists the non-negotiables; this file gives the detail.

0. Overview

Rakeback is a membership token on Robinhood Chain. Holding gates, tenure and published funded caps determine each wallet’s refund. Treasury and Syndicate wallets are disclosed, and public swap events, receipts and pool records supply the evidence. In v1, members can claim USDG refunds of eligible swap fees and gas they already paid on whitelisted venues, within those caps. The token’s Pons v2 creator tax funds the pool. Watch is planned for v1.1 and Roadshow Priority for v1.2; neither is included in the initial release.

1. Benefits

Benefit	Behaviour	Bounded by	Version
Fees back	Swap fees the member wallet paid on whitelisted venues, metered from the venues’ public swap events, refunded in USDG each epoch. Trade from any wallet or terminal.	Tier fee cap per epoch	v1
Gas back	Gas the member wallet spent on those same swaps (from tx receipts), converted to USDG at the epoch TWAP, refunded each epoch.	Tier swap-count cap per epoch	v1
Burn-back (optional)	Not enabled in the initial release. A later, separately specified trigger path may refund only fees and gas already paid on a position, within the same caps. Principal is never refunded; the current weekly claim path makes no earlier-payment commitment.	Same caps	optional, not enabled
Watch	Pre-trade: structural flags from the scanner (LP unlocked, creator/top-10 holdings, tax/mint settings, age, bot-vs-real volume). Post-trade: alert the block a held token trips a trigger. Does not predict rugs.	Nothing paid	v1.1
Priority	Member-only window and capped allocation before the public curve opens on Roadshow launches. Checked via `Snapshot` tier + tenure.	Allocation size per tier	v1.2
Interest back	Rebate on borrow APR against tokenized stocks. Parked until the relevant on-chain lending venues carry sufficient volume.	—	later

Every benefit is a refund of a cost already paid or a place in a queue. See AGENTS.md §1.3–1.4.

2. Tiers, gates, tenure

Tier	Gate (USD-equiv.)	Fees back cap / epoch (reference)	Gas back cap / epoch (reference)	Priority (v1.2)
Member	$100	$10	20 swaps	window
Gold	$1,000	$50	100 swaps	window + allocation
Platinum	$10,000	$250	300 swaps	larger allocation

Gate pricing: USD-equivalent, using the registered pool’s 1-hour TWAP at each hourly snapshot. A wallet qualifies for the highest tier whose gate its $RAKEBACK balance value meets.
Startup pricing: until a full one-hour registered-pool price window exists, record the raw balance with an unavailable price and zero qualifying valuation. No spot or curve price is substituted. Tenure starts with qualifying priced snapshots.
Reference caps are the targets at the $1M/day registered-pool volume reference point (docs/ECONOMICS.md). Actual caps for epoch E are computed by the oracle from the pool’s 30-day trailing balance and current spendable funds (ECONOMICS §4) and published on-chain with the epoch root. Caps scale down proportionally when the pool is short and up (to a published ceiling of 3× reference) when it is long.
Tenure: consecutive qualifying hourly snapshots. Accrual factor: 0 for the first 168 snapshots (7 days), 0.5 from snapshot 169 to 720 (day 8–30), 1.0 thereafter. A snapshot below the tier’s gate resets tenure for that tier (a Gold wallet dropping to Member keeps Member tenure only).
Founding tier: the first 1,000 wallets that (a) cross the Gold gate before the end of E1 and (b) remain above it at every snapshot through E1 receive founding = true; their accrual factor is 1.0 from day one, permanently, while they never drop below the Gold gate. Dropping below removes the flag.
Referral: a referred wallet explicitly signs an EIP-712 message and confirms it through MembershipRegistry using the referrer’s claim-card link. The public confirmation skips the initial dead period while the wallet meets a holding gate: its minimum effective tenure is 169 snapshots, and its full factor still requires more than 720 actual snapshots. The referrer receives +168 snapshots after each referred wallet stays above a gate through a full epoch beginning at or after confirmation, once per referred wallet, capped at +720. Adjustments start after that epoch closes. Chain, registry, fixed site origin, both wallets, nonce and expiry are bound into the signature; first confirmed referrer wins. Holding gates are never waived. The implementation and tests are local; activation requires the founder’s deployed registry and published origin.
Syndicate tenure: active anchors receive a 720-snapshot tenure adjustment on qualifying holdings during their 60-day term. The larger anchor or referrer adjustment applies; adjustments do not waive a holding gate. Writers use normal holding gates and tenure. Public terms determine when an adjustment applies.

3. Epochs and snapshots

Epoch length 7 days from the recorded launch timestamp. E1 begins at launch; delayed publication does not move boundaries. A root is posted only after its epoch closes.
Hourly snapshot at a block chosen by keccak(prevrandao, hour) mod 300 within the hour (unpredictable enough to blunt snapshot-gaming; not a security boundary).
At epoch end the oracle computes per-wallet: tier, tenure factor, fees paid (by venue weight), gas paid, caps, rebate = min(cap, accrued × factor), and posts EpochPosted(epoch, merkleRoot, capsHash, total, poolSpendable, cid).
Claims open immediately. claim(epoch, amount, proof) pays USDG from Pool; claimMany claims selected epochs atomically. Any invalid entry reverts the batch. Unclaimed after 56 days from posting is swept back to the pool.

4. Funding

Launch on Pons v2, quote asset USDG, creator tax 0.8%, fixed at launch. Pons’ base fee is 1% (70% creator / 30% Pons with Pons buyback disabled). The nominal creator portion is 0.7% + 0.8% = 1.5% of the hook’s fee-bearing amount before integer rounding and any conversion. The hook charges both cuts on the swap’s unspecified currency: output for exact-input swaps, input for exact-output swaps. This can be USDG or the token. Token-denominated fees require a verified conversion during sweeping before USDG enters the Fee Escrow. The creator claims actual USDG; the indexer derives funding from verified receipts and deposits. The token itself remains a clean fixed-supply ERC-20 without fee-on-transfer logic.
Split per epoch of the claimed take: Pool 50% · Buyback+Liquidity 20% · Treasury 20% · Syndicate 10%. Epochs 1–4: Buyback line goes to Pool (70% pool). Announced before launch.
Reserve: 20% of pool balance is never spendable. Pool.spendable() = balance − reserve − outstandingClaims.
Fragmentation: only the factory-registered pool is taxed. Mitigations: venue weights (registered pool 100%, others 50%), buyback+liquidity into the registered pool, the registered pool address on the front page, USDG pairing so no rival stable pool is needed. Size all economics on registered-pool volume.

5. Venues and metering

VenueRegistry holds (pool/curve address, kind, weight). v1 whitelist: the $RAKEBACK registered pool (weight 100), Pons curves and hooked pools (weight 50), Uniswap V4 pools via the chain’s PoolManager (weight 50), Uniswap V3 pools (50), Ramses (50). Trades on venues not listed are ineligible.
Fees paid: for Pons venues, the matched public curve/hook fee and tax events; for Uniswap V3, the factory-creation fee applied to gross input; for V4, the rate carried by the Swap event. Ramses requires complete paired fee-change replay before each swap, bound to its creation, pool and exact swap contents. A current getter or static creation rate cannot establish a later historical Ramses fee. Percentage calculations floor integer amounts, conservatively allowing for per-step rounding. Store the raw computation inputs and rate evidence.
Gas paid: gasUsed × effectiveGasPrice from the swap receipt. Robinhood bundles the L1 data charge in this amount; retain additional receipt fields without adding them again. For a successful unsponsored ERC-4337 operation, use its actualGasCost and attributed sender. Gas is allocated once across the payer’s decoded swaps and converted at the epoch ETH/USDG TWAP.
Minimum notional per swap for eligibility: $20 USD-equivalent. Swaps below are ignored.
Wash detection (v1, simple): a wallet’s swaps against a pool where the same wallet is also the dominant LP (> 50% of liquidity) are ignored.

6. Sybil resistance (structural)

Tenure dead period · USD gates · minimum notional · per-wallet caps · venue whitelist · wash rule · rebates only from realised tax (pool can’t be borrowed against). A trade does not create an individual entitlement to the tax it contributes. Shared funding, eligible costs, tenure and published caps determine any refund; only registered-pool trades supply this creator tax. Dominant-LP self-trades are excluded under the wash rule.

7. Treasury, syndicate, disclosure

Treasury and Syndicate wallets are labelled on the site from the first trade. Treasury receives 20% of the take every epoch in USDG from day one.
No-sell pledge: no treasury $RAKEBACK moves for 90 days after launch. After that, any sale is announced ≥ 7 days ahead, from the labelled wallet, in tranches ≤ 0.5% of supply per week, or OTC.
Syndicate payments go through the same Claims Merkle mechanism as members (see docs/SYNDICATE.md), so they are public and provable.

8. Out of scope (do not build)

Payments sized by principal losses · paymaster / gas sponsorship · mandatory router · transfer tax · stored spending allowances · payouts unrelated to costs already incurred · off-chain bill payments or commodities · interest back before relevant volume exists · features requiring a company, custody or business-verified service credentials.

9. Dependencies

Unlisted Roadshow (priority, v1.2) and the scanner (Watch, v1.1; trigger registry; early-wallet list for the syndicate) are separate repos. Rakeback v1 ships without them. Interfaces: PriorityGate.isEligible(wallet, tier) and TriggerRegistry.trigger(token, block, reason).