A token whose price chart is 92 ownable rungs. Every claim on this page has a way to check it yourself in the right-hand column — you should not have to take any of it on trust.
A fixed-supply token launches with zero ETH of liquidity. Instead of a trading pair someone funded, the entire supply is placed into a Uniswap v4 pool as 92 stacked price bands — rungs. In v2 they are not all the same size: cheap narrow steps at the bottom where a normal buy can win several, dense walls every tenth rung that are expensive to push through and pay the most, and wide thin ramps at the top where price runs fast. Together they span roughly 1,394× from the bottom of the ladder to the top.
While the price sits inside a rung, that rung collects the 2% fee on every trade. Those fees pile up. Whoever makes the buy that carries the price up through the rung’s top takes the rung — and takes the pile with it. That transfer is the game: it is a prize you seize, not a yield you accrue.
The app cashes that pile out to you in the same transaction as the buy, so you do not have to race anyone for what you just won. If you trade through a raw router or an aggregator instead, the pile stays on the rung and the next person through the top takes it. Nothing is allocated and nobody is appointed; buying is the only way to move on the map.
Winning a rung does not cost a fixed amount. It costs whatever is left of the current rung, so the cost falls continuously as the price climbs toward the top edge. A small buyer can take any rung on the ladder by timing rather than by out-spending — you need to be the one who pushes it over, not the one who funds the whole climb.
The pool charges a 2% fee on every trade, in both directions. That fee is what funds every role below. It is a constant and cannot be raised by anyone, including the creator.
There are four ways to be on the receiving end of that 2%. You can hold more than one at once.
You become one by making the buy that carries the price up through a rung's top — you conquer a rung by traversing it. Your immediate prize is the pile of fees that rung accrued while the price was passing through it, which transfers to you on capture. That is the number the app shows as “fees you’d keep”, and you keep 63.75% of it after the 15% pot tax, the 11.25% creator fee and the 10% veteran bond.
You do not have to claim it yourself. Buying through this app realizes that pile in the same transaction, up to 16 rungs per buy, so it cannot be taken from you while you are getting round to it. Beyond 16 rungs, or if you trade through something else, you claim manually.
When it pays after that: a rung only earns while the price is inside it — and the moment you capture one, the price has just left it going up. So your rung earns nothing further until the price comes back down into it. At this band width the price crosses a rung roughly every 23 minutes, so it does move around; but treat the seized fees as the reward and anything later as a bonus, not the other way round.
The corollary is worth knowing: the rung the price is in right now is usually unowned, quietly accruing fees for whoever eventually captures it.
The king is whoever owns the highest rung that has ever been captured. It is the only role that earns while the price is above your rung rather than inside it — the one income that does not stop when the price runs away from you.
When it pays: continuously, while the price stays at or above that rung's top. The pot pays out at about 13.4% of its balance per day, and the king takes 52.7% of that flow. It ends the moment somebody captures a higher rung.
No minimum and no lockup — unstake whenever you like. Stakers earn from two separate streams: 35.1% of the same throne stream the king draws from, and a second, always-on stream worth about 3.5% of the pot per day, of which stakers take 87.9%.
When it pays: the second stream is the only genuinely unconditional income in the system — it does not care where the price is. This is the role with no entry cost beyond the tokens themselves.
Anyone at all can call settleDrip() and take 1% of whatever
that call pays out. It exists so the pot never stalls waiting on someone else's attention.
You need no position and no permission.
The pot that pays the king and the stakers is filled by the 15% tax on every claim. So the roles are circular by design: rung owners fund the pot, and the pot pays the king and the stakers.
| Door | Split | Condition |
|---|---|---|
| A rung's trading fees, at claim | 63.75% owner · 15% pot · 11.25% creator · 10% bond | price is inside that rung |
| Throne stream, 13.4% of pot/day | 52.7% king · 35.1% stakers · 11.1% creator · 1% keeper | price at or above the throne rung |
| Citizen stream, 3.5% of pot/day | 87.9% stakers · 11.1% creator · 1% keeper | always |
The creator takes an 11.25% rake on realized winnings only — down from v1's 21.25%, the difference funding the veteran bond — claims and drips. It never touches principal, entry, exit or supply. It can be set to zero one-way and can never be raised, by anyone, including the creator. Across everything, it works out to roughly 0.5% of traded volume.
The pot is not a reservoir. It pays out continuously and is refilled only by the 15% claim tax, so it drains at about 16.5% a day while the ladder is being climbed — a half-life of under four days. King and staker income depends on new captures continuing. The numbers are on the risks page.
The 2% is not felt equally. A buy that sweeps several rungs pays about 0.46% of its notional in fees; a small buy inside a single rung pays the full 2.00%.
Total supply is fixed at 1,000,000,000 and nothing can mint more. All of it is seeded into the pool at genesis and has to be bought like anyone else’s. There is no team allocation, no pre-mine and no reserve. The creator holds zero tokens at launch.
The contracts are immutable once deployed. There is no owner, no admin, no upgrade path and no pause. That cuts both ways — it also means nothing here can ever be fixed, which is why the risks page is worth reading.
One privileged address does exist and should be named: creatorPayee.
Its entire and only powers are to receive the rake, zero it permanently, or hand it to
someone else via a two-step transfer. It cannot touch supply, liquidity, fees, rungs or the
pot.
THELADDER.FUN (ticker LDR2) is deployed on Ethereum mainnet. All seven contracts are verified on Etherscan. They are immutable: no owner, no admin, no upgrade path, no pause.
Buy however you like. This is the thing v2 changes. In v1 a rung was only awarded if your swap carried an extra piece of calldata, so a buy through the normal Uniswap front end won nothing — on day one 86% of crossings were forfeited, and on day two exactly one swap in 918 reached the pool a way that could win. v2 credits the wallet that sent the transaction, so any router works. Two honest exceptions: a smart account or sponsored relayer credits the bundler, and a contract buying for pooled users credits whoever pokes it — both are fixed by passing your address as hookData.