What can go wrong

This has not been audited by a third party

Things the review explicitly did not cover: formal verification, symbolic execution, a long-horizon fuzzing campaign, and any economic review with real capital at stake. The fixes themselves were also written and reviewed by the same party that found the issues.

How you lose money

The price can fall

This is a token with a market price. It can go down, including to nearly nothing. You keep whatever tokens you bought, and they can be worth less than you paid. No mechanism here prevents that, and nothing about the design implies the price should rise.

Your rung stops paying, roughly every 23 minutes

A rung only earns while the price is inside it. At this band width the price leaves a rung on roughly a 23-minute cadence, so rung income is intermittent, not a yield. If the price runs far above or below your rung, it can pay nothing for a long time.

Rungs get stolen — and unclaimed fees go with them

If the price drops below your rung's top, anyone can take the rung back by buying up through it, and any fees you have not cashed out are seized along with it. This is a forcible transfer: there is nothing to approve or refuse, and holding the deed in a wrapper or escrow contract does not help.

What protects you, and what does not. Buying through this app claims the pile in the same transaction, so what you win at capture is secured immediately and cannot be taken with the rung. Three limits on that, all real:

• It stops after 8 rungs. A single buy that sweeps more than eight rungs auto-claims the first eight and leaves the rest exposed. The cap exists so gas cannot run away on a very large sweep; if you make one, claim the remainder yourself.
• It only covers what you win at capture. Fees that accrue afterwards, if the price returns to your rung, sit unclaimed like before.
• It does not apply outside this app. Trading through a raw router, an aggregator or your own contract skips it entirely, and the old rule stands: cash out fast.

A bot will often beat you to a capture

Because a capture goes to whoever supplies the last sliver of the move, it is cheap to snipe. In simulation, the front-runner supplied a median 23.8% of the buy pressure it took the rung from. You keep the tokens either way — but do not count on winning the rung you were aiming at.

Buying a rung on a marketplace is riskier than it looks

Rungs are transferable ERC-721s, so they can be listed for sale. Price one as expected income before someone takes it: the seller can empty its unclaimed fees first, and can take it back themselves after a dip. A cooldown on the previous owner would be defeated by a fresh address, so there is none.

The pot shrinks, and it is funded by newer buyers

Concretely: a 10 ETH pot with nobody claiming, while the ladder is being climbed, is 5.83 ETH after three days, 2.84 after a week, 0.81 after two weeks.

What that means plainly. This is a redistribution loop with an 11.25% creator rake on top. King and staker income depends on a continuing supply of new captures, which means new buyers. It pays while the ladder is being climbed and decays quickly when it is not, so earlier participants are paid in part by later ones. That is a structural property of the design, not a market condition.

Nothing here creates value. After the 2% fee and the rake this is negative-sum across all participants: most people should expect to lose money.

What the creator takes

An 11.25% rake on realized winnings — claims and drips only, about 0.25% of traded volume. It never touches principal, entry, exit or supply, can be set to zero one-way, and can never be raised. The creator holds no tokens: there is no allocation, no pre-mine and no reserve, so the rake is the entire creator take.

Most of the marked value is not backed — and how much changes wildly

The pool launched with zero ETH. The only ETH behind the token is what buyers have paid in on the way up — so the “market cap” you can compute from the price is not money that exists.

There is no single number, and that is the point. Backing rises through the cheap steps and the walls, peaks around 43.8% at rung 49, and then collapses across the ramps at the top — to 0.26% at rung 91. The ramps are wide and cheap by design: they buy price range without spending much supply, which is exactly what makes the marked value up there almost entirely imaginary. The whole ladder, if every rung were bought, holds 59.1 ETH — and at that point the price implies a market value of about 23,000 ETH.

Read that table in both directions. In the part of the ladder anyone is likely to reach, v2 is several times better backed than v1, which sat flat near 10.9% the whole way up. But if the price ever runs into the ramps, the gap between what the chart says you own and what is actually there becomes far worse than v1 ever was. A high price on this token is not evidence that the money is there.

The way out is a queue, and the back of it gets almost nothing

This is arithmetic, not a prediction — it follows from a one-sided pool and applies to any token launched this way. It is the single most important thing on this page: the price you see is not the price you can all leave at.

Things we know about and did not fix

A rounding drift in the staking accounts

The staking accumulator floors each account's share, and that shortfall accumulates — measured at tens of wei over thousands of stake/unstake cycles. In practice this means the contract can owe a few wei more than it holds. Withdrawals were made partial-safe so a shortfall costs those wei rather than blocking a balance, but the drift itself is inherent to the accounting method and is not eliminated.

The front end trusts whatever node it reads from

Your slippage protection is computed from data supplied by an RPC endpoint, which is a different trust domain from the wallet that signs. A hostile or compromised node can make a trade look better than it is. The app shows the price impact and asks you to confirm anything unusual, but the honest answer is that a client-side check cannot fully solve this. Use your own node if you have one.

Empty space below the bottom rung

Below the lowest rung the pool holds no liquidity, so the price can move there without value changing hands. This previously made the last rung cheap to seize; it was fixed before launch and has a regression test. It is listed here because the underlying geometry is unchanged.

Things that can change without us

• Uniswap governance can enable a protocol fee on any v4 pool, including this one. If it did, the all-in swap fee would rise from 2% to at most 2.098%. It is currently zero here, measured on a mainnet fork.
• Ordinary sandwich risk applies, as on any AMM. Large orders are better sent through a private relay.
• Gas costs are real. On a small position, the gas to capture, claim and cash out can be a meaningful share of what you earn.