v1 is not switched off and never will be: the contracts have no owner and no pause. It is kept here so anyone who wants to keep playing it can. The current game is v2 — theladder.fun. Note v1 only awards a rung if your buy goes through its own router; v2 credits whoever sent the transaction.
Someone is squatting our DexScreener listing. theladder.fun is the only official website. Spread the word, thank you.
Written to be useful to someone looking for a reason not to buy. If any of it is wrong or out of date, that is a bug and worth telling us about.
An internal adversarial review was run — roughly 250 new tests, several working proof-of-concept exploits, and a full lifecycle run against the real Uniswap contracts on a mainnet fork. It found no critical issues. Every issue it did find was fixed before launch, each with a regression test. Later work on a mainnet fork found a further bug in the auto-claim loop that the unit tests had missed — it left the last rung of a sweep exposed — which is a fair illustration of the limits of the whole exercise: testing finds what you thought to look for.
That is a thorough search. It is not a proof, and it is not an audit. The people who wrote the code also reviewed it, which is a known blind spot that no amount of rigour removes. The contracts are immutable: nothing found after launch can be fixed.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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 pays out continuously and is refilled only by the 15% tax on claims. King and staker income is therefore funded by new captures, and in a stretch with none the pot simply drains.
| State | Drains at | Half-life |
|---|---|---|
| Ladder being climbed (price at or above the throne) | 16.47% per day | 3.9 days |
| Stalled (price below the throne) | 3.54% per day | 19.3 days |
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 a 25% 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.
A 25% rake on realized winnings — claims and drips only, about 0.5% 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.
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.
| Price at rung | Marked value | ETH actually in the pool | Backed |
|---|---|---|---|
| 20 | 72.5 ETH | 6.8 ETH | 9.4% |
| 40 | 535.9 ETH | 57.2 ETH | 10.7% |
| 60 | 3,959.6 ETH | 429.2 ETH | 10.8% |
The ratio settles at about 10.9% and stays there — it does not improve as the price climbs. The whole ladder, if every rung were bought, holds 10,552 ETH.
There is no separate bid. Every sale pushes the price back down through the rungs it came up, so what you get depends entirely on how early you are. If everyone holding at rung 40 decided to leave — 435M tokens marked at 233 ETH, against 57 ETH actually in the pool:
| Seller | ETH realized | Per token, vs the marked price |
|---|---|---|
| first tenth out | 18.88 | 81.0% |
| third tenth | 8.62 | 37.0% |
| fifth tenth | 3.94 | 16.9% |
| eighth tenth | 1.21 | 5.2% |
| last tenth | 0.55 | 2.4% |
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Ladder (ticker LDR) is deployed on Ethereum mainnet. All five contracts are verified on Etherscan. They are immutable: no owner, no admin, no upgrade path, no pause.
Buy through this site. A swap that reaches the pool any other way — an aggregator, a raw router — cannot be attributed to you, so the rung it crosses is awarded to nobody and its fees stay unclaimed. On the first day, 12 of 13 crossings were forfeited this way.