Operating policy v1
Acquisition, dissolution and repayment rules, their constants, and how they change.
Policy v1, dated 17 September 2026. These rules are published and change only with seven days' public notice. They live in the keeper's onchain limits, not in an operator's discretion.
Status: published, not fully deployed. The acquisition and dissolution rules are expressed as keeper limits. The repayment model in 4.3 requires a contract change that has not been reviewed; Accounting describes what the deployed code does instead, and Status and limits tracks the gap.
Acquisition
Licences. Up to three a day on each charter until it holds ten branches, and only at or below 25 days of one branch's current issuance — τ ≤ 25 in the notation of the Reserve's rules. Above that ceiling the keeper waits.
Charters. None can be bought today: the Reserve's charter auction has not started and founding charters cannot be transferred. When charters do become available, the pool buys only with new ETH raised in a contribution round, and each round publishes its mandate first — what it will buy, the most it will pay, and the modelled payback. Every charter acquired is then filled to ten branches.
Rounds. Every round joins the same pool. The principle is that a newcomer pays what capacity costs on the day they enter: units are issued against the pool's $STANDARD, its releasable balances, and its branches and charters marked from recent auction prices — which is what the newcomer's own ETH is about to pay for them.
A branch is not liquid inventory. Its licence is burned, it cannot be sold, and its balance is released only by closing it. What a member leaving is paid is therefore a different and lower figure than what a member entering pays. The valuation policy that sets both — how recent auction prices are averaged, how a charter bought in ETH is carried — will be published before public contributions open.
Two things the pool never does: it never sells $STANDARD to buy a charter, and it never opens a round to fund withdrawals.
Dissolution
Retiring branches is the only way to be paid, so the pool does it by rule, charter by charter.
- Each charter pays for itself first. Nothing is retired on a charter until one retirement — of every branch but the ones that must stay — would return what the pool paid for that charter and its licences, swap costs included. That retirement is made on the first day it can be. On charter #729 it is eight of the pool's nine branches.
- Then regular payouts. One branch is retired whenever re-opening it would cost at most 25% of what the retirement releases (
c ≤ 0.25), and it is re-opened under the acquisition rules. - Only in calm. No retirement while the Reserve's exit fee is above 5%.
- Members waiting to leave. If a withdrawal request has waited 90 days without being fully paid, the pool retires the fewest branches that would pay it, provided the exit fee is at most 10% — even where rules 1 and 2 are not met. That cost falls on the pool as a whole.
- Never. The pool never retires the founder's branch or a charter's last branch, and retires nothing above a 10% exit fee.
Because rule 1 empties most of the balance, the regular payouts under rule 2 do not begin again until it has rebuilt. The first year of a single charter is therefore lumpy by construction: a long wait, one large payout, a pause, then a regular cadence.
The constants
| Setting | Value |
|---|---|
| Licence price ceiling | 25 days of one branch's issuance |
| Licences a day | 3 per charter, until ten branches |
| A charter's first retirement | When one retirement returns the charter's cost |
| Regular retirement | 1 branch, when c ≤ 25% |
| Exit fee ceiling | 5%, or 10% for a waiting member |
| Waiting-member trigger | 90 days |
| Notice of any change | 7 days |
| Fee | 10% of realised profit |
| Entry and exit fee | None |
Repayment
Everything a retirement brings in, from any charter, is paid to every member in proportion to their units, in $STANDARD, whichever round they joined in.
A payout does not redeem units. Ownership stays, and you do not sell anything to receive it.
What a charter returns up to its own cost carries no fee. The pool charges one fee: 10% of realised profit — what retirements bring in above the cost of the branches retired, after recorded costs and earlier losses are recovered. Nothing to enter, nothing to leave. Transaction costs are borne by the operator, not charged to members.
Leaving is separate. A member queues units and is paid in weekly withdrawal rounds at that week's unit value, from realised $STANDARD, with a price floor the member sets. Unpaid units stay invested and keep receiving payouts. There is no promised date and no guaranteed amount.
What growth changes
The Reserve is not selling charters yet, so the pool's first year is one charter's year, with the lumpy shape described above.
As charters become available, each round buys one and runs the same cycle from a different start day. Their payouts overlap, so a pool of charters at different stages pays something in most weeks. That is how the two aims — capital back first, and frequent payouts — are meant to be met together. It is a property of the policy, not a forecast, and it depends entirely on charters actually becoming available.
How this can change
The numbers above live in the keeper's onchain limits. The founder can change them only with seven days' public notice. That notice period is the protection; it is not a promise that the numbers will not change.
Public contributions are not open. Continue to Custody and the founder for who holds what, and to Accounting for what the deployed contract currently enforces.