Long the squeeze, not the price.
Nothing else on this chain has a payout trigger that is not just price.
Pairing a launchpad against a stock token is not new. Gating it to tickers the street cannot borrow is. Short interest is public, twice-monthly, and unambiguous — so a coin can carry a payout that fires on a real event in the lending market rather than on a candle.
Short float ≥ 15%, or nothing lists.
FINRA publishes consolidated short interest twice a month. Cross the line downward and the ticker is marked recalled: existing pools keep trading, no new locates land on it. Cross it upward and it is back on the sheet. The gate works in both directions, and it moves 24 times a year.
When the shorts cover, the coin pays out.
A coin records its quote ticker short float at launch. On every settlement date, any decline against that mark pays holders pro-rata out of the coin margin — in the quote stock token, pull-based, one Merkle root per epoch. Then the mark rebases, so it can fire again.
A short float decline. No price condition — there are only 24 firing windows a year, and a mechanic nobody sees fire cannot be explained.
Balances are taken at the block where the settlement job commits the root. That block number is published, so anyone can rebuild the tree.
Holders claim. Nothing ever loops over holders on-chain, and one squeeze can never drain the treasury.
The harder it is to borrow, the more holders take.
A coin tier is always its quote ticker current tier, recomputed every settlement date — never snapshotted at launch. A static tier would hand permanent rent to whoever picked the right ticker on day one. Creator takes 30% in every tier; the rest is protocol.
| tier | dtc | holder | creator | protocol |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| █ etbeasy to borrow | < 2 | 20% | 30% | 50% |
| ██ htbhard to borrow | 2 – 5 | 35% | 30% | 35% |
| ███nbno borrow | > 5 | 50% | 30% | 20% |
1,627,475,000 shares short across 13 listed tickers.
| tkr | float | dtc | tier | coins |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| BYND | 36.0% | 10.6 | ███nb | 2 |
| WOLF | 32.0% | 8.0 | ███nb | 1 |
| UPST | 30.5% | 8.3 | ███nb | 2 |
| LCID | 28.0% | 4.7 | ██ htb | 1 |
| SOUN | 27.0% | 3.2 | ██ htb | 1 |
| PLUG | 22.1% | 3.8 | ██ htb | 1 |
3 coins paid a buy-in this settlement, $25K in total.
Half buyback. Half buy-in reserve.
The protocol share of every swap fee splits two ways. The reserve is the point: it tops up coin margins so a squeeze payout is worth claiming, which ties the token to the one memorable mechanic instead of making it a generic buyback token. A settlement date where many coins pay out is a settlement date where the reserve is doing visible work.