01 Proposal
Launch incentives
A response to the Genesis proposal, costed against the current protocol spec. Three things stack without contradicting each other, and they all run off the mint counter that already exists.
- Lead with the halving countdownThe first 50,000 Blades earn double what the next 50,000 earn, permanently. That is already built. It needs no code and no new narrative, only a public counter.
- Genesis tranche for the curated mint5,000 units carved out of the existing cap, sold in ETH, freely tradeable and never splittable. The status comes from distinctive art and a fixed count, so the economic bonus can stay small.
- Compound bonus during the first epochExtra fragments on rewards reinvested rather than claimed, ending at the first halving. Rewards the behaviour the protocol is built on, and costs under 10% of lifetime emissions.
Everything here is sized against the live spec: 150,000 Blade cap, 50,000-Blade halving step, 10–5% creation fee in ETH, no transfer taxes.
02 Existing
The deadline you already have
The halving schedule is an early-entry incentive that is currently described as a schedule rather than sold as a deadline. A Blade minted before the first halving earns twice what one minted after it earns, for as long as both exist.
| Minted | Rate per Curl | Lifetime ROTOR | Return multiple |
|---|---|---|---|
| Before 50,000 Blades | 0.10000 | 20.0 | 1.82x |
| 50,000 – 100,000 | 0.05000 | 10.0 | 0.91x |
| 100,000 – 150,000 | 0.02500 | 5.0 | 0.45x |
Being early is worth exactly 2x, then 4x. The counter is on-chain, it only moves in one direction, and it is legible to anyone: Blades remaining until the rate halves. No protocol I know of manufactures a better urgency mechanic than one it already has running.
The work here is presentation rather than engineering. A live counter on the site, the number in every post, and the second halving as the follow-up deadline once the first passes.
03 Genesis
Genesis tranche
The curated mint, the ETH pricing and the milestone from the original proposal all hold. Three parts of it need changing to fit the current spec and the art direction.
Size it out of the existing cap
Reserve a slice of the 150,000,000 fragment cap rather than creating a parallel supply, so the ceiling keeps meaning what it says.
| Units | Fragments each | Total fragments | Share of cap |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2,500 | 1,500 | 3,750,000 | 2.5% |
| 5,000 | 1,500 | 7,500,000 | 5.0% |
| 10,000 | 1,500 | 15,000,000 | 10.0% |
Tradeable, not soulbound
The original proposal locks Genesis Blades until a milestone so that KOLs cannot flip them. With distinctive art and a capped count that reasoning inverts, because a soulbound token cannot be flexed. The flex is not the picture, it is holding something with a visible floor price, and a floor price requires a market, bids and a listing. Locked, it reads as a participation badge rather than a status asset.
Trading also gives a public scoreboard that keeps working long after the mint: Genesis floor against normal floor, visible to everyone, updating continuously. That is a better sustained marketing asset than the mint event, and it exists only if they trade.
Soulbinding also contradicts the docs directly. The No lockups section argues that lockout periods trap holders in assets they cannot sell, “which is why Rotor has none”. Running one at launch is the kind of inconsistency that gets quoted back.
Two further costs. Illiquid assets trade at a discount, so locking Genesis reduces what the sale raises from the people being locked. And a transfer gate means a non-standard token or a hook, marketplace handling for something that cannot be listed, and one-way unlock logic, none of which a plain NFT needs.
Let the art carry the status
If Genesis is visually distinct and capped at 5,000 forever, the economics do not have to do the work of making it desirable. That matters because the economic perk is the expensive part.
| Bonus | Fragments each | Extra fragments | Cost as % of all emissions |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10% | 1,100 | 500,000 | 0.50% |
| 25% | 1,250 | 1,250,000 | 1.25% |
| 50% | 1,500 | 2,500,000 | 2.50% |
A Blade that looks different, is capped at 5,000 and earns somewhat more is already a strong object. Paying 2.5% of every ROTOR the protocol will ever emit for a perk the art largely delivers is overspending, so 10 to 25% is the range I would set.
Not reduced decay
Whatever the bonus size, deliver it as fragments at mint rather than as a lower claim decay. Half decay is not a perk, it is a controlling stake delivered by rule, because positions that shrink at half the rate of everyone else’s compound their share of the base:
| Month | 0 | 12 | 24 | 36 | 48 | 60 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Share | 5.0% | 12.7% | 28.6% | 52.5% | 75.3% | 89.4% |
Bonus fragments avoid that entirely. Both cohorts decay at 15%, so the Genesis share stays flat at whatever it started at, forever.
Two things the art breaks
Splitting. The docs say the protocol can split a holding when someone wants to sell part of it. Applied to Genesis, 5,000 units become 10,000 or 25,000 NFTs and the scarcity the art depends on is gone. Genesis should be atomic: tradeable whole, never splittable. That is a different constraint from soulbound, since nothing stops an owner selling, and it keeps the art one-to-one with a token so a floor price means something.
Appearance against decay. A Genesis Blade claimed against twenty times holds a fraction of its fragments and looks identical to a fresh one. The docs make a virtue of there being no degraded NFT to inspect; with distinctive art there now is one, and a buyer cannot see what they are getting. Expose the current fragment count as a live metadata trait so it shows on the listing. It is a dev task rather than a protocol change, but without it people will buy hollowed-out Genesis Blades at full-position prices.
Anti-flip friction, if wanted
If the flip risk still needs addressing, vest the bonus rather than locking the asset. The base fragments mint immediately and the bonus vests toward the milestone, with the unvested portion forfeited on transfer.
Selling on day one means selling a plain 1,000-fragment Blade and forfeiting the rest. Nobody is trapped, and the perk is earned rather than granted. It also reuses a rule that already exists, since moving a position already forfeits unclaimed ROTOR to the Treasury.
Worth being clear-eyed that the flip risk is mostly optical. If a KOL sells, the fragments still exist and still earn for whoever bought them, so the protocol loses nothing mechanically. What is being defended is the headline, which is real at launch but smaller than it feels.
What the original proposal does not address
Genesis is live from day one while normal supply is still filling, so its share of emissions early on is nothing like its share at the cap.
| Normal fragments outstanding | Genesis share |
|---|---|
| 2,000,000 | 78.9% |
| 10,000,000 | 42.9% |
| 50,000,000 | 13.0% |
| 142,500,000 (full) | 5.0% |
For the first months Genesis collects the large majority of all emissions. That is arguably the point, and it is what a buyer is paying for, but it is a far bigger giveaway than “5% of the cap” implies and it is what the sale price should be set against. It is also the strongest argument for keeping the fragment bonus small, since the early windfall is already substantial before any bonus is applied.
The milestone
If the bonus vests, tie the vesting to 50,000 outstanding Blades, the first halving. It is a real growth marker, it is already on-chain, and it means Genesis holders are pushing toward an event that halves their own rate in order to collect the rest of their bonus, which is an honest trade rather than a free one.
04 Bonus
Compound bonus
If a second lever is wanted beyond Genesis, the one that fits the design rather than fighting it is a bonus on fragments created by compounding, during the first epoch only, switching off at the first halving.
Compounding is already the privileged action, since it pays no tribute and burns no fragments. A mint bonus rewards anyone who turns up. A compound bonus rewards people who turn up and then do not claim, which is the cohort the protocol is built around and the one that ends up holding the supply anyway.
| Design | Cost | Epoch-0 multiple |
|---|---|---|
| Nothing | — | 1.82x |
| Creation fee waived | LP funding | 2.00x |
| 50% bonus on compounding | 6–10% of emissions | 2.18x |
| 25% bonus on all minting | 12% of emissions | 2.27x |
| 50% bonus on all minting | 25% of emissions | 2.73x |
The constraint that rules out the large versions
Bonus fragments count against the 150,000,000 cap. At a 50% across-the-board bonus, the first epoch alone consumes 75,000,000 fragments, half the entire supply for a third of the Blades, and everyone arriving later is crowded out of a ceiling that was meant to be theirs too. Any broad bonus should be capped at 25%, and the compound-only version avoids the problem by applying to a subset.
05 Rejected
What to drop
Anti-sniper launch tax
The sell tax was removed from the spec specifically to get a plain ERC-20 with no transfer hook. A decaying launch tax puts the hook back, and once it exists the token reads as fee-on-transfer to every aggregator, centralised venue and lending market permanently, even at a 0% rate. That trades lasting composability for an hour of sniper revenue. The proposal’s note that it fits the “tax can only go down” language refers to a line that is no longer in the docs.
Dormancy Reaper
It confiscates rewards from wallets that do nothing, which is the exact behaviour the protocol is designed to reward. The docs state in four places that patience pays and that never claiming is optimal. A one-click check-in makes it a liveness chore rather than a resolution, and it adds a second forfeiture path alongside the existing one on transfer.
Stale references
Three parts of the original proposal are written against an older spec. There is no longer a 15 USDG mint fee to take a cut of; the creation fee is 10–5% in ETH and all of it goes to liquidity, which is now the only thing funding the pool. There is no USDG revenue stream, since the 1% holder allowance was removed. And normal Blade supply is capped at 150,000 rather than unlimited.
Panic Tax, undecided
It works mechanically. At 40% decay the break-even claim interval jumps from 16.5 days to 44, so claiming into a panic genuinely hurts. The reservation is that it makes the decay rate a dynamic value read from protocol state, which is a manipulation surface and something every integrator has to model. If it is taken, cap it nearer 25% than 40% and settle who can trigger it.
06 Open
Open decisions
Sale price is the only item above that cannot be derived from the spec, because it depends on what the early-emissions position is worth to the people being sold to rather than on protocol mechanics. Everything else follows from numbers already settled.
One interaction to settle before Expansion Burns is adopted alongside Genesis: if Genesis units can buy additional earning power later, the 5% share stops being fixed and the compounding advantage returns through a different route.
Rotor Finance · proposal, not protocol documentation