A real collectible’s price. Every market is launched against one underlying: a specific graded card (for example, a PSA 10 Umbreon VMAX) or an NFT collection’s floor (for example, Mad Lads). One million tokens represent one unit of that collectible, and the token’s price is pulled toward the collectible’s live market price by funding and hedger arbitrage. SOL is just what you pay with; it is never the thing being tracked. If the card doubles, your exposure doubles; if it drops, so does your token.
Not in the vault sense. The token is a synthetic: CDP supply drawn from the reserve is backed by shorts’ SOL collateral, and the price is tethered to the oracle index by arbitrage and funding. The token’s solvency never depends on custodied items, so there is no lemons problem and no oracle-priced redemption pot to drain. Markets can additionally hold an item pool: registered vaulted copies of the underlying that holders have deposited for value-equal tokens. Those copies sit in a keyless program escrow and anyone can swap tokens back for one, but they are exchange inventory, not backing the supply depends on.
No one can mint more, ever. Every commas token is a fixed-supply SPL token: on the internal venue the entire allocation (curve supply, the hedging reserve, and the item-swap reserve) is preminted at market creation and the mint authority is revoked in the same transaction, which is what wallets and screeners show as “mint revoked”. Externally launched tokens arrive with fixed supply already. The hedging facility is a preminted reserve allocation, not an inflation mechanism, and the unsold curve allocation burns at graduation, so supply can only ever shrink.
The peg is soft. Funding and reserve draw-and-repay arbitrage pull the price toward the index; they do not pin it there. A basis of a few percent is normal and can persist. If you need exact index exposure at every block, a funding-pegged synthetic is the wrong instrument.
The damage is bounded by design. A bad print can only tilt the funding rate (clamped by max_funding_bps_per_day) and shift CDP draw/repay pricing until the TWAP recovers, and a print that deviates too far from the TWAP trips the circuit breaker and freezes the market instead of entering the index. There is no redemption-against-pooled-money mechanism for a manipulated price to drain.
The index stops updating and index_last_ts on the market account shows its age. Past max_index_age_secs, the on-chain staleness guard stops trusting the last value: new shorts, withdrawals against debt, funding, and liquidations are rejected with IndexStale until a fresh push lands. Trading, repaying debt, and adding collateral keep working, so the market degrades to a safe mode rather than trapping anyone.
Shorts. Every CDP-drawn token is a short’s debt, collateralized in SOL at a minimum ratio. The insurance fund, seeded at graduation, backstops liquidation shortfalls. Curve-phase tokens are backed by the SOL raised into the pool, like any launchpad token.
Yes, when the market’s item escrow holds one. Item swaps work in both directions and are value-based: deposit a registered vaulted copy and receive tokens worth exactly one copy at current prices (index / mark EMA units of tokens), or return that much token value and take a copy out of escrow. There is no fixed tokens-per-item rate and no redemption queue; withdrawals are first-come while escrowed copies last, and a market whose escrow is empty is back to pure synthetic exposure until someone deposits.
Simplicity and safety in v1: one collateral asset, no collateral price feed needed beyond the index itself (which is quoted in lamports), and no multi-asset liquidation math. Note the consequence: positions carry underlying-versus-SOL relative exposure.
Trading, shorts, funding, and liquidations are paused; adding collateral still works. Markets freeze when the circuit breaker trips on an outlier oracle print or when the admin freezes manually. The admin reviews and unfreezes. Balances and positions are untouched while frozen.
Yes: a commas token will launch on pump.fun. Follow @commasdotart on X for the announcement and the official contract address; anything not posted there is not ours. The protocol itself remains fully usable without it, and each market’s synth token is the only token the program creates.
Each trade pays a per-market fee (curve_fee_bps on the curve, amm_fee_bps on the AMM) that accrues inside the market vault and is withdrawable by the admin via withdraw_fees. At graduation, insurance_share_bps of the curve raise can seed the market’s insurance fund; the launch convention sets it to zero so the full raise lands in the pool. There are no fees on opening or closing shorts beyond normal trading.
Solana only. The program is written in Anchor, and the design leans on Solana-native infrastructure (SPL tokens, Pyth for the SOL/USD leg, Solana-native marketplaces and launch infrastructure).
Yes. commas runs on Solana mainnet: launching, trading, item swaps and hedging are all live, and the program ships with a 21-test integration suite plus an adversarial review pass. Independent audit work is on the roadmap.
Fractionalization and 404-style hybrids custody the underlying and peg by two-way redemption, which makes them trackers with vault problems (adverse selection, custody risk, reflexive unwinding). commas references the underlying’s price without holding it, and accepts a softer peg in exchange for eliminating custody entirely. See How it works.