Settlement

One transaction

Settlement is on-chain, same transaction. The token leaves the counterparty’s address and the ether arrives at it inside a single call, atomically, so that either both legs happen or neither does. There is no moment at which the desk is holding a curve token it has not paid for, and there is no moment at which a counterparty has parted with a position and is waiting on a transfer.

That structure is chosen for what it removes rather than for what it adds. It removes custody: the desk never holds a client asset, because there is no state in which it holds one and the client holds nothing. It removes the withdrawal queue, which is the mechanism by which every failed venue of the last decade discovered it was insolvent in public. It removes settlement risk in the ordinary sense — the desk cannot fail to pay after receipt, because receipt and payment are the same event — and it removes the desk’s own uptime from the question of whether a completed trade stays completed. Finality here is the chain’s, and the desk has no opinion about it.

What it does not remove is the desk’s ability to decline. Refusing to quote and failing to settle are different failures, and only the first is available: a quote either becomes a transaction or it expires.

The 90 seconds before it

A returned quote is firm for 90 seconds. A desk that reprices while you are deciding is not quoting, it is widening, and the only honest way to say so is to put a clock on the number and let it run out.

90 seconds is long enough to read the waterfall on the quoting page, check the arithmetic and sign, and short enough that the out-of-hours term is still describing the same night it was priced for. Because the schedule is published, an expired quote is not a negotiation reopened: re-run it, and it returns the same number unless one of the inputs actually moved. The firm window is a bound on the free option the counterparty holds, not a pressure tactic.

The floor, and the ceiling

Below $250 of reference notional the desk does not quote. On a chain with cheap blocks that floor is not about the desk’s costs; it is that the gas to settle becomes a material share of a ticket that small, and a trade where the settlement mechanics eat a visible fraction of the proceeds is a trade that should not be recommended by the party charging for it.

Above $250,000 the schedule stops. Not widens — stops. The size term has no band past that point and the quote endpoint returns a reason instead of a price, because a number that large has to be a decision somebody takes rather than a lookup, and publishing an extrapolated band would be publishing a price the desk had not agreed to honour.

Why ether, and only ether

The settlement asset is ETH, in every ticket, with no second option. Three reasons, in order of how much they matter.

The first is that ether is the thing the counterparty cannot reach. That is the entire measurement this desk rests on: 115,094 of the 240,350 live curves at block 55,223,440 — 47.89% of the chain — are denominated in tokenised Robinhood equity tokens that hold no pair against WETH or USDG on the canonical factory. Paying a counterparty in another asset of that family would settle the trade and leave them exactly where they started, holding something with no route out. A bid that does not end in ether is not a bid, it is a swap between two positions with the same problem.

The second is that one asset out means one hedge to run. A desk that settles in three currencies is a desk carrying three inventories, three funding decisions and three conversion spreads it did not charge for, and every one of those is an unpriced line on a schedule that claims to have priced everything.

The third is verification. A quote expressed in basis points off a reference and settled in one named asset can be checked against the transaction afterwards by anybody with a block explorer open. Multi-asset settlement turns that check into a reconciliation exercise, and a schedule only the desk that wrote it can audit is back to being an announcement.

What the desk is holding afterwards

The position, with nothing standing behind it. No pair, no borrow, no offset. The desk holds the position outright until an exit exists. This is the book. Settlement is the moment the risk changes hands; it is not the moment the risk goes away, and nothing in the mechanics above makes the asset any more exitable than it was when the counterparty owned it. The desk agrees to be the one holding it, and the 420 basis points on the venue term is what it charges for that.

That is the honest shape of this business and it is written up in full on the risk page: the inventory the desk accumulates is, by its own thesis, inventory for which no venue exists. Every other line on the schedule prices something the desk can eventually get out of. That one prices something it may not.

Where this would happen

The curves are on Robinhood Chain (chain ID 4663), and they are created by the Pons factory at 0x7eD598BcEf8bd9Edd8C97A195C6d13f40801EC7e, which is where the survey enumerated them and where anybody can re-run it. Transactions are readable at the chain’s explorer, and the enumeration in this repository was taken against https://rpc.mainnet.chain.robinhood.com at block 55,223,440.

Those are the venue’s addresses, not the desk’s. The distinction is the next paragraph.

When there is an address it will appear here and in the changelog on the same day, with the block it was deployed at.