Paperstock

Manifest names it · Foil records it · Pyx reserves against it · Exchequer issues it · PaperHook collects for it

Where does the name come from?

An Exchequer tally was a hazel stick, notched across the grain with a sum and split down its length. The Crown kept the short half, the foil. The creditor walked away with the long half, and the long half was called the stock. A man holding one was a stockholder, and that is the whole etymology of the word.

What the stick was a claim on had not happened yet: taxes not yet collected, from a county that had not yet paid. A receipt for an asset that did not exist. They circulated as money in England for roughly seven hundred years. In 1834 the Treasury fed two cartloads of obsolete sticks into a furnace under the House of Lords, the flue overheated, and Parliament burned to the ground.

What is being sold here?

A token. One billion PAPER, minted once in the constructor, eighteen decimals, and not one unit more thereafter.

Around it there is a register that issues dated claims on cargoes that were never landed, named by a contract that invents them out of a hash. Those claims are collateralised in ether by the pool’s own trading fees. The goods are admitted fiction. The collateral is not.

What does holding PAPER entitle me to?

One thing, and the absence of everything else is the point. PAPER is a claim on the reserve — the share of trading fees the Pyx sets aside under the token rather than under the tallies. You take it by burning, pro rata, at any time, with nobody’s permission.

PAPER is not a claim on the tallies. Ether paid into a tally belongs to whoever holds that tally’s stock, and this token has no call on a wei of it. If you want the cargo, buy the cargo.

What cannot be done to me?

Minting. There is no mint function anywhere in the file. Not disabled, not guarded behind an owner, not renounced after the fact — never written, and a function that was never written cannot be switched back on by anybody for any reason.

Administration. There is no owner. The launcher role exists so the pool can be seeded before anyone is able to trade against it, and it deletes itself inside the same transaction that uses it.

Taxation. No transfer fee, no rebase, no reflection, no blacklist, no maximum wallet, no cooldown, no pause. Moving PAPER between two addresses is an ordinary ERC-20 transfer and costs what one costs.

What could make this worthless?

The reserve is only ever as large as the fees, and the fees are only ever as large as the volume. On a pool nobody trades the reserve stays at zero, every tally matures short, and the register goes on printing manifests for cargoes that will never be paid for. Nothing in this suite manufactures value. It refuses to let fee income leave, which is a far smaller claim and is the only one being made.

And no third party has audited any of it. The six contracts are tested hard against a mainnet fork, and that testing has already earned its keep — it caught a sibling project selling a claim for less than the money already sitting behind it, which is the same as handing out cash. But a simulation written by the same hand that wrote the contract is not an audit and is not offered to you as one.

The only contract in the suite whose entire job is to lie, and the only one that tells you so in its own source

What is this for?

Every tally the Exchequer cuts is a claim against a lot, and a lot has to be a lot of something or the whole thing is an abstraction with a number on it. Give this contract a lot number and it gives you a cargo: a commodity, a port of lading, a quantity, a unit of measure, a grade and a lot mark. Every field is read out of keccak256 of the lot number. There is no input, no oracle, no owner, no stored string and nothing to set.

Are the goods real?

No. Not one crate of it. There is no tin, there is no rum, there is no ship and there is no port agent.

The commodities and ports come from the manifests of the nineteenth-century bonded trade and they are deliberately plausible. These were ordinary cargoes. A lot line out of this contract reads exactly like a lot line off a real warrant, and that is the joke, and the joke is the product.

Then what am I actually buying?

Ether. The cargo is the name on the claim; the backing is the money the Pyx has actually put behind it, and you can read that number at any second of the tally’s life. Nothing in this file touches the money and nothing in this file can move it.

Why is it a separate contract?

Because it holds nothing and can do nothing, and separating it says so more loudly than a comment could. No state, no ether, no writer, no wiring step, no constructor arguments. Every function is pure. Two calls with the same lot number a decade apart return the same cargo.

What could make this worthless?

It is already worthless, in the strict sense, and that is the design. This contract adds no value to a tally and removes none. Burn it out of the suite and every claim would be worth the same ether to the wei.

The real risk it carries is a human one. Somebody will screenshot a lot line, crop off the part where it says the cargo is invented, and post it as a holding. Nothing in Solidity can prevent that. The defence is that the admission is in the source, on the website, in the deployment document, and in this paragraph.

Holds no ether, owns no token, accepts one writer for ever

Why is it called the foil?

The foil was the control. Notches cut before the split had to line up across the grain, and hazel does not split twice the same way. A stock presented for payment was laid against its foil in front of a clerk; if the halves did not match, the claim was not honoured. The fraud control was the wood.

This contract is the foil: the record kept on the other side of the claim, written by something with no interest in the outcome.

What does it record?

One number, and the restraint is the whole design: the number of separate days on which this pool has traded at all. Not volume. Not price. Not fees. Days.

The hook calls in after every swap; if the UTC day has already been counted, nothing at all happens and nothing is written. The first swap of a new day moves the counter by exactly one and that is the most this contract can ever do in twenty-four hours.

Why days and not money?

Because money is the one thing a single address can fake in a single block, and the Exchequer needs at least one gate that cannot be crossed by being rich. The funding condition can be bought outright. The calendar condition cannot be bought at any price, by anybody. You can fund a tally in one transaction. You cannot make it Tuesday.

What can it do to me?

Nothing. It cannot hold ether — there is no payable function and no receive. It cannot hold a token. It has no owner. Its one writer is set once by a wiring role that deletes itself in the same transaction, and after that the writer can never be changed, added to or removed, by anyone, for any reason. On the swap path it is one storage read and a comparison, and on the first swap of a day, one write.

What could make this worthless?

A determined party with a lot of time can satisfy it. One swap of one wei a day, for the required number of days, counts exactly as much as a day of real trading — this contract cannot tell an active market from a patient one and does not claim to. What it costs to fake is gas, and calendar days, every one of them in public and on chain where anybody deciding what a tally is worth can see the pattern. It raises the floor on the cheapest possible lie from one block to several weeks. It does not make lying impossible.

And it measures a pool, not a world. If the pool is quiet for reasons having nothing to do with the register, the counter is still right and the tally still matures short. It has no way to tell those apart, and it will not be taught to.

One way in, two ways out, and no third

What is a pyx?

A locked box. From 1282 the Royal Mint has dropped sample coins into one, and once a year a jury of goldsmiths opens it in front of the Queen’s Remembrancer, counts the contents, and assays them against a standard plate. If the coin is light the Master of the Mint answers for it. The Trial of the Pyx has been held, with gaps, for seven hundred and forty years.

Its one good idea is that the box is opened in public by people who did not fill it. This contract publishes a view called trial that anybody can call, from anywhere, for nothing, whenever they like.

What comes in?

The duty on swaps, and nothing else, ever. PaperHook takes it out of the PoolManager and sends it straight to this address — the hook never holds a wei of it — and then calls credit to account for what has already arrived. credit refuses unless the ether is already here. A book that is only ever written after the money lands cannot be talked into believing in money that did not.

Where can it go?

Two places, and they are the only two that exist in the bytecode. The bond, drawn by the Exchequer and placed behind whichever tally is nearest its maturity. The reserve, which stands under PAPER itself and is claimed by burning, pro rata, by anybody holding the token.

There is no withdrawal. No sweep. No rescue. No treasury address. No owner to add one and no upgrade path to add one later. These are not withheld powers — go and read the file, they are absent.

What is the invariant?

balance ≥ reserve + bonded

Held is never less than owed. It is enforced on the way in, on every single credit, rather than audited afterwards and apologised for. The fork simulation asserts it after every swap, every draw and every burn.

Why is burning fair to the people who do not?

Because n tokens buy n × reserve / supply, and taking that much out of both sides of the fraction leaves reserve / supply exactly where it started. The floor per token after a burn equals the floor per token before it, to the wei, by construction and not by rounding luck: the payout rounds down, so the only direction the survivors can be moved in is up.

What could make this worthless?

It starts empty. It has no income of its own and cannot create any: it is a box with a slot in the lid, and if nobody trades the pool then nobody posts duty and the box stays empty for ever. A floor of zero is a floor, and it is the floor this contract will publish, honestly, for as long as that is the true number.

The invariant also protects the book and not the price. It guarantees that what is promised is present. It guarantees nothing whatsoever about whether the amount promised is large enough to matter to you.

Cuts the tallies, sells the stock, pays the claims, and never holds a position on either side of any of it

What am I buying, exactly?

Units of face in one numbered tally. Face is denominated in wei, and a tally is a claim against a lot of cargo that does not exist. Every thirty days this contract cuts a new tally and fixes the size of that lot on the spot. A tally runs for ninety days — the classic tenor of a commercial bill, and picked for that reason.

While it runs, two things flow into it: what people pay for stock in it, and the duty the Pyx has taken at the gate. Both are ether and both stand behind the face. Your stock is a pro-rata claim on whatever is behind that tally the moment you present it. Not a promise of face. A claim on what is actually there, readable to the wei at any second, by anybody.

How big is a lot?

Three times the bond the register drew over the previous thirty days, and never less than 1 ether. Nobody picks it. Nobody can change it once it is cut.

That rule was not the first attempt. The first design let buyers subscribe as much face as they liked, and it does not survive contact with arithmetic: demand expands until the gate income is a rounding error beside it, every lot drifts to full on subscription money alone, and the word HONOURED stops meaning anything. The simulation found that before a line of this had been near a chain.

Sizing the lot off the warehouse’s own takings fixes it from the other end. A busy quarter cuts large lots, a dead quarter cuts small ones, and the ratio between what the gate earns and what the cargo costs stays fixed by construction. At 3× cover the duty pays for about a third of every lot, and a lot that fills returns half as much again as it cost to subscribe. At 2× that would be +100% a cycle — a bot race and not a market. Above 4× the duty share falls under the honour bar and no lot could ever be honoured at all.

What does it cost?

There is no order book and no counterparty. The price is a function, it is public, and it is the same function for everybody:

r     = backing / subscribed
add   = duty × remaining/elapsed × 0.60
add   = min(add, (subscribed − backing)/2)
price = (backing + add) / subscribed

The register looks at the rate at which duty — gate income, not other people’s purchases — has actually arrived in this tally, carries that rate out to maturity, takes forty per cent off it for being a guess, and then refuses to let the result climb more than halfway from the money that is there to the money that is promised. A run rate is never read off less than a week.

Why does that line matter so much?

Because the addition can never be negative, the price can never be less than the money already sitting behind the claim. That single line is the most important one in the file and it is the reason for the shape of everything else.

The alternative has already happened in this repository: a sibling project priced a dated claim off a stale number and would sell you, below face, a claim that was already worth face. The fork simulation caught it. It was free money out of the fund, and it was three lines of arithmetic.

So the guarantee here is written the other way round and proved to the wei: buy and immediately present and you cannot come out ahead. Not by intent — by algebra. Buying n face at price p adds p to both sides of a fraction standing at r ≤ p, so the new ratio lands between r and p; presenting straight back pays that new ratio, which is at most p. Both roundings point at the register: cost rounds up, payout rounds down.

And the pending duty is drawn into the tally before the price is read, in the same transaction, every time. Quoting against money that is about to land but has not been credited yet is the same bug wearing a hat.

Is buying in fair to people already holding?

Yes, for the same reason. A newcomer pays at least r, so the ratio behind every existing holder can only be moved up. Nobody in a tally can be thinned by somebody else joining it, at any size, at any moment. Fifty thousand random buys, presentations and placements were thrown at that property and the ratio has never once fallen.

How does the duty get shared out?

Strictly by maturity. The bond is drawn from the Pyx and placed behind the oldest tally still open — the front of the curve — until that one is paid up or matures, and only then does the next begin to fill.

There is one brake. A tally may only ever have absorbed duty worth subscribed × elapsed / term: a stick cut last month cannot swallow the whole quarter’s takings before the older sticks have had theirs. When the front hits that ceiling the remainder spills down the queue, three tallies deep in one call and never more.

Nobody chooses any of this. There is no allocation function, no privileged caller, nothing to lobby. It falls out of two rules, and what it produces is a term structure nobody posted anywhere.

When is a lot honoured?

When the fiction stops being one. Four conditions, all of them, before the tally matures: every unit of the lot has been subscribed; the backing has reached the whole of it; at least a quarter of the lot was paid for by duty, not by buyers; and the pool has traded on at least 21 separate days since it was cut. The last one cannot be bought.

It latches in two stages. The instant the first three hold, the lot is marked FILLED, in ink, at a block number. Only then does the calendar matter — and by then there is no quantity of face anybody can add that would undo it. Without that, somebody could wait for a lot to fill and then buy a great deal of face at par purely to push the duty share under the bar, strand the lot on paper for ever, and recover every wei afterwards because the ratio was one. It would have cost them nothing.

Honour is permanent. No path in this contract clears it. Whoever burns 1,000,000 PAPER against an honoured lot first may cut a twelve-character merchant’s mark into it, once, for ever. It confers nothing whatsoever.

What happens if it is not honoured?

Nothing dramatic, deliberately. At maturity the tally stops receiving duty. Whatever ratio it reached is the ratio it keeps, for ever, and every holder can present at that ratio whenever they like. No liquidation, no forced exit, no penalty, no deadline on your own money. The clock was only ever on the funding.

An unhonoured tally matures short. It is a claim on a cargo nobody paid for, which is what a tally has always been, and it stays presentable for ever as the receipt for that.

What could make this worthless?

No duty. Everything above is plumbing for gate income, and on a pool nobody trades there is none. Lots are then cut at the 1 ether floor, nothing fills them, and every buyer gets back what they put in and not a wei more. That is the ordinary outcome of a quiet pool, not a tail.

Being early. The first buyer into a lot pays 0.50 and carries the whole risk that no duty ever arrives. That is the trade, and it is meant to be uncomfortable.

Front-loading. Whoever subscribes the front of the curve first gets the cheapest way into the tally that is about to be fed. The lot cap bounds how much of that anyone can take and the intake ceiling bounds how fast, but it is still capital being paid ahead of patience, and that is said here rather than left to be discovered.

Late money. The placement walk is bounded at three tallies per call. If the queue falls further behind than that — possible only after a long quiet stretch — the excess waits in unplaced until somebody calls sweep again. It is never lost and never spendable by anyone. It is late.

And this file is unaudited, like the other five. It is the largest of them, it holds the money, and it has already been rewritten once because a simulation disagreed with it.

Present at every swap, holds nothing, configurable by nobody

Why is there a hook at all?

Because a bonded warehouse is paid for by the duty on what passes through the gate, and this contract is the gate. It is the only thing in the suite that is present at every swap, and the only place where the income can be taken before it becomes somebody’s to keep. Everything else in PAPERSTOCK is downstream of this file. The Pyx has no income of its own. The Exchequer cannot create a wei.

What does it take?

Ether, on both sides of every trade. It opens at 5.00% and decays once, smoothly, to a resting 1.00% over three days.

The clock starts at the first swap, not at deployment. A pool left sitting cannot have its opening rate waited out by anybody, and the first person through the gate pays the opening rate no matter how long the gate has been standing there.

The rate is immutable and the constructor refuses to accept an opening rate above 10.00% or a resting rate above the opening one. There is no setter. There is no owner to call one.

A return delta only ever reaches the unspecified currency, so the duty is taken in beforeSwap when ether is specified — exact-input buys and exact-output sells — and in afterSwap for the other two shapes.

Where does it go?

To the Pyx, and there is no second destination in the bytecode. The duty is taken out of the PoolManager directly to the Pyx’s own address and only then accounted for. This contract is never, at any point in any transaction, holding the money — so there is no balance here that a withdrawal function could have been written against even by mistake.

What does it do to liquidity?

Nothing whatsoever. Permissions are 0x20CC and the six liquidity bits are clear. Anyone may add, anyone may remove, this contract is never consulted about it, and no exit can be blocked, taxed, delayed or front-run by it. That claim is measured rather than asserted: an LP add on this pool against an identical hookless control pool, from the same fork snapshot, is published in the project’s own measurement file alongside the contracts.

The pool the gate stands on is fixed at construction: beforeInitialize refuses any pool whose currency pair, fee and tick spacing are not exactly the ones the hook was built for. The tick spacing is 200, not the 60 the Uniswap interface fills in by default, so the tickSpacing field in the app’s URL has to be corrected by hand or the pool call reverts with WrongTickSpacing.

What does it write down?

One call to the Foil after every swap, which nearly always does nothing at all — the Foil only writes on the first swap of a new UTC day. That is the whole of the record-keeping on the swap path. The register does its arithmetic later, somewhere else, on somebody else’s gas.

What could make this worthless?

It makes every swap in this pool more expensive than the same swap in a pool without it, and no arrangement of the code can make that untrue. The number is published against a hookless control, both from one snapshot, so it can be checked rather than believed.

And the duty is a real cost to the trader, taken from the trade. It is not conjured. Everything the Pyx holds and everything behind every tally was paid by somebody swapping in this pool, and the whole structure is a claim on that flow continuing. If it stops, this file keeps working perfectly and collects nothing.