How Lode works
What it is
Lode is a token launchpad on NEAR. A launch mints one billion tokens and puts all of them into one to five pools on Rhea, NEAR's main exchange. Each pool pairs the token with something else: a tokenized stock, gold, a stablecoin, NEAR, or any other token you name.
There is no bonding curve and no migration. The token trades in those pools from the first block, and keeps trading there.
A token drawn as a core sample. Half of the supply sits in a pool against NVIDIA, 30% against Tesla, 20% against NEAR. The pools are separate: each has its own price, and nothing converts one paired asset into another.
What a launch does
One transaction, signed once. The contract then runs these steps on its own, in order:
- Creates the token account. It has no access keys, so its code and supply can never be changed.
- Hands the whole supply to Rhea.
- Creates every pool and its liquidity in a single step, so a pool never exists empty.
- Sends your first buy, if you asked for one. It arrives one block after the liquidity.
The liquidity positions belong to the launchpad contract, and the contract has no function that removes them. Nobody can pull liquidity — not the creator, not the protocol.
If a step fails, the supply stays with the contract and the creator can retry that step. A launch that cannot be finished — someone took the pool first and put their own liquidity in it — can be cancelled: the launch fee, the unspent pool costs and an unfilled first buy come back, and the supply is burned.
Trading
Auto pays with NEAR and spreads the purchase across every market NEAR can reach, in one transaction. It compares that split with the best single market and takes whichever gives more.
Pick a market to trade with its own token instead — NVDAon for the NVDA market, and so on. Some markets can only be traded this way: if no pool connects NEAR to the paired token, Auto leaves that market out and says so.
Before you buy, the app registers your account with the token contract. Without that, Rhea cannot deliver the tokens.
Fees
There are two, and they are separate.
The pool fee is 1% of every trade. Every token has it. It is split like this:
| Share of each trade | Goes to |
|---|---|
| 0.20% | Rhea, the exchange |
| 0.56% | The creator, or the wallets the creator named at launch |
| 0.24% | The protocol |
A fee is taken in whatever the trader pays with: the paired asset on buys, the token on sells. Fees collect inside the locked positions. Anyone can press “Collect fees” on a token page; that moves them to the creator's and the protocol's balances, to be claimed from the Portfolio page.
The token fee is set by the creator: none, or a whole percentage from 1% to 10%. The token takes it from itself on every buy and every sell. Moving tokens between wallets is free. If a sale does not go through, the fee comes back with the tokens.
| Fee structure | Where the token fee goes |
|---|---|
| No fees | There is none. Only the pool fee applies. |
| Creator fees | To one wallet. |
| Fee sharing | To two to five wallets, in the shares the creator set. |
| Burn | It is destroyed. So is the creator's share of the pool fee paid in the token. |
| Holder rewards | To holders, by balance. Tokens inside the pools earn nothing. Holders claim from the Portfolio page. |
The structure and the rate are fixed at launch. The token account has no keys, so nobody can change them later — the creator included.
Launching costs 0.3 NEAR plus what Rhea and NEAR charge for storage — about 0.05 NEAR per market.
Graduation
A token graduates when buyers have paid $10,000 into its pools and that money is sitting in the locked positions. Anyone can press “Check graduation” to record it. It is a milestone and a badge. No liquidity moves, no pool closes, the price is not capped.
Only listed assets count, at the keeper's current price. A market paired with a token the creator priced themselves adds nothing. The badge records that the threshold was reached once; it does not mean the money is still there.
Prices
The contract keeps a dollar price for every listed asset, updated by a keeper. It uses them once, at launch, to open every pool at the same dollar value, and again to measure graduation. A launch is refused if a price is more than two hours old.
The keeper cannot move a price by more than half in one update. A larger move is left out until the owner of the contract confirms it, which guards against a price sent in the wrong scale.
A token paired with several assets has several prices. The price shown on a token page is the average of its pools, weighted by their share of the supply.
What differs from EVM launchpads
On an EVM chain a purchase either happens completely or not at all. On NEAR a swap and the delivery of what was bought are separate steps, and Rhea does not undo a swap when delivery fails. Two things follow.
No buy limits in the first blocks. A token that refused early or oversized purchases would not stop them: the buyer's money would be spent and the tokens would be stuck inside the exchange. So this token refuses nothing.
The creator's first buy is part of the launch. It is sent in the same block as the liquidity. No purchase can happen before that block, because before it the pools hold nothing.
Risks
- The contracts have not been audited.
- Anyone can launch a token. A listing here says nothing about the token or the people behind it.
- Stock, gold and bond tokens are issued by third parties. They track a price; they are not the share itself.
- Pools of one token can drift apart in price. The gap closes only when someone trades it.
- A token fee is paid on every buy and every sell. At 10% a round trip costs about a fifth of the amount before the price moves at all.
- A custom paired token is priced by the creator. A wrong price opens the pool in the wrong place.