Alpher Docs

A systematic quant desk issued as a token. It funds itself from its own turnover, trades by rules on a perpetuals venue, and pays realised profit back to holders every epoch, entirely on chain.

What Alpher is

Alpher is a trading desk with a token for a cap table. A 2% fee on every trade of the token is collected, converted to stable margin, and handed to a systematic strategy that trades perpetual futures on Lighter. When the desk books a realised profit, all of it is distributed to holders, in proportion to what they hold.

There is no administrator, no accreditation check, no minimum ticket and no lockup. Holding the token means owning a slice of a working desk that pays you. Capital, positions, profit and every payout live on chain where anyone can audit them.

Why it matters

Systematic trading is the most profitable corner of finance and the most closed. Access used to mean being a fund, or being rich enough to invest in one and pay two and twenty for the privilege. The strategies were never scarce. The door was.

Alpher takes the door off. It puts an institutional style systematic desk on chain, funds it from its own token instead of a raise, and routes the profit back automatically. The more the token trades, the bigger the desk gets, and the coupons grow with it.

The self funding loop

Alpher took no outside capital. Every dollar of margin came from the token's own activity, cycled through a loop that is fully on chain:

1. Fees accrue. Every trade of the token generates a fee in native ETH, held by the launch curve's fee escrow. The desk's share is 2% of the traded volume, buys and sells alike.
2. Harvest. A keeper sweeps the escrow the moment the balance is worth moving.
3. Swap. ETH is wrapped and swapped to USDG on a low fee pool with a slippage floor.
4. Deposit. The USDG is posted as margin to the desk's Lighter account.
5. Size. The model sizes each market and adjusts the book to its leverage target.
6. Distribute. Realised profit is withdrawn and paid to holders pro rata at the epoch boundary.

Then it repeats. Nothing in the loop needs a human to approve it.

The strategy

One systematic strategy runs the whole book: trend following on the market's fastest names, currently ETH, SUI, ZEC, XRP and NEAR. It is long the names that are rising, short or flat the ones that are falling, and it rebalances hourly.

Signal

Trend is measured on three lookbacks (168, 720 and 2160 hours) and blended into a single score between −1 and +1 per market. A carry term built from funding rates tilts the score: paying funding to hold a position reduces its weight, receiving it increases the weight.

Sizing

Each position is sized so that the book targets a fixed annualised volatility. Fast names get smaller notional, slow names get more. A per market notional cap and a gross leverage cap sit above that, and the risk layer rejects any resize that would breach them.

Exit

Positions leave the book when the signal flips sign or when the equity drawdown kill switch triggers. There is no discretionary override.

The open interest signal

Alongside the trend book the desk runs an experimental signal built from open interest and price divergence: when open interest expands against price, the model reads a crowded side and leans the other way. It has a short history and is in sample, so it is not on the book and no figure from it is published anywhere on this site. It goes live only when it has an out of sample record to show.

Distributions

At each epoch boundary the desk compares its realised P&L against the high water mark. If it is above, the difference is withdrawn from Lighter, converted to USDG, and split across holders in proportion to balance at the snapshot block.

• Who is paid: every wallet holding the token at the snapshot, except the launch curve, the liquidity pool and the locker. They hold supply but are never paid.
• How much: your share of the eligible supply, times the epoch's realised profit.
• When: hourly, at the top of the hour, if there is anything to pay.
• In what: USDG, sent straight to your wallet. Nothing to claim.

Settlement

Only realised profit is distributed. Unrealised gains stay on the book as margin until the model closes the position. A losing epoch pays nothing and lowers nothing: the high water mark simply waits to be beaten before the next coupon.

Verify it on chain

Every figure on the front page is read live from the desk's Lighter account. You can open it yourself from the footer link and compare equity, positions and P&L line for line. Fee sweeps, swaps, deposits and distributions are ordinary transactions from the fund's operator wallet on Robinhood Chain and are listed under Addresses.

The desk's capital is 2% of the token's traded volume on the Pons bonding curve, and that volume is read from chain, hour by hour. The curve at 0x2d48…5337 emits a CurveBuy or CurveSell event on every trade; the site sums the ETH on those events into hourly buckets, prices each hour at that hour's ETH close, and takes two percent of it. Anyone with an RPC endpoint can rerun the same sum. A block range that cannot be read is left out rather than estimated, so the figures never run ahead of what the chain has confirmed.

Capital starts at zero at the launch hour. Each hour's fee is deposited at the top of the following hour, and the strategy sizes only on the capital actually in the account at that hour, so the caps travel with equity instead of sitting at a number the book has not reached. Until the funded venue account is connected the book is marked against live Lighter markets: the signals, the vol targeted sizing, the caps, the 5 bps costs and the hourly rebalance are the code the funded desk will run, and the equity curve on the front page is that replay, not an illustration. When the account is funded it replaces this book and the same page reads the account instead.

Risk and controls

• Volatility target: the book is sized to a fixed annualised sigma. Realised sigma is printed in the desk feed.
• Leverage cap: gross book leverage is capped. Resizes above the cap are rejected and logged as BLOCK lines.
• Per market cap: no single name can exceed a fixed notional.
• Kill switch: a drawdown from the equity high water mark flattens the book and halts trading until manually reviewed.
• Venue risk: margin sits on Lighter. Alpher inherits that venue's solvency and smart contract risk.

Addresses