FLOW Whitepaper

1 The incentive problem

Most tokens reward exactly the behavior that kills them. Snipers and bots buy the opening block and sell into the first wave of real buyers. "Reflection" tokens tried to reward holders, but they pay rewards in the token itself, circular, and diluting, and most ship with exploitable tax and liquidity mechanics.

FLOW starts from a single principle: the people who hold should capture the value, and the people who leave should fund the ones who stay. Rewards are paid in real native token (ETH on Robinhood Chain), not in FLOW. Exiting is not free. It feeds the remaining holders and the liquidity floor.

2 The basket mechanism

Every buy and sell pays a 5% tax. That tax is collected in native ETH and streamed, pro-rata by balance, into every holder's basket. A personal, on-chain pot of accrued rewards.

Distribution uses an O(1) accumulator (the classic "magnified dividend" pattern). No looping over holders, so gas stays constant whether there are 100 or 100,000 holders:

Earn while you hold. You don't stake, lock, or claim on a schedule. Holding is the strategy. The basket fills on its own with every trade, forever.

3 Hold, redeem, or sell

At every moment a holder faces one decision, and every path rewards the people who hold. That's what makes the token self-stabilising.

Between the two exits, a rational holder always picks the bigger pot. Early on the market value usually exceeds a small basket, so people sell. Feeding the buyback and the other holders. If the price ever falls below a holder's accrued basket, redeeming becomes the better deal: they burn FLOW to claim ETH, supply shrinks, and the price is pushed back up toward that backing.

4 Forfeit & redistribution

A sell forfeits a proportional slice of your basket (sell 30% of your tokens → forfeit 30% of your basket). A plain wallet-to-wallet transfer does NOT. Your basket simply travels with the tokens to the recipient, so moving between your own wallets never costs you. Selling can't dodge this by transferring first: the basket follows the tokens and forfeits on the real sell. The forfeited amount splits three ways:

• 20%, Project treasury
• 40%, Spilled to remaining holders
• 40%, Buyback & burn (buys FLOW and burns it → supports the floor)

The seller is excluded from their own spill. (FLOW earns from the wider ecosystem separately, via a small platform cut on launched tokens, not from this split.)

Why front-running doesn't pay

Because every exit forfeits the basket and the only way to claim it is to burn tokens, the classic attacks don't work: buying right before a big forfeit to scoop the spill fails, because to keep the loot you must either sell (which forfeits it again) or burn your whole position (destroying far more than you captured). The 5%+5% round-trip tax is a second wall.

5 Loyalty & hold-time

Every wallet's holding streak is tracked on-chain (weighted-average on buys, reset on any sell). It is display-only. It powers a "diamond hands" leaderboard and lets the project reward loyal holders by hand, but it carries no automatic reward weighting. That is a deliberate safety choice: continuously re-weighting rewards by time is expensive and error-prone on-chain, and the basket already grows the longer you hold.

6 The launch: live on Uniswap V4 from block one

FLOW launches straight onto a Uniswap V4 pool. No bonding curve, no "migration" step. At launch the token seeds a single-sided concentrated position (token only, no ETH) into a real FLOW/ETH V4 pool. Buyers swap on that pool from the very first block; as they buy, the token sells off and the ETH accumulates inside Uniswap's PoolManager. The protocol never custodies the raised ETH. A V4 hook skims the 0.5-10% tax off the ETH leg of every swap straight into baskets, so baskets fill from the first trade. The liquidity position is held forever with no withdraw path. It is locked from that first trade.

Why this is safer. There is no venue to migrate from, no LP token to burn, and no window where liquidity is exposed. The raised ETH is custodied by Uniswap's battle-tested singleton, not by FLOW's own code. Even a bug in our contracts can't reach it. "Graduation" is just a re-range of an already-locked position, done in one atomic, permissionless call.

Anti-snipe. A pool that's live from block one is a target for snipers, so the hook adds an extra launch fee (up to +4%) that decays to the base rate over the first minute, early snipers pay a premium that flows straight into the token's holders' baskets, not to a bot. On top of that, every token enforces a 1% max-buy per transaction and a 2% max-wallet cap, so no single wallet can hoover up the supply at launch. These caps stay on by default, and FLOW itself keeps them too, it isn't a privileged exception.

7 Tokenomics

A fair launch: 100% of the 1B supply is routed through the launcher — no team allocation, no presale, no insider unlocks. The supply is split into two buckets:

• 70% (700M) — the curve. Seeded as a single-sided, token-only position on Uniswap V4. This is what buyers buy; the price rises as it sells (§5).
• 30% (300M) — the graduation reserve. Held back to become locked liquidity. When the curve reaches its graduation price, this reserve is paired with all the ETH raised on the curve to form a deep, permanently-locked full-range FLOW/ETH pool.

What the 30% is for — and what happens at graduation. The single-sided position is re-ranged into a full-range LP that pairs every wei of the raised ETH with tokens at the graduation price. The reserve is deliberately over-provisioned, so graduation can never run short of token to pair the ETH — it either forms deep locked liquidity or reverts, and the raise is never siphoned into rewards. The LP only needs part of the reserve; the surplus is burned (a one-time deflationary finalize). Measured at the launch parameters (start ≈ $3k FDV → graduation ≈ $30k FDV, ~2.8 ETH raised, ~80% of the curve sold):

Fees. The tax on every trade → 100% to holders' baskets. The project and the liquidity floor are funded only by exits (the forfeit split in §4), never by the ongoing tax, so those who stay are paid by those who leave.

8 Security & audits

The contracts have been through multiple internal adversarial audit rounds (several independent reviewers each) plus 119 automated tests. The direct-on-V4 rebuild. Where the single-sided launcher and the claims-based hook are load-bearing from block one. Was re-audited by three independent adversarial reviewers. Two high-severity issues were found and fixed: the anti-snipe surcharge was inflating FLOW's 0.25% cross-token cut (now the cut is taken off the base fee only, and the surcharge goes to the launched token's own holders); and graduation outside a safe price band could route raised ETH to baskets instead of locked LP (now graduation is guarded to a healthy in-range band with an on-chain "ETH-must-be-paired" invariant, so it either forms deep locked LP or reverts, the principal is never siphoned). A deployment front-run on the deployers' one-shot wiring and several medium/low issues were also fixed.

On top of the audits, the contracts were put through five dedicated red-team offensives, real, on-chain attack attempts against the baskets, the raised ETH at graduation, the platform vault, cross-token isolation in the shared hook, and tax / anti-snipe evasion. Across 20 concrete attacks. Reentrancy, double-redeem, forging basket credit, front-running a fee flush, sandwiching graduation, draining the vault, stealing another pool's fees, dodging the tax, not one succeeded. Every attack is kept as a permanent regression test, so a future change that reopens a hole fails the suite instantly.

The claim↔ETH 1:1 backing, the flush solvency gate, the forfeit split, the reentrancy posture, the permanent liquidity lock, per-pool fee isolation, and the fact that the protocol never custodies the raised ETH (it lives in Uniswap from the first trade) were each verified sound.

The full internal adversarial audit summary — scope, per-contract findings, the verified-safe invariants, and the fixes applied — is published as AUDIT.md alongside the verified source. It is an internal review, not a substitute for the planned third-party audit.

9 The platform vision

FLOW becomes a launchpad for basket-tokens: any project can launch the exact same audited contracts. The single-sided V4 launcher, the hook tax, the baskets, the forfeit, and pick its own tax between 0.5% and 10%. Every token goes live on its own locked Uniswap V4 pool with the protocol never touching the raised ETH. Because every token is the identical, verified contract, there's no hidden mint and no rug functions. A safety guarantee generic launchpads can't make.

Each project sets its own logo and socials (X, Telegram, website, Instagram, Reddit) at launch. These are pinned to IPFS as on-chain metadata. The launch transaction records the metadata reference itself, so a coin's identity travels with the token and renders the same for every visitor on any device, rather than living in a central database that can go down or be quietly edited.

The platform captures value from every launch two ways. First, 0.25% of every launched token's trades flows to FLOW holders' baskets. Second, at graduation each project sends 2% of its supply (out of what would otherwise be burned) to a PlatformVault that can never sell it. It only holds the position (earning that project's basket) or burns it for the accrued ETH, which streams back to FLOW holders. FLOW plays its own game across the whole ecosystem: hold or redeem, never dump.

So the more tokens launch and trade, the more ETH streams into FLOW holders' baskets. Without FLOW depending on its own volume alone. FLOW itself takes no allocation (its own graduation remainder is fully burned); the 2% applies only to other projects, and it can never be sold on them. This layer is upcoming and needs its own audit; FLOW launches first (as token #1) via this same mechanism.

10 Roadmap

• Phase 1, Launch. Live-on-V4 launch on Robinhood Chain, single-sided Uniswap V4 pool, liquidity locked from block one, re-range graduation to deep liquidity.
• Phase 2, Baskets & community. Basket explorer, diamond-hands leaderboard, holder analytics, partnerships.
• Phase 3, Launchpad. Projects launch the same audited basket contract; 0.25% of every launch's trades streams to FLOW holders.

11 Risks & disclaimers

• FLOW is an experimental crypto token. Nothing here is financial advice. Only spend what you can afford to lose, and do your own research.
• The contracts have had extensive internal adversarial auditing and red-teaming and a third-party audit is planned. As with any new smart contract, no code is ever risk-free.
• The soft floor is soft, not guaranteed; the reward reserve can be drawn down by redemptions.
• The tax is collected on FLOW's official Uniswap V4 pool (via the hook). Trading FLOW on a different pool or venue can avoid that fee, which would reduce the ETH flowing to baskets. The official pool holds the deep, permanently-locked liquidity, and the forfeit-on-exit rule still applies everywhere you move FLOW.
• The protocol never custodies the raised ETH. It sits in Uniswap's PoolManager from the first trade. The already-earned basket ETH (rewards accrued to holders) is held by the token contract until claimed, and its soft floor can be drawn down by redemptions.
• Early buyers get a lower price (the single-sided position sells up as people buy); large sellers face the pool's slippage like any AMM. The hook's launch surcharge and per-wallet caps deter, but don't fully eliminate, sniping.
• The launchpad layer is upcoming and needs its own audit; it is not live at FLOW's own launch.
• Not affiliated with Robinhood. The chain name and colours are used for identification only.