The rules.
every figure twice, and the two sides sum to nothing. Everything below follows from that, and every figure on this page was computed when the page was drawn by the same functions that write the book.
Why double entry
Single entry is a list of balances. Somebody types them and you either believe them or you do not. Double entry makes every movement appear twice — once where it came from and once where it went — so the sum of the whole book is zero, and a reader with a column of figures can check it.
The method is six hundred years old and was invented for exactly this situation: a merchant nobody could audit. A launchpad publishing a lone TVL figure has chosen the older, weaker method, and the figure may even be true — but it cannot be checked, and unfalsifiable is not the same as honest.
A worked entry
Backing a shot with 1 SOL writes one entry with three legs:
| Account | Leg | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Subscribed by backers | -1 | money in from the people who backed a shot. The treasury owes this. |
| Held in the vault | 0.98 | the balance the treasury can point at. Read, never assumed. |
| Taken by the house | 0.02 | our fee. It is an account like any other, and it is on the same page. |
| sum | 0 | it comes to nothing, so it can be written |
The backer is owed the full amount they paid. Our 2% comes out of what the vault keeps, never out of what they are owed — which is why the vault and the amount owed differ by exactly the house account, and why that difference is printed on the books page rather than explained away.
A refund is the same shape in reverse: 0.5 out of the vault, 0.5 into redeemed.
The four states of a shot
subscriptions are still being taken. Nothing has been decided.
the target was subscribed in full and the vault holds it.
the window closed short of the target. Every backer is owed their money back.
a missed shot whose refunds have all been booked. The books are square again.
In the air is the only genuinely undecided state, and it is the one an interface is most tempted to dress up as one of the others. It gets its own colour here and nothing decorative may use it.
Missed and settled are kept apart on purpose. A missed shot owes its backers money; a settled one has paid them. Merging the two would let a debt look like a closed matter.
What the house takes
| our fee | 2% | of every subscription, taken inside the subscription entry itself |
| rounding | per entry | charged once per entry and floored each time, which takes marginally LESS than charging on the total. Integer division must never round toward the party writing the code. |
| where it shows | an account | the same trial balance as everything else. A fee that lives outside the book is a fee nobody can add up. |
What this cannot do
| hold your money | This book is the product's own record. It is not a chain, and an entry here is not a transfer. |
| make a shot good | A target reached says people backed it. It says nothing about whether they should have. |
| stop a bad actor | Double entry catches arithmetic, not intent. A book can balance perfectly and still describe a theft, provided the theft is written down. |
| be fast to read | Every balance on every page is summed from the legs on each request. That is slower than a cached total, and it is the reason no total here can drift from its rows. |
| take an unbounded shot | A window is at most 72 hours and one subscription is capped, so a fat finger cannot put the book somewhere nobody meant. |
What it removes is the possibility of a figure nobody can check. The books →