How it works

A way for a project on LitVM to share its revenue with the people who back it. The project opens a pool; people buy shares in it; a fixed part of every fee the project earns is paid out to shareholders as dividends.

The promise is backed by money, not words: the creator locks a bond up front. If the project pays holders less than the minimum it promised, the difference comes out of that bond. Contracts enforce all of it — nobody, including LitShares, can move your shares, pause your exit or change the terms against you.

zkLTC is the native coin of LitVM LiteForge. Prices, dividends, bonds and loans are all in zkLTC — there is no other token.

LiteForge is a testnet: its zkLTC has no value. One figure is lowered for testing: the minimum payment starts at 0.05 zkLTC here, 0.5 on mainnet.

Each pool has a revenue splitter. The project sets it as its fee recipient, so the project's own contract sends its fees there. Every payment is split three ways:

• 10–95% to shareholders — the creator picks the figure when opening the pool and can later raise it, never lower it;
• 5% to the LitShares protocol;
• the rest to the creator.

The splitter keeps checking that the project still points its fees at it. If the project redirects them, the pool gets 72 hours to fix it before it goes into Default (see below).

Almost nothing that touches your money. Pools have no admin key: no one can freeze them, change their terms or move shares. The loan contract every pool trusts is created together with the factory and fixed forever. The team receives protocol fees and runs the service that checks a project's website and GitHub for its trust score.

By a bonding curve — a formula instead of an order book. The first share costs 0.001 zkLTC and every share sold adds 0.00000003 zkLTC to the price. When the pool's reserve reaches 50 zkLTC, the price has doubled to 0.002.

What you pay goes into the pool's reserve; when you sell, you are paid from that reserve at the curve price. So there is always someone to sell to, and the price only moves when people buy or sell. It never falls below the start price of 0.001.

The first 24 hours of a new pool. Instead of racing each other up the curve, everyone deposits and gets shares at the same average price:

1. Deposit up to 5 zkLTC per wallet. You can add more or withdraw everything until the launch ends.
2. When the timer runs out, all deposits buy shares together, minus the 1% fee.
3. Your shares are your part of the total deposits. If you put in 10% of the money, you get 10% of the shares.

Your shares show up once the launch ends — nothing else to do. Their early-exit clock starts at the launch end.

1. Open the pool, enter an amount in zkLTC and check how many shares you would get.
2. Confirm. 1% of what you pay is the trading fee; the rest buys shares.

Three limits apply:

• One buy per wallet every 24 hours.
• One wallet can hold at most 10% of all shares, or 5 zkLTC worth at the current price — whichever is larger.
• Buying pauses while the pool is at risk of Default or its fee routing is broken, so nobody can buy in just to catch the bond payout. Selling and claiming still work.

1% on every buy, sell, unbond and reinvestment. Half goes to the protocol, half to the creator. An instant sale can also carry the early-exit penalty (below). Claiming dividends is free apart from gas.

Every share earns an equal part of everything paid into the pool:

• the project's revenue share;
• money taken from the creator's bond when the project underpays;
• 60% of the early-exit penalties other holders pay;
• the whole remaining bond if the pool defaults.

Payments are released gradually over 7 days, so nobody can buy right before a payment and sell right after it. A very small payment waits and joins the next stream. A bond paid out on Default arrives at once.

Press Claim on the pool page, or the claim button on Portfolio to collect from every pool in one transaction. There is no deadline: dividends pile up until you claim them, and claiming works even when a pool is in Default. A keeper also sends them to your wallet by itself once they reach 0.001 zkLTC.

It turns your dividends into more shares at the current curve price, with the usual 1% fee. It does not restart your early-exit clock or your 24-hour buy limit, because no new money came in.

Switch on auto-compound and a keeper does it for you once at least 0.001 zkLTC has built up; it checks every few minutes. Anything above the 10% holding limit stays claimable. Creators cannot reinvest in their own pool, and nobody can while buying is paused.

There are two ways, and they trade speed for cost:

• Sell now — instant, at the current price, minus the 1% fee and the early-exit penalty.
• Unbond — request it, wait 2 days, then execute. Only the 1% fee, no penalty. You get the price at the moment you execute, which may be higher or lower than when you asked. Shares stop earning dividends while they wait. You can cancel at any time and they start earning again. One unbond at a time.

It is 10% if you sell right after buying and falls evenly to 2% over 90 days, then stays at 2%. After 45 days it is 6%. It is taken from what is left after the 1% fee.

The penalty is not lost: 60% goes to the holders who stay, 20% to the insurance fund and 20% to the protocol. It exists so that quick flips pay the people who hold.

If you buy more later, your clock moves toward today in proportion to the size of the new buy. There is no penalty at all while a pool is in Default or winding down.

Yes. The main ways:

• The price falls when other holders sell.
• Fees and the penalty: buying and immediately selling costs about 12% (1% + 1% + 10%). Buying and unbonding costs about 2%.
• The project earns less than expected. The bond only guarantees the minimum payment, and only while it lasts.

Time in a pool runs in 30-day epochs from the day it was created. The creator promises a minimum amount to holders in every epoch. When an epoch ends and the revenue share paid less than that, the difference is taken from the bond and paid to holders.

• When the bond falls below 4 minimum payments. It starts at 6, so a project that pays nothing at all defaults at the end of its third epoch, about 90 days in.
• When the project's fee recipient points somewhere other than the splitter for 72 hours.

• Everything left in the bond is paid to holders at once, as dividends.
• Buying stops. Selling carries no early-exit penalty, only the 1% fee.
• Dividends keep flowing if the project keeps paying.
• The trust score drops to 0, and loans against the pool can be liquidated.

The creator can lift the Default by topping the bond back up to 6 minimum payments with the fee routing fixed. A new epoch starts from there.

Buying is on hold because the pool is close to Default, or its fee routing is broken but still within the 72-hour grace. Holders can sell, unbond and claim as usual. Buying reopens once the pool is healthy again.

The creator's honest way to close a pool:

1. Buying stops at once and every holder can leave without the early-exit penalty.
2. The creator keeps paying the minimum for the rest of the current epoch and 3 more.
3. Then the pool closes and whatever is left of the bond goes back to the creator.

If the creator stops paying during the wind-down, it turns into a normal Default and the bond goes to holders.

A contract on LitVM that earns fees in zkLTC and sends them to a fee recipient you can change, readable through a view function (for example feeRecipient()). The pool can only verify revenue it can see arriving.

1. Project. Register your project: name, description, logo, website and GitHub. This mints a Project NFT — the project's passport. Whoever holds it opens the pool. One pool per project. Gas only.
2. Fee routing. The splitter's address is known before the pool exists. Set it as your contract's fee recipient; the site checks it by calling your view function. Gas only.
3. Terms and bond. Choose the revenue share (10–95%) and the minimum payment per 30 days (from 0.05 zkLTC). Pay the 1 zkLTC creation fee plus a bond of 6 minimum payments. The cheapest pool costs 1.3 zkLTC.

The fair launch starts the moment the pool exists. Start on Create pool.

• Your part of revenue: everything after the holders' share and the protocol's 5%. At a 20% revenue share you keep 75%.
• Half of every trading fee: 0.5% of all buys, sells and reinvestments in your pool.
• Your bond back, in full, if you wind down properly and revenue always covered the minimum.

You withdraw both from your pool's creator panel whenever you like.

• Paying holders at least the minimum every 30 days. Any shortfall comes from your bond; below 4 minimum payments of bond the pool defaults and holders get the rest of it.
• Keeping your fee recipient pointed at the splitter. A wrong recipient costs 20 points of trust score immediately and becomes a Default after 72 hours.
• The revenue share you set. You can raise it later, never lower it. The minimum payment cannot change.

You can top up the bond at any time, and that is also how you lift a Default.

Yes, in the launch or afterwards, but they are locked for 90 days from the pool's creation and then unlock evenly over the next 90 days. This shows holders you cannot dump on them. You also cannot reinvest dividends, pledge your shares for a loan, or lend in your own pool.

A project that calls the splitter's payRevenue() is split in the same transaction. A plain transfer is split on the next action anyone takes in the pool, or by the keeper, which checks every pool every few minutes.

Each offer sets its own limit: 20% of the value of the shares you pledge by default, up to 33% if the lender allows it, at the current curve price. In other words, you pledge shares worth 5× the loan, or about 3× on a 33% offer. The site adds 0.5% extra when you have it, so a small price move before your transaction lands does not make it fail.

1. Hold shares in a pool that has open offers.
2. On the pool page open Loans → Borrow, pick an offer and press Borrow.
3. Your shares move into escrow and the loan amount, minus a 1% fee to the lender, lands in your withdraw balance.
4. Press Withdraw to send it to your wallet.

You cannot borrow from a pool that is in, or about to go into, Default. Creators cannot pledge their own pool's shares.

Yes — and that is how the loan repays itself. The dividends your pledged shares earn go to the lender and shrink your debt. A keeper collects them once at least 0.001 zkLTC has built up; it checks every few minutes. If the dividends clear the whole debt, the loan closes and your shares come back on their own; anything earned beyond the debt goes to you.

While pledged, those shares cannot be sold or unbonded.

At the APR the lender chose, between 0% and 100%. It accrues every second and is added to the debt each time the loan is touched (every dividend collection, repayment or liquidation check), so it compounds slightly.

Interest for the first quarter of the term (at least 7 days) is added to the debt when the loan opens and is owed even if you repay early. After that it accrues on what is left. On top, 1% of the loan goes to the lender as a fee when it opens.

Any time, in part or in full, from the loan card. Anyone may repay for you. When the debt reaches zero your shares come back with their original early-exit clock — a loan never resets it.

1. On a pool page open Loans → Lend.
2. Set the amount, the interest (0–100% APR), the term (7–365 days) and how big a loan the pledge backs (20%, 25% or 33% of its value), and post the offer. Your zkLTC is held by the loan contract until someone takes the offer.
3. Changed your mind? Cancel an offer nobody has taken yet; the money goes to your withdraw balance on the Loans page.

You do not need to hold shares to lend — the borrower brings them. Your offer is separate from any shares you own; selling them does not touch it. The pool's creator cannot lend in their own pool.

Think about what the borrower would do otherwise: sell. Selling right after buying costs about 10.9% (the 1% fee plus a 10% penalty), falling to about 3% after 90 days. A loan is worth taking while it costs less than that.

A 30-day loan at 40% APR costs the borrower 4.3% (the 1% fee plus 3.3% interest) — cheaper than selling for anyone who bought in the last ~75 days. At 100% APR it costs 9.2%, still cheaper for holders under ~19 days. At 10% it costs 1.8%: every holder would take it, but you earn little. The Lend form shows this for your exact numbers, next to what buying shares with the same money would pay in dividends.

You earn the 1% fee when the loan opens, plus the interest — at least a quarter of the term's worth, however early the borrower repays. Repayments — from dividends or from the borrower — collect in your withdraw balance on the Loans page.

If the borrower does not repay, you get their pledged shares instead of zkLTC. You only lose money if those shares are worth less than the debt when the loan is liquidated, which takes a price drop of more than 80% from the loan's start (67% on a 33% offer) before anyone liquidates it. Seized shares carry the borrower's early-exit clock, and selling a large amount moves the curve price, so turning them back into zkLTC can return less than their listed value.

Anyone can liquidate a loan once one of these is true:

• the debt reaches 60% of the pledged shares' value — for a fresh loan at 20%, that is a 66.7% fall in the share price (45% at 33%);
• the term has ended and debt remains;
• the pool has gone into Default.

Uncollected dividends are applied first. Then shares worth the debt at the current price go to the lender and the rest go back to the borrower. Nothing is sold into the curve, so a liquidation never moves the price or anyone else's position.

Loan money never goes straight to a wallet. Borrowed amounts, repayments, dividends routed to a lender and cancelled offers all land in a withdraw balance first. Press Withdraw on the Loans page or the pool's Loans panel to collect it. That way no wallet can block someone else's repayment.

The seller promises the dividends a set number of shares will earn over a term of 7 to 180 days, and locks zkLTC as collateral. The buyer pays a fixed price up front and gets a transferable claim. At the end of the term the buyer receives what those shares earned, counted from the pool's on-chain dividend-per-share figure, and the seller gets the rest of the collateral back.

Nobody needs to hold shares: the forward only tracks the pool's payouts. The buyer is betting the pool pays more than the price; the seller is betting it pays less.

The payout never exceeds the collateral, so that is the most the seller can lose and the most the buyer can receive. If the pool stops paying, the buyer gets whatever it paid before that, possibly nothing, and loses the price. The offer shows when its collateral is below the expected payout.

Open forwards on a pool can cover at most 20% of its earning shares, so they never outweigh the holders themselves. A forward can only be bought while the pool is live and not heading into Default. The pool's creator cannot sell forwards on it, because they steer its revenue.

Anyone can settle a forward once it matures; a keeper does it within minutes. The price paid to a seller, refunds of cancelled offers and settlements all land in a withdraw balance. Press Withdraw on the pool page or your Portfolio to collect it.

Up to 60 points come from the chain and cannot be faked:

• 7 points for each epoch in a row that revenue alone met the minimum, up to 35;
• up to 15 for the total paid to holders: 3 for any, 6 from 1 zkLTC, 9 from 5, 12 from 25, 15 from 100;
• up to 10 for the pool's age, growing over 180 days.

Up to 40 points come from checks of the project's identity:

• 15 for a proven website domain;
• 8 for a GitHub account proven to be the creator's, +6 if it is at least 180 days old, +6 for at least 20 commits in the last 90 days;
• 5 for verified contract source.

A wrong fee recipient takes away 20 points. A pool in Default, winding down or closed scores 0 whatever else it proved. Identity checks are valid for 30 days and need renewing.