The law of the tick.
On an ordinary pool, being first in the block is worth money. Here it is worth nothing, because nothing happens between ticks. Everything below is either a rule the contracts enforce or a limit we are telling you about. Nothing is a promise.
01The tick
A tick is a fixed number of blocks, set at deploy. Ticks are numbered from the block of deployment, and the current tick is a pure function of the block number: divide, round down, and you have it. There is no function that opens, closes, extends or skips a tick, for anyone.
A tick is the unit of time on this market. Nothing on it is measured in blocks or in seconds: an order waits a tick, a price lasts a tick, a burn happens once a tick.
02The order
During tick n, anyone leaves an order with the settlement contract: a buy, as an amount of the quote asset, or a sell, as an amount of $TICK. The asset is escrowed by the contract until the tick settles.
There is no limit price. An order accepts the tick price, whatever it turns out to be, and that is the whole point of leaving it: nobody knows the price before settle, so nobody can trade ahead of it. An order can be withdrawn in full as long as the tick has not closed, with one exception described in section 9: the last block of a tick freezes withdrawals, so that a large order cannot be shown to the book and pulled at the last moment.
The number of orders a tick can hold is bounded, so that settling a tick always fits in one transaction. The bound is a parameter.
03The settle
At the first block of tick n + 1, anyone calls settle(n). The contract takes every order left during tick n, nets the buys against the sells, and sends only the imbalance through the pool in a single swap. The price that comes out of that operation is the tick price: one number for the whole tick, computed by the contract, chosen by nobody.
Every order of the tick is then settled at the tick price. A buyer receives their quote amount divided by the tick price, in $TICK; a seller receives their $TICK amount multiplied by it, in the quote asset. The order in which orders were left changes nothing. Inside a tick there is no first and no last, so there is nothing to sandwich and nothing to snipe.
What is owed is credited, and claimed by the address itself. The contract never pushes funds to anyone, so no recipient can block a settle by refusing to receive.
04The toll
A fixed share of every settled order, set at deploy, is kept back in the quote asset. On a buy it is taken from the amount paid; on a sell it is taken from the proceeds. Everything the toll collects goes into one place, the buyback reserve, and it has exactly one way out, described in the next section.
The toll is flat. It does not change with the size of the order, the direction of the tick, the state of the reserve or the identity of the address. Nothing is kept by a team, and there is no switch to change that later.
05The buyback
At every settle, the reserve spends a fixed share of its balance, set at deploy, buying $TICK. The purchase is added to the buy side of the tick before netting, so it goes through the same swap as everyone else and pays the tick price like everyone else. What it buys is sent to the dead address in the same call.
There is no other buyback. Nobody decides when to buy, how much, or whether to wait for a better price. The reserve spends its share at every tick, including a tick with no orders at all, and the share is written in the contract. That makes the burn as regular as the clock, and as easy to read: at any block, the next burn is the published share of a balance anyone can read.
06The pool between ticks
$TICK trades in its own Uniswap v4 pool, under a hook that refuses every swap not sent by settle. The pool therefore executes exactly one swap per tick, the imbalance of that tick, and no order can reach the pool around the tick. The hook also records the tick price, so it can be read on chain.
The protocol liquidity position is locked in a locker with no withdrawal function. Because the only counterparty to the pool is the settlement contract, the question of who the sender is in the hook has one answer, and it is checked.
07Nothing hidden
Orders are public from the moment they are left: anyone can read the book of the current tick. The tick price is computed, not chosen. The cadence of the buyback is written in the contract. The reserve balance, the total burned and the price of every tick are readable on chain, and this site shows them the way the chain does: one tick at a time.
08What the contracts enforce
Every order of a tick is executed at the same price.
The pool executes one swap per tick, the one that settle sends it.
The toll leaves the system as burned $TICK, and in no other form.
The buyback of a tick is exactly the published share of the reserve, no more and no less.
The current tick is a function of the block number. No function moves it.
An order that was not executed is refundable in full.
09What can go wrong
You wait. An order waits at least one tick, and a tick is a few blocks. On a market that moves fast, that is a long time, and it is the price of the rule. Here you do not buy the second, you buy the tick.
Nobody calls settle. A tick that is not settled holds its orders until somebody calls. Anybody can, this site does, and an unsettled tick loses nothing: the orders wait, the escrow waits, the burn waits.
The tick price is not the pool price. The imbalance of a tick crosses the pool in one swap, and the larger it is, the further the average price moves from the quote before it. A very one-sided tick gets a worse price than the same orders spread over several ticks. That is the cost of the batch, and it is visible in the tick price.
An order can be shown and pulled. Leaving a large order to mislead the book and withdrawing it before the close is a real tactic, and it is bounded by a freeze: no withdrawal in the last block of a tick. The length of the freeze is a parameter.
The reserve can grow faster than it burns. A fixed share of a balance that fills faster than it empties makes a balance that grows. That is a choice of cadence, not a leak: nothing leaves the reserve except through the buyback, and this site shows the balance and the rhythm, not only the total burned.
Rounding. A settlement at one price over dozens of orders is a sum of roundings. Every one of them goes in the protocol's favour, and the dust burns with the rest.
The contracts can be wrong. Every rule on this page is only as good as the code that enforces it and the audit that reads it. The settle, the netting and the freeze are the first things to be fuzzed, on real traces of orders, before anything is deployed.
10Parameters
Constants are fixed at deployment and published here. Until then, none of them has a value, and no number you may read elsewhere is ours.
| Parameter | What it does | Value |
|---|---|---|
| Tick length | How many blocks a tick lasts | set at deploy |
| Toll | The share of every settled order kept for the reserve | set at deploy |
| Buyback share | The share of the reserve spent at every settle | set at deploy |
| Minimum order | The smallest order the contract accepts | set at deploy |
| Orders per tick | The bound on how many orders a tick can hold | set at deploy |
| Withdrawal freeze | The last blocks of a tick during which an order cannot be withdrawn | set at deploy |
| Quote asset | What buys are paid in and what the reserve holds | set at deploy |
| Swaps per tick | How many swaps the pool accepts in a tick | 1, fixed |
| Prices per tick | How many prices a tick has | 1, fixed |
| Team share | What the team takes from the toll | none |
11Chain and venue
Tick runs on Robinhood Chain, chain 4663, and trades on Uniswap v4 through the PoolManager at 0x8366a39CC670B4001A1121B8F6A443A643e40951. The pool is ours and the hook is ours; the protocol liquidity position is locked in a locker with no withdrawal function.
Gas is paid in ETH, at a gas price around 0.02 gwei on this chain. That is what makes short ticks possible: a settle that clears dozens of orders and one swap in a single call costs what an ordinary transaction costs, so the tick does not have to be long to be worth calling.
The first tick is the launch. There is no first block to snipe, only a first batch, and everyone in it pays the same price.
Explorer: robinhoodchain.blockscout.com. Contract addresses are published on this page and on X at launch, and nowhere else. Anything else is somebody else's.
12FAQ
Why does my order wait?
Because the price of a tick is computed at its end, from every order in it. An order that executed at once would have a price of its own, and then somebody would be first again. The wait is the rule, and it is at most one tick.
Can I set a price?
No. An order accepts the tick price. A limit price is the open design question of the sheet: it would make the batch safer for you and the settle more complex for everyone, and the choice today is no limit. If that changes, it changes here first.
How long is a tick?
A fixed number of blocks, set at deploy. Whether the tick should stretch when the book is quiet and shrink when it is busy is an open question, and the current answer is no: a fixed tick is a tick anyone can count.
What is the tick price, exactly?
The one price at which the buys of the tick, its sells and the pool's single swap all balance: buyers as a whole receive exactly what sellers and the pool provided, and nobody in the tick is paid at a price different from anybody else's. Whether the side that did not cross the pool should be netted at the pool price before the swap or at the average price after it is a question the sheet keeps open, and the contracts will answer it in one line, published here.
Can a bot trade ahead of the buyback?
It can leave a buy in the same tick, and it will pay the same price as the buyback, with everyone else. There is no before inside a tick. What a bot loses here is the thing it is built for: an order of its own in the block.
What if nobody calls settle?
The tick waits. Its orders stay in escrow and can still be withdrawn, and the next call settles it. Anybody can send the call; this site does.
Is the buyback a fixed amount?
No, a fixed share of the reserve, at every tick. A fixed amount would run the reserve dry on a quiet week and cap the burn on a busy one; a share follows the balance. This is a choice, and it is written in the sheet as one.
Can I withdraw an order?
Yes, in full, until the tick closes, except in the last block of the tick, where withdrawals are frozen so that nobody can show the book an order they never meant to keep.
Can you change the tick, the toll or the share later?
No. The constants are fixed at deployment. There is no function to move the tick, to change the toll, to pause the buyback or to take anything out of the reserve.
Where do I find the contract address?
On this page and on X at launch. Anywhere else, it is somebody else's.