Every time a token changes hands, the smart contract takes a small cut — a fixed amount of ETH, set when the contract was deployed. Immutable. Can’t be turned off, redirected, or voted away. That cut goes to the verification pool.
The pool pays for tree verification. Satellite imagery, on-the-ground checks, dispute resolution. When the market is active, the pool is flush and trees get checked frequently. When the market is quiet, the pool is thin and checks are infrequent. The system breathes with demand.
Same model as Bitcoin. Transaction fees fund miners who secure the ledger. Here, transaction fees fund verifiers who secure the trees. Same architecture. Different work product.
The fee is denominated in ETH — not dollars, not stablecoins. No price oracle needed for fees. No fiat dependency. The protocol is native to its own chain. Two lines of Solidity. Set once. Runs until Ethereum stops.
You’ll notice we never tell you what a token is worth. By design and by principle. We show you the mechanism — scarce, deflationary, self-funding, tied to a living organism. What that’s worth is the market’s decision, not ours.
This is the target design. The current proof-of-concept uses a simpler model while the transfer fee mechanism is finalized in v3.
The death-freeze eliminates the most obvious attack: no one can profit from reporting a tree dead. A false death ruling doesn’t create a payout — it destroys an asset. Verification uses satellite imagery matched to GPS coordinates with a staked dispute window. Report a tree falsely? You lose your stake. Challenge a real death? You lose your stake. The incentive architecture makes fraud expensive and unprofitable.
The oracle — the authority that updates tree status — follows a published decentralization roadmap. Phase 1: the founder’s wallet. Phase 2: a multisig of independent keyholders. Phase 3: on-chain arbitration. Each transition is a one-way, irreversible on-chain event. The roadmap is public. The wallet is public. The founder holds genesis tokens in the same wallet — his skin is in the same game.
The token references a GPS coordinate. It doesn’t claim ownership of the land, the tree, or any legal right. Referencing is not claiming — the same way knowing the azimuth of Alpha Centauri doesn’t make you the owner of that star. A trading card referencing a Wikipedia article about Tokyo doesn’t require Tokyo’s permission to exist. The card has value. The fact is free. These are different verbs.
No landowner is affected. No government is involved. No NGO is required. The token is a collectible that references observable reality. If someone cuts the tree down, the token freezes. The cutter doesn’t profit. The holder loses. The mechanism doesn’t need permission because it doesn’t claim authority.
A tree that’s been standing for a thousand years has already survived everything the planet could throw at it. The base rate is extraordinary. But yes — it can die, and if it does, you lose your position. That’s the mechanism working. The risk is what creates the incentive. Without it, there’s no reason to care whether the tree survives.
If you want to manage that risk, buy tokens on trees in stable biomes. Sell the ones near active threats. The market prices the risk. That’s what markets do.
And yes — we’re trying to do something real. This only works with participants who care. That’s the invitation.
Why does anyone want anything? Scarcity, narrative, social consensus, and stakes.
Arbcap tokens are scarce — only old-growth trees qualify, and they aren’t being made anymore. They’re deflationary — every tree death permanently reduces supply. They carry stakes — your loss and the tree’s loss are the same event. And they represent something people actually care about — the survival of ancient living organisms.
The mechanism doesn’t promise value. It creates the conditions under which value has historically emerged in every asset class: limited supply, real consequences, and something worth caring about. Whether that’s enough is the market’s decision, not ours.
A security promises returns from the efforts of others. An arbcap token promises nothing. There is no yield, no dividend, no buyback, no treasury, no team allocation. The founder holds tokens subject to the same death risk as every other holder. There is no entity that can be compelled to generate returns.
The token is a collectible — a digital trading card with GPS coordinates. You can’t cut the tree down with it. You can’t fence off the land. It confers no property rights and creates no obligations. It references observable reality the way a Pokémon card references a fictional character — except the tree is real, and it can die.
Right now, yes. One architect, open-source code, published research, and a live contract on Base mainnet. The protocol is designed to not need its founder. The oracle authority — the only centralized component — follows a published roadmap from single wallet to multisig to on-chain arbitration. Each transition is irreversible and logged on-chain.
The founder can’t get rich from this. There’s no equity, no token allocation, no exit that doesn’t go through the same door as every other holder. The wallet is public. If that’s not enough trust — good. That skepticism is exactly what the decentralization roadmap is designed to answer, one stage at a time.
The system hibernates. The pool drains. Verification stops. But the contract is on-chain. The tokens exist. The death-freeze is armed. One person holding ten tokens in a quiet market is a functioning protocol — just a sleeping one.
The first trade after years of silence restarts the heartbeat. The fee hits the pool. A verifier picks up the work. The trees get checked again. The mechanism doesn’t require popularity to survive. It requires popularity to thrive.
The math works at both ends.