Prior Protocol · Robinhood Chain
A fund that buys
the right tail.
Five percent of every PRIOR buy and sell goes to a treasury. The treasury buys long-dated call options on Bitcoin, Ether, Hyperliquid and Zcash — March 2027 and further out — and holds them. It cannot buy anything else: not an asset off the list, not a nearer expiry, not a put. That restriction is compiled into the contract, not written on a roadmap.
Then, on mainnet, the same machinery becomes a venue and everyone else can trade options too. The fund is how we get there, and it is the first customer.
Read live from chain by your browser, not typed here. NAV counts stablecoin plus option intrinsic value only — never a model price — so the number is a floor, not an estimate. The fund's own PRIOR counts as zero.
Four steps. There is no fifth.
Every other treasury buys the asset. A million dollars of Bitcoin is a million dollars of Bitcoin: if it doubles you have two million. Linear, and unremarkable.
A million dollars of March-2027 $110,000 Bitcoin calls is 346 contracts. If Bitcoin doubles to $168,000, each one is worth $58,000. That is $20.2 million from the same million dollars.
| Asset | Implied vol | Premium as % of spot |
×1.5 | ×2 | ×3 | ×5 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| BTC | 40% | 3.4% | 5.6× | 20.2× | 49.3× | 107.6× |
| ETH | 56% | 7.3% | 2.7× | 9.6× | 23.3× | 50.8× |
| HYPE | 66% | 10.1% | 2.0× | 7.0× | 16.9× | 36.7× |
| ZEC | 125% | 27.0% | 0.7× | 2.5× | 6.2× | 13.7× |
What one dollar of premium returns, by how far the underlying moves. Live Derive marks for 26 March 2027 calls at roughly 1.3× spot, 24 September 2026. Breakevens: BTC +34%, ETH +37%, HYPE +39%, ZEC +58%.
Read down that table and the interesting thing is not the size of the numbers, it is the order of them. Bitcoin — the least volatile asset on the list — returns the most per dollar. Zcash, the wildest, returns the least.
That is not an inefficiency we found. Bitcoin's implied volatility is 40% and Zcash's is 125%, and that gap is the market pricing how likely each double is. Convexity is cheap exactly where the move is considered unlikely. Anyone selling you "20× on a double" without that sentence attached is selling you a lottery ticket and calling it a strategy.
So the fund buys all four and keeps buying, across March 2027 and every expiry beyond it as they list. It is not picking the winner. It is buying the right-hand tail of four distributions at four different prices and waiting to be wrong about three of them.
A redeemable claim on the fund's assets, pro rata. Hand back your PRIOR and you receive your exact share of the stablecoin and your exact share of the option contracts — the real ones, transferred to your wallet.
Redemption pays in kind on purpose. A fund that paid cash against its own quoted mark would be selling illiquid options to itself at a price it made up, which is the usual way one gets drained. In kind, you can only ever remove your share of what is actually there.
It also cannot be switched off. The guardian key can stop the fund buying. Nothing can stop you leaving, and redemption never reads a price, so even a halted oracle cannot trap you.
Move the volume. The curve is the treasury's value on 26 March 2027 against how far the basket moves between now and then, computed from the live premiums above.
| If the basket | Treasury at expiry | vs deployed | What that means |
|---|
Assumes the tax is spread equally across the four assets at today's premiums, that every contract is held to 26 March 2027, and that the four move together by the same factor. Payoffs are capped at four times strike, which is why the curve bends flat at the right — that ceiling is real and it is in the contracts. The left of the curve is real too.
Every trade in PRIOR feeds the fund, and the manager has no way to sell. Positions go in and stay until expiry unless holders vote them out — a proposal names the series, the size and a floor price, runs for three days, and needs a tenth of the supply behind it. Only then can the manager sign, and only at or above the floor the vote set.
How much it buys is also a rule rather than a judgement. A single purchase may spend 10% of the cash on hand while an asset is within 5% of its high, and up to 100% once it has fallen more than 40%. The fund hoards into strength and spends into weakness because the contract will not let it do otherwise.
Two things compound at once. Volume compounds the number of contracts, because the tax is a share of turnover rather than a fixed budget. And the contracts themselves are convex, so the value of what is already held grows faster than the underlying does. A treasury that is both accumulating and convex does not grow in a straight line.
It does not grow at all if the assets go sideways. That is the same sentence read from the other end, and both readings are true.
The machinery that prices the fund's own book is a full options engine, and it is already running. It converts perpetual futures into listed option chains — the funding rate is the cost of carry, which is the forward — across 80 markets: Bitcoin, Ether, Solana, the long tail of alts, and eight real-world assets including gold, silver, Brent, WTI and the Nasdaq.
On mainnet that becomes a venue anyone can trade. Write covered calls against a position. Buy protection on something no venue lists. Borrow against an options book instead of closing it. The contracts for all of that are deployed and tested today.
The fund is why the venue can open at all. A new options exchange fails for one reason: nobody wants to be the first to quote into an empty book. Prior arrives with a treasury that is permanently, mandate-bound long calls across four assets — a counterparty that cannot leave, on the side of the book that is hardest to fill. Anchor liquidity that is a consequence of the strategy rather than a rented incentive.
Then venue fees route to the same treasury, which buys more calls. That is the second flywheel, and it only starts once there is real volume — so treat it as the plan, not as something already happening.
Not a date, and not our discretion. Open options trading begins on mainnet when $5,000,000 has gone into the treasury — cash on hand plus every dollar of premium it has ever paid. Both are readable off the contract, which is why this is the trigger rather than a quarter on a roadmap.
The threshold exists because an options venue with a thin book is worse than no venue: the first trader gets a terrible fill, says so, and the second never arrives. $5M of mandate-bound long calls is a counterparty that cannot walk away, on the side of the book that is hardest to fill. Below that we would be asking people to trade into nothing.
Deliberately not measured by NAV. NAV counts options at intrinsic value only, so while they are out of the money it reads near zero no matter how much has been spent — a threshold the fund could never cross by doing precisely what it is meant to do. Capital in cannot fall when the market falls, and cannot be flattered when it rises.
Every quote the engine produces carries a provenance label — observed inferred modelled unvalidated — so you can always tell whether a price came from a real market or from our model. We publish the ones we cannot validate and say which they are.
Near is the example. It has a $345M perpetual and no options market anywhere on earth. Prior can list it, and will. But the fund does not buy what it cannot price against a real book, so NEAR is not in the mandate and the contract would reject it. Announcing a fifth position we could only mark against ourselves would have been the easy thing and the wrong one.
Every claim above is a contract call you can make yourself. The treasury address, the positions, the premium paid, the NAV — all readable without asking us anything.
Currently deployed to Robinhood Chain testnet; balances are test tokens. The contracts, the mandate enforcement and the redemption path are the ones intended for mainnet — 278 tests cover them and the source is public.