$CALL and staking
A token issued by a launchpad, and a staking contract that discounts your margin rate, funded by a reserve that can only ever shrink.
Issued by a launchpad, not by the desk
$CALL is issued by a launchpad, after the desk opens. The desk deploys no token contract and mints nothing, and it deploys no staking contract on launch day either: the desk goes live with staking deferred, every account pays the base rate, the staking page says Not on this deployment, the contract addresses page lists no token and no staking contract, and the api reports staking as unavailable naming the deferral. After the token generation event a second script deploys the staking contract, owned by the governor, pointed at the launchpad's token address only after a check, run before any transaction, that the address carries code, answers a token's name, symbol, decimals and the number of tokens in existence, has 18 decimals and a non-zero count, and carries no upgrade path, pause, blocklist, freeze, mint, admin burn, owner or role the check knows how to look for; the four reads and the code's hash are recorded beside the address, so a later swap of the token or a change in how many exist is visible. The two calls that wire the new contract into the desk then wait the governor's loosen delay of 72 hours in public, and until they execute nothing here is live and the api names the pending activation and when it matures. How many tokens exist and how they are distributed are the launchpad's decision and the foundation's, are unknown until the token generation event, and are stated nowhere here. The token is not margin collateral, staked or not, and it is never sold to backstop the cash vault. The demo chain and the testnet are mock deployments whose deploy mints a stand-in token of its own so every flow here is clickable without funds.
The staking contract holds your staked $CALL in a token contract the desk did not write and cannot change. The deploy refuses a token that visibly carries a power over its holders, but a check on runtime code cannot see a power under a name it does not know, or a fee, rebase or hook inside transfer itself; a token like that could still freeze or take staked balances and the reward reserve, and nothing on the desk's side can prevent it. That is the same shape as the equity issuer's power over the collateral in your account, set out on the margin account page. The desk records what it read at deploy, watches the address for those events and says plainly when it can watch nothing, and staked $CALL never counts as collateral, so a frozen token cannot reach your margin.
Staking and the rate discount
Stake $CALL into the Staking contract and your margin rate itself drops by a tier discount, taken off the spread. Each tier has its own debit index accruing at the base rate minus the tier's discount, and your debit is scaled against the index of your tier, so a discount is slower accrual, not a rebate at settlement. A tier change binds at your next transaction or daily charge, or at once through a permissionless sync, and it reprices accrual only from that moment forward. Unstaking is request then claim: the requested amount leaves your tier and stops earning rewards immediately, and becomes claimable after 7 days, one pending request per account.
| Staked $CALL, at least | Rate discount | Rate paid today |
|---|---|---|
| 500,000 | 250 bps | 10.00% |
| 1,000,000 | 400 bps | 8.50% |
| 5,000,000 | 700 bps | 5.50% |
A discount can never eat past the spread, so no rate falls below fed funds, and no tier discount can exceed the 700 bps ceiling, which sits exactly at the deepest tier so governance can narrow a discount but never widen one. Because a discounted account simply pays less gross interest, the cost falls where every other dollar of interest falls: 80 percent on vault depositors and 20 percent on the skim. See the cash vault for where the skim goes. The tier thresholds are denominated in tokens and are revisited at the token generation event against however many the launchpad issues.
Where protocol revenue goes
It does not come back to $CALL. Protocol revenue accrues inside the cash vault in two legs: the skim on interest, which goes to the insurance line while the line is below target and to the protocol balance once it is at target, and the desk fee on a trade, which lands in the protocol balance whole whatever the line holds. A permissionless sweep moves the whole protocol balance to the foundation treasury pinned write-once in the vault. There is no buy of $CALL anywhere in the protocol, no fund holding it and no allocation of revenue to the token. The token's only economic link into the desk is the rate discount above, and settled revenue is listed with its transaction hashes on the protocol page.
Staking rewards and the reserve
Rewards accrue per second toward a 2.50% annual target and are paid in $CALL when you claim. They are paid out of the staking reserve, which sits inside the Staking contract itself: the reserve is simply whatever $CALL the contract holds above the stakes and pending unstake requests it owes, so staked principal can never be spent on rewards. The reserve is funded by a transfer of $CALL to the staking contract once that contract exists, after the token generation event, not by any deploy, so it reads zero until that transfer lands. Draws are capped at 25,000,000 $CALL per rolling year, and nothing is ever minted to cover a claim, because the desk has no mint path.
When the cap and the reserve together cannot cover an accrued claim, the shortfall is forfeited and the effective reward rate floats down. The target is a ceiling, not a debt: the protocol carries no reward liability forward, and the reserve is finite and shrinks with every claim it pays. As it empties, the realised APY drifts below the target rather than the protocol owing anyone the difference.
A claim zeroes your accrual whether or not the reserve can pay it. Claiming against an empty reserve, including one that has not been funded yet, forfeits the whole accrual permanently, while waiting costs nothing, so check the reserve before you claim.
Staked $CALL contributes nothing to collateral value or margin. Its only link into the desk is the read-only tier lookup that prices your rate, and since the desk is open continuously, staking, unstaking and claiming work at any hour, exactly like every other flow here.