Decentralisation

PopularityX is fully on-chain and non-custodial, its prices are set by trading alone with no curator, and anyone can build a pricing mechanism on top without permission. This page sets out those properties, then states what still depends on the team today: owner keys, allowlisted board creation, a hosted relayer, and unaudited contracts, along with the sequence for constraining them.

Fully on-chain

PopularityX is fully on-chain. Positions, balances, and market state all live in smart contracts. The AMM is on-chain too. Nothing is held by PopularityX, and nothing requires PopularityX to be running for your positions or prices to exist.

Non-custodial

Your keys, your funds: everything you hold remains under your control at all times. There is no custodian and no withdrawal request. You interact directly with the contracts.

No price curator

Every alternative measure of who matters requires a curator: someone who decides what counts, how to weight it, and how to update the methodology over time. That decision introduces a single point of bias and control.

Price formation has no curator. The price is set entirely by trading activity. No entity, including PopularityX, can move a price without putting capital at risk. Which names appear on a board is a separate question, covered under The trust model today below.

Permissionless liquidity

Anyone can deploy an AMM or order book on top of a live PopularityX board. The Ledger, which holds all positions and enforces solvency, is open. Adding a new pricing mechanism requires no permission from the PopularityX team.

Open contracts

Source code and audit reports will be published ahead of launch. Integration means reading the contracts directly. Hosted services exist for convenience, a relayer for gasless trading and an indexer for price history, but nothing depends on them: every action can be taken directly against the contracts, with your own gas.

The trust model today

The team holds the owner keys today. Creation of new boards is allowlisted, which names appear on a board is decided by the board's creator, fee parameters are owner-set, and the hosted relayer is operated by the team. The contracts are unaudited. Evaluating PopularityX today means trusting the team's operational discipline on those points, bounded by the property above: nothing depends on the team's services, and every action can be taken directly against the contracts.

The sequence from here, in order: the security audit; multisig and timelock control, with admin power progressively constrained before real deposits; then permissionless market creation.