The honest version

Every hub is priced from a named public source, almost all US government. The rule is about the figure, not the passport: the number has to describe a US market, though the body publishing it may be foreign. A hub is a token the protocol sells on demand at a real commodity's price: 1 EGGS is one dozen Grade-A large eggs at the latest BLS print. Buying through this site mints fresh hub tokens at exactly the oracle price, with no spread. A market-making keeper also quotes the hub on a public pool so aggregators can route it and holders can sell. Every oracle number on this site links to its source.

Burn the hub coin, take USDC at the oracle price, straight from the hub’s redemption vault. It is permissionless and has no spread. The vault holds exactly what buyers paid in — filled by every sale of the hub coin at the oracle price, whether that was a direct mint or a keeper ask fill, and drained by nothing except redemption. The keeper’s market making cannot spend a cent of it.

Redemption is bounded by that balance. A request the vault cannot cover fails outright rather than filling you at a worse price, and the interface sends you to the pool instead, where the keeper quotes bids just under the oracle price funded from pool fees and the protocol’s share.

Peg coverage on each hub page is the vault measured against what redeeming every circulating coin at the oracle price would cost. At rest it sits at 100%, because every coin in circulation was sold at the oracle price and that USDC is in the vault. It falls when the commodity rises, since the same dollars now owe more.

After a large upward move it will not cover everyone, and the people who redeem first do best. That is not a flaw being disclosed reluctantly — it is what the coverage number is for, and it is published so you can check it before you need it rather than discover it at the moment you do.

Two numbers on every hub page: what the keeper holds in USDC, and what it would take to buy back every circulating hub token at the current oracle price. The gap between them is uncovered. The bar is green for the covered part and hatched for the gap. We show it because it is the single most important number here.

Say eggs 5×. The protocol sold EGGS at the old price and holds roughly that much USDC per token, a fifth of what a full buyback at the new price costs. The keeper's bids absorb what they can and then there is no bid until new buyers arrive at the new price. The protocol never owes the difference; holders bear it. Collateralizing it would make this a perp, which is a different product. This is the trade you are making.

Every trade pays a flat fee set at launch, the same on the curve and on the graduated pool (a dynamic surcharge can add to it during violent volatility). It has three parts: 0.5% to the protocol (half swapped and burned into $SME, half to treasury), an optional 0.5% to the creator, and 1–4% to the token's holders. The creator picks the holder reward at launch. The creator's share is claimed directly from the curve (and, after graduation, accrues to their locked LP position); it never passes through the protocol. Holder and protocol fees are claimed from the pool hourly, and the holder share is then paid straight to holders in the commodity hub. There is nothing to claim and no deadline: it arrives in your wallet. A balance too small to be worth its own transaction is carried forward and paid the first hour it clears the floor.

Total fee runs 1.5% (1% holders, no creator fee) to 5% (4% holders + 0.5% creator), always including the 0.5% protocol slice. Both choices, holder reward and creator fee, are fixed at launch and can never be changed for a live token.

Feed-priced hubs read a Switchboard On-Demand oracle feed: anyone can push the on-chain print permissionlessly (update_ref_price_from_feed), the program verifies the oracle signatures, staleness and sample quorum, and the same drift caps apply as everywhere else. Each such hub links its feed and the exact job definition on its page. BIGMAC has no live data source anywhere (The Economist publishes it twice a year), so it is protocol-posted and labeled as such. Hubs whose sources are not live yet stay keeper-posted with the feed staged and visible.

Each hub carries a protocol liquidity position locked on-chain with an unlock time of never. Withdrawal physically fails. That is a statement about the protocol not pulling liquidity. It is not a promise about price, and you will not find the word "floor" anywhere on this site because there isn't one.