How Slab Market works

A Slab Market token references a graded card’s price. The market prices itself on a bonding curve from the first trade, and the card’s reference price sits beside it so you can always see the basis. The two are not linked by any mechanism: nothing forces the token to trade at the card’s price, and nothing redeems one for the other.

This distinction is enforced rather than trusted. The price feed is display-only and is never read by a program that moves funds, which is the load-bearing boundary in the whole design: a stale or manipulated feed becomes a cosmetic bug rather than an exploit. It is also why a market survives its card becoming unpriceable. The number beside the chart turns into a dash; the curve, the pot and every holder’s balance carry on untouched.

Slab Market holds no card for any token. Tokens confer no ownership of, and no claim on, any card, and are not redeemable for one.

A pairing is an explicit list of card identities, from one to 100, chosen by the launcher and frozen the moment the market opens. It is a list rather than a rule on purpose: a rule like “every PSA 10 Pokemon card” describes the whole market, not a pairing, and a rule narrow enough to be a pairing is a list. The list never changes, so a pairing cannot be redefined under the people holding the token.

The cards behind the list stay live. A member is a card identity, not one slab, so a new graded copy of a member that arrives in the vault is part of the pairing the moment it lists, and one being sold removes a copy rather than the card. Every member has to be worth at least $1,000 on its own, because the prize is a member and a list with one cheap card raffles a cheap card.

Live, thin, depleted

Every market says how many copies of its members are listed for sale right now, because that is what the pot can actually buy. Three or more is live. One or two is thin, and thin is where most markets start: across the catalogue, most priced cards have exactly one copy listed. None is depleted.

A depleted market is not a broken one. The pot keeps filling and stands as a public bid: any member listed at or below the pot’s balance is bought. Anyone holding a physical copy can vault it with the issuer, list it, and sell it to the pot. The token keeps trading throughout, because the price it tracks is a label and never something a program reads.

A declared fallback

At launch, and only at launch, a launcher may declare a second list and a waiting period. If the market has been depleted for that long, the pot may buy from the second list instead. It is a different prize and is labelled as one on the market page. Nothing can be added to either list afterwards, and Slab Market does not offer a cash draw in place of a card.

What the pot buys

When a draw comes, the pot buys the most valuable member it can afford that has a listed copy, and rolls whatever is left into the next cycle. A quiet market raffles the cheapest member; a busy one reaches the chase card. Prize quality scales with the market on its own.

Every market launches with the same token, and that is on purpose: identical supply makes two market caps directly comparable at a glance.

The standard is not a preference. Token-2022 is what makes a transfer tax enforceable at the token level, and the transfer tax is the only thing that keeps funding a prize pot after a market leaves the curve.

Graduation

The curve raises 85 SOL, the venue’s default and the figure the platform this design follows launches at. When it has, the remaining 20.69% of supply and the SOL raised seed a pool at the 0.25% tier and trading continues there. What is derived rather than chosen is the price: the program sets the curve’s reserves so that its closing price equals the pool’s opening price, so there is no step change at exactly the moment a market is most watched. Trading happens on Raydium’s interface or through any aggregator that routes it; the market page links the token there.

Measured across 25 graduated markets on the platform this design follows, the median time from creation to graduation was 23.7 minutes. The curve is a price-discovery phase measured in minutes, not a fundraise, and anything built on the assumption that a market sits on it for days is built wrong.

The creator’s opening buy

A creator may buy up to 10% of supply, executed as the pool’s first trade and atomic with pool creation, so there is no block in which anyone can front-run it. The cap is a fifth of what comparable platforms allow, and the reason is specific to this design: raffle entries are weighted by holdings, so a creator’s position is also a permanent share of every draw. On a platform with no pot, a large creator position costs holders nothing. Here it comes straight out of the prize.

A trade on the curve therefore costs 2.25% or 4.25% all in, depending on which tax the launcher chose: the venue’s fee and the pool fee are taken from the SOL going in, and the tax is withheld from the tokens coming out. After graduation the curve fees end and the pool’s 0.25% tier takes their place, plus a 0.05% pool creator fee that Raydium charges on every swap and that we route into the market’s pot, so a trade costs 1.3% or 3.3%. The trader’s cost matches the platform this design follows, whose 1% platform fee also sits on top of the venue’s, which is why these figures are known to work rather than hoped to.

Creators on this launchpad earn no fee, from any layer, at any time. On other launchpads half of the pool fee is the creator’s; here that half goes into the creator’s own market’s pot, the tax goes there in full, and the platform’s half runs the platform. A creator’s stake in their market is the opening buy they disclosed, which enters the raffle like every other holding.

Why the tax sits on the token

A transfer tax applies to every transfer and is enforced by the token program itself, so it keeps funding the pot after a market graduates. Funding the pot from curve fees alone would stop the raffle exactly when a token became successful enough to leave the curve, which is the opposite of what the mechanic is for.

The choice between 1% and 3% is a real trade and the launch flow states it in the units it is actually made in. 3% fills the pot three times faster; 1% is cheaper to trade, so more people trade. The rate is fixed at launch and never migrates, which is why the menu is two options rather than a free field.

Each market has its own pot, segregated from every other, and its balance, target and progress are public. When the pot can afford a member of its pairing, Slab Market buys the most valuable one it can and raffles it to holders. Then the cycle starts again with whatever was left over.

The prize is the tokenized card rather than a physical one, and that is what makes the mechanic affordable enough to repeat. The issuer’s own withdrawal flow burns the token to ship the physical card, and the holder pays that shipping, so the cost of a cycle is the card and fractions of a cent.

A raffle is a probabilistic reward funded by fees. It is not a distribution owed to any holder, and no token entitles anyone to a prize.

A raffle entry is weighted by how much you hold and by how long you have held it. The time component accumulates across draw cycles rather than continuously, so it is legible: you have held through three draws, or you have not.

Everyone starts at 1.00x, because a zero base would be a lock-out rather than a reward. The increment is +0.15x per completed cycle and the cap is 2.00x, so a holder of any tenure is worth at most double a newcomer. Cycles run 24h then 48h then 72h thereafter: a fast first draw proves the mechanic, and later cycles give the pot time to refill.

Two rules that are not optional

Selling part of a position reduces its weight through the minimum-balance rule but does not reset the multiplier. Punishing profit-taking drives full exits, which is the behaviour this is built to discourage. Only going to zero forfeits what you have accumulated.

A card, not a slab

A token references a card identity, not one graded copy sitting in one vault. A particular copy can be sold, delisted, or burned to ship the physical card, and a reference pointing at it would simply cease. An identity is what the hobby already prices anyway: nobody quotes a certificate number, they quote a year, a set, a card and a grade.

Grade is part of that identity, and not out of fussiness. Across cards listed at more than one grade, the median price ratio between the lowest and highest graded copy is 5x, and the 90th percentile is 177x. Merging grades would produce a figure spanning assets that differ by two orders of magnitude.

Where a price comes from

Sources are ranked by how much they deserve to be believed, and they are never blended. A figure mixing a sale with an asking price is neither what anyone paid nor what anyone wants, and there would be no honest way to label it.

The third column is the honest part. All four tiers carry data now, but the two stronger ones are thin: a card at the value floor sells a few times a season, not a few times a day, and the sales tiers accumulate one sale at a time. Where a card has recent sales they outrank its asking prices, which is the point of ranking rather than blending; where it has none, its price still rests on asks banded against a custody valuation, and the page says so.

Measured on 2026-09-14, against the catalogue as synced on 2026-09-14: 54,579 card identities, of which 7,883 carry a live asking price and 161 survive the checks and are priced well enough to launch against. That is 0.29%. The rest hold a custody valuation and nothing else, or are worth less than the floor below. What the launch page actually offers is the subset of those an administrator has reviewed against the quality standard, twelve named rules with the evidence each looked at, and marked offered; nothing is offered by default.

Every price carries a confidence score, and every displayed price says which source produced it. A card whose only figure is an insured value cannot be launched against at all, and neither can one scoring below 0.15. Refusing costs a market someone wanted; allowing it would put a number on a page that nothing stands behind.

Only cards worth having

A card must also be worth $1,000 or more, judged on the lower of its reference price (what it sold for, or an asking price near the market) and its insured value. A market exists to fill a pot that buys the card and gives it away, and a pot working toward a card worth thousands is a different product from one working toward a card worth tens. Judging on the lower figure means an inflated listing cannot qualify a cheap card: a card insured for a few hundred dollars and listed for a few thousand is, for this purpose, worth a few hundred dollars.

Asking prices are the interim standard, and only the sane ones count. Measured across the whole catalogue in September 2026, half of all asking prices sat more than double the insured value, while genuine sales cleared at a median 0.94x of it; so an ask outside 0.5x to 2x of what the market says is recorded and disregarded, never shown as a price. Once a card has settled sales, the figure the floor is judged on comes from what it actually sold for, that sold figure is itself held to the insured value or to a second sales source before it counts, and an asking price becomes context.

An offered card is also one a pot could buy: a copy listed at no more than 1.25x its market value, or a card the licensed feed shows trading often enough to be bought off the platform and vaulted. The pot never pays more than that multiple for a copy, whatever a seller asks.

When a price goes stale

Each source expires on its own schedule, because the evidence decays at different rates: an asking price is evidence only while the listing stands, a completed sale stays a historical fact for far longer. Past its window, a price renders as a dash. A last-known number dressed as a live one is worse than showing nothing.

These prices have not yet been measured against an independent source. The method, the ranking and the confidence scoring are all in place; the accuracy is not yet a number we can publish, and calling it accurate before measuring it would be the exact overstatement this page exists to avoid.

Slab Market is under construction in public. The catalogue and the pricing layer are live and reading real data; the on-chain half is not deployed.

No wallet is asked to approve anything today. The launch flow validates and computes exactly what the programs will take, and its final button is disabled, because the programs do not exist and will not be put in front of anyone until they have been audited.

Start at the catalogue or walk through the launch flow.