How BÒUND works

01Overview

Every investing platform sells the same components. You open an app, you are shown a wall of tickers, and the work of turning those components into a coherent portfolio is left entirely to you. Platforms compete on which assets you can buy — the list of instruments, the spread, the settlement time.

BÒUND competes on a different axis: which strategies you can own.

A BÒUND is an AI-managed portfolio containing between one and five tokenized assets. It has a permanent identifying number, a creator, an AI manager operating under a published mandate, and a performance history that anyone can inspect. You do not assemble it from parts. You hold it, or you don't.

02Core concepts

How the pieces fit

A creator defines a basket and a mandate. The protocol mints an identity and deploys an AI manager bound to that mandate. Investors deposit capital and receive units. The manager trades the underlying assets on schedule, within its constraints. NAV moves; unit value moves with it. Everything the manager does is written to a public activity log attached to the BÒUND's number.

# the lifecycle, end to end
creator  →  defines assets + weights + mandate
protocol →  mints BÒUND #284, deploys its AI manager
investor →  deposits $500  →  receives 0.0038 units
manager  →  rebalances every 24h within the mandate
public   →  reads holdings, NAV, risk, history at any time
investor →  redeems units  →  receives proportional value

03Anatomy of a BÒUND

Every BÒUND carries the same fields, whether it holds one asset or five.

{
  "id": 284,
  "name": "Tech Momentum",
  "creator": "Alpha Capital",
  "status": "live",
  "assets": [
    { "symbol": "NVDA", "weight": 35 },
    { "symbol": "MSFT", "weight": 25 },
    { "symbol": "BTC",  "weight": 25 },
    { "symbol": "UST",  "weight": 15 }
  ],
  "mandate": {
    "objective": "maximize_risk_adjusted_growth",
    "volatility_cap": 30,
    "rebalance": "24h",
    "drift_band": 5
  },
  "risk": 6,
  "tvl_usd": 18200000,
  "followers": 8192
}

Immutable vs mutable

Some fields are fixed at creation and can never change. This is deliberate — a track record is meaningless if the strategy behind it can be swapped out.

04Creating a BÒUND

Creation is open. There is no application, no minimum AUM and no whitelist.

Step 1 — Choose assets

Select between one and five assets from the supported universe and assign target weights summing to 100%. Minimum weight per asset is 5%; no single asset may exceed 80% unless the BÒUND holds exactly one asset.

Step 2 — Set the mandate

You give the AI manager objectives, not orders. See Mandates for the full parameter set.

Step 3 — Deploy

The protocol validates the configuration, mints the next sequential ID, deploys the manager and opens the BÒUND for deposits. From this point the strategy runs continuously.

Why the five-asset cap

The cap is the most opinionated decision in the product. A strategy you cannot explain in one breath is not a strategy — it is a pile. Five holdings keep the allocation bar readable at a glance and force creators to express an actual view. Investors who want twenty exposures can hold four BÒUNDs, and can see exactly what each one is doing.

Validation rules

• 1 ≤ asset count ≤ 5, no duplicates
• Weights are integers summing to exactly 100
• Minimum weight 5% per asset
• Maximum weight 80% unless single-asset
• Name is 3–32 characters, unique across live BÒUNDs
• Volatility cap between 5% and 200% annualised
• Rebalance cadence is one of 1h, 24h, 7d, 30d

05Asset universe

Everything in a BÒUND is a tokenized representation of the underlying asset, which is what allows a single basket to hold equities, crypto, commodities and government debt side by side and settle them together.

Mixed-hours behaviour

A BÒUND holding both BTC and NVDA has one leg trading continuously and one leg that closes. Managers are aware of session state: rebalances that would require trading a closed market are queued to the next open, and the drift band is temporarily widened so the manager does not thrash the liquid leg to compensate for the illiquid one.

06Mandates

A mandate is the contract between a creator and the AI manager. It is published on the BÒUND's page and cannot be edited after launch.

# a conservative income mandate
objective:      income
volatility_cap: 12%
rebalance:      7d
drift_band:     3%
max_drawdown:   15%
tilt_limit:     5%

# an aggressive momentum mandate
objective:      growth
volatility_cap: 65%
rebalance:      1h
drift_band:     8%
tilt_limit:     20%

The same four assets under those two mandates produce genuinely different portfolios. The mandate, not the asset list, is what the investor is really buying.

07AI managers

Each BÒUND has exactly one AI manager, and each manager runs exactly one BÒUND. There is no shared model making correlated decisions across thousands of portfolios.

The decision loop

1. Observe — prices, realised volatility, correlation, liquidity, funding rates and session state for each held asset.
2. Evaluate — current weights against target weights and the drift band.
3. Propose — a target allocation optimising the objective subject to every constraint in the mandate.
4. Check — the risk engine vetoes any proposal that would breach the volatility cap, tilt limit or drawdown floor.
5. Execute — orders are routed for best price with slippage limits.
6. Record — the trade, its rationale and the resulting NAV are written to the public activity log.

Manager archetypes

08Rebalancing

Rebalancing is what makes a BÒUND a living portfolio rather than a static basket.

Triggers

• Scheduled — the cadence set in the mandate
• Drift — any weight leaves its band, checked continuously
• Risk — the volatility cap or drawdown floor is breached
• Flow — a deposit or redemption large enough to move weights materially

Worked example

BÒUND #284 targets NVDA 35 / MSFT 25 / BTC 25 / UST 15 with a 5% drift band. BTC rallies hard and the basket drifts:

          target   current   drift    action
NVDA        35%      31.2%    -3.8     buy
MSFT        25%      22.4%    -2.6     buy
BTC         25%      33.1%    +8.1     sell  ← breached the 5% band
UST         15%      13.3%    -1.7     buy

BTC's +8.1 drift breaches the band, so a rebalance fires: trim BTC back toward 25% and distribute proceeds across the other three legs in proportion to their shortfall.

Execution

Orders route across venues for best available price. Each order carries a slippage limit; if the limit cannot be met, the order is split and retried across the following blocks rather than filled at a bad price. Rebalances that would cost more in fees and slippage than the drift they correct are skipped and logged as skipped_uneconomic.

09Investing

You do not buy the underlying assets one by one. You deposit into the BÒUND and receive units of it.

deposit $500 into BÒUND #284

  protocol computes NAV per unit ......... $131,578.00
  units issued .......................... 0.0038
  underlying acquired automatically:
      NVDA  35%  →  $175.00
      MSFT  25%  →  $125.00
      BTC   25%  →  $125.00
      UST   15%  →  $ 75.00

Redemption

Redeeming burns your units and returns the proportional value of the basket. You may redeem to the basket's constituent tokens, or have the protocol liquidate to a stable asset in one transaction. There is no lock-up and no redemption gate under normal conditions.

Partial positions

Units are divisible to 18 decimals, so any deposit size maps cleanly onto any basket regardless of the price of the underlying assets.

10Units & NAV

Net asset value is the market value of everything the BÒUND holds, less accrued fees. Unit value is NAV divided by units outstanding.

NAV        = Σ (quantity_i × price_i) − accrued_fees
unit_value = NAV ÷ units_outstanding
units_out  = deposit ÷ unit_value        # on entry
payout     = units × unit_value          # on exit

Because units are issued at the prevailing unit value, entering a BÒUND never dilutes existing holders, and exiting never leaves them with a worse basket than they had.

Pricing

Prices come from redundant oracle feeds with a median filter. If feeds for a held asset disagree beyond a tolerance, or a feed goes stale, the BÒUND enters pricing_paused: deposits and redemptions halt while positions are held untouched. Trading resumes when the feeds agree again.

Performance

Returns are calculated on unit value, not on TVL, so they are unaffected by capital flowing in or out. The figures shown for 24H, 7D, 30D, 1Y and All Time are all unit-value based and net of fees.

11Fees

Both creator fees are fixed at launch and displayed on the BÒUND's page before you deposit. The performance fee uses a permanent high-water mark: a creator who loses 20% and then gains 20% earns nothing on the recovery.

12Identity & numbering

IDs are assigned sequentially from #001 and are never reused, even if a BÒUND is closed. The number is the canonical reference — names can collide across time, numbers cannot.

BÒUND #001        the first strategy ever deployed
BÒUND #284        Tech Momentum, by Alpha Capital
BÒUND #150294     the most recent launch

Low numbers carry the obvious social weight — being #17 says something that being #150,294 does not — and that is intentional. Early creators who stayed live and performed are legible at a glance.

Canonical links

bòund.xyz/284            # canonical
bòund.xyz/b/284          # explicit
bòund.xyz/tech-momentum  # slug, redirects to the number

13Discovery & search

The feed leads with strategies rather than instruments. Five ranked views, each computable over 24H, 7D, 30D, 1Y or All Time.

Search

One field matches across ID, name, creator, held asset, tag and risk score.

284              # by number
tech momentum    # by name
alpha capital    # by creator
gold             # everything holding gold
risk:<4          # conservative strategies only
tvl:>10m         # meaningful size only
assets:2         # exactly two holdings

A BÒUND outside the current top ten still surfaces on an exact match — searching a number always finds it, wherever it ranks.

14Social layer

Every BÒUND carries followers, TVL, performance, comments, a creator profile, a share link and a watchlist state. Creators accumulate a public record across everything they launch.

Verification

A verification badge is earned, not bought. It requires a creator to have run at least one BÒUND live for 90 days, sustained TVL above a threshold, and no mandate breaches. It can be lost.

What is not shown

• Individual investor positions or balances
• Wallet addresses of depositors
• Pending manager decisions before execution — to prevent front-running

15Risk framework

Risk score

Each BÒUND carries a 1–10 score combining realised volatility, asset-class mix, concentration and historical maximum drawdown. It is recomputed daily and it moves.

Protocol guardrails

• Volatility ceiling — sustained breach forces the manager to de-risk
• Drawdown kill switch — breaching max_drawdown moves the BÒUND to a defensive allocation and notifies every holder
• Slippage guard — orders that cannot fill within limits are split, not forced
• Oracle divergence halt — disagreeing feeds pause entry and exit
• No leverage — enforced at the protocol level, not by convention

16Security & custody

Custody

BÒUND is non-custodial. Deposits are held by the BÒUND's contract, not by the creator and not by the protocol team. A creator can never withdraw investor capital — they earn fees, and that is the only path by which value reaches them.

Manager isolation

Each manager holds trading permission for its own BÒUND alone. A compromised or badly behaved manager cannot reach any other portfolio, and its permissions do not include transfer or withdrawal — only rebalancing within the declared basket.

Operational commitments

• Independent audits before mainnet, published in full including unresolved findings
• Timelock on protocol parameter changes
• Public bug bounty
• Open-source contracts

17API

A read-only public API is planned for launch; write endpoints follow.

GET  /v1/bounds                 # list, paginated + filterable
GET  /v1/bounds/:id             # full detail
GET  /v1/bounds/:id/holdings    # current weights + quantities
GET  /v1/bounds/:id/history     # unit value time series
GET  /v1/bounds/:id/activity    # rebalance log with rationale
GET  /v1/creators/:handle       # profile + every BÒUND launched
GET  /v1/search?q=              # same syntax as the site

POST /v1/bounds                 # create (authenticated)
POST /v1/bounds/:id/deposit     # deposit (authenticated)
POST /v1/bounds/:id/redeem      # redeem (authenticated)

Rate limit 60 requests per minute unauthenticated, 600 authenticated. Time series are available at 1m, 1h and 1d resolution.

18Roadmap

19FAQ

Is a BÒUND an ETF?

Structurally it rhymes — a basket, a NAV, units. It differs in that anyone can launch one, the manager is an AI operating under a published mandate, rebalancing happens as often as hourly, and the entire holding and decision history is public in real time.

Can the creator take my money?

No. Creators never hold investor capital. They earn the fees they declared at launch and nothing else.

What if the creator disappears?

Nothing breaks. The mandate is fixed and the manager keeps executing it. A creator's absence has no effect on the strategy.

Why can't I add a sixth asset?

See the five-asset cap. Launch a second BÒUND.

Can I see what the AI is about to do?

Not before it executes — publishing pending trades would invite front-running. Every completed action is published with its rationale.

What happens if a held asset is delisted?

The BÒUND moves to paused, the affected leg is liquidated to a stable asset at the best available price, and holders are notified. The remaining basket continues under its mandate with the freed weight distributed proportionally.

Are returns guaranteed?

No. Nothing here is guaranteed. See the disclaimer.

20Glossary

21Disclaimer