A minute of the market, paid out in stock.
CANDLE is a free game with a real settlement layer. A player calls whether the next one-minute candle of a listed company closes up or down. Right calls earn points, and once a day the pool splits across those points and pays in Robinhood Chain stock tokens: the same ERC-20s that track the price of the underlying share. Nothing is minted, nothing is promised, and every payout is a transfer anyone can open on a block explorer.
The problem with a free market
Everyone watches the market and nobody is paid for watching. Brokers turn attention into commissions, apps turn it into notifications, and the person staring at a chart gets a number that moves. Owning a fraction of a company still asks for an account, a deposit, a wait and a form.
CANDLE inverts that: attention first, ownership as the reward. The entry is one tap on a page, the prize is a real share fragment, and the only thing a player risks is a streak.
A round
A round is one minute of the ticker of the day, aligned to the clock. The open is the last trade at the moment the minute begins, the close is the last trade when it ends. A call is right when the close sits on the player's side of the open; a close exactly equal to the open is a miss for everyone.
During the US session the price comes from the live trade stream and one-minute bars are built from those prints. When the market is closed a real past session replays minute by minute, with its date hidden so the answer cannot be looked up, and the interface says so.
Chainlink feeds on Robinhood Chain update on a 0.5% move or once a day, so they cannot drive a minute-by-minute game. They do the other job: pricing the vault in dollars.
Points, streaks and candles
A right call is one point. From the third right call in a row each is worth two, from the fifth each is worth five. A wrong call resets the streak and never touches points already earned.
Playing costs a candle. A new player holds five and one returns every six hours, so the game is a habit rather than a session. Quests hand out more, and $CANDLE holders refill faster and score higher.
The pool, exactly
The vault holds stock tokens and nothing else. Each day after 00:00 UTC the keeper pays out 10% of every token balance, split across all points earned that day, and the contract refuses more than that per day even if the server asks.
The formula is one line: your payout equals your points divided by all points in play, times the day's payable balance of each token. Players with no payout wallet keep their place on the board and their share stays in the vault.
| Token | In vault | Payable today |
|---|---|---|
| TSLA | 0.00000 · $0 | $0 |
| NVDA | 0.00000 · $0 | $0 |
| AAPL | 0.00000 · $0 | $0 |
| SPY | 0.00000 · $0 | $0 |
Because the share is a percentage of what remains, the pool cannot be drained: it decays toward the level that trading fees refill it to.
Where the money comes from
The vault was seeded with the founder's own money, and from launch it is refilled by $CANDLE. Creator fees from every trade land in an immutable splitter that sends half to the pool treasury and half to a buyback. The treasury half is swapped into stock tokens on Uniswap v3 and deposited into the vault.
No trades, no pool: the game still runs on streaks and rank, and the interface says the pool is empty instead of inventing one. Lots of trades, big pool. That is the whole loop, and it is visible on-chain.
The token
$CANDLE is not a ticket. Playing is free without it. It is an amplifier that is read from your payout wallet on-chain, with no staking contract, no lock and no admin switch.
| Tier | Hold | Candles | Refill | Points |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | 0 | 5 | 6 h | ×1 |
| Holder | 10,000 | 8 | 2 h | ×1.5 |
| Major | 100,000 | 15 | 1 h | ×2 |
| Whale | 1,000,000 | 30 | 30 min | ×3 |
| Legend | 5,000,000 | 60 | 10 min | ×4 |
It is also spendable: 2,000 $CANDLE buys five candles on the spot, half of that burns and half goes to the buyback.
The token is not live yet. When it launches, its contract address appears here and holder tiers switch on.
The contracts
CandleVault holds the stock tokens. Only the keeper can pay out, never more than the daily cap, and there is no owner withdrawal: what goes in can only leave as a payout. The governor is a 2-of-3 Safe and its single power is rotating the keeper key.
FeeSplitter takes ETH and splits it by an immutable ratio between the pool treasury and the buyback. Anyone can trigger it.
Fair play
The pool is fixed for the day, so extra accounts dilute every player's slice rather than the house. On top of that: candles are capped per player and per network, one guess per round, and the vault cannot pay more than its daily share no matter what the server asks it to do.
Roadmap
Ordered by subject, not by date. No quarters, no promises we would quietly move later.
Risks, stated plainly
The pool can be zero. Stock tokens rise and fall with the share, and a fragment worth a dollar today can be worth less tomorrow. The tokens are issued by Robinhood Assets (Jersey) Limited and their issuer can pause transfers; if that happens, that token cannot be paid out until it lifts.
The price feed for rounds is a third-party market data stream. If it stops, rounds close on the last known price or the day is not scored, and the interface says which. CANDLE is not affiliated with Robinhood or any listed company, this paper is not financial advice, and the game is not a security offering.