How Curfew works.

Overview

Curfew is a weekend order queue for tokenized stocks on Robinhood Chain. It exists because the stock market closes and the tokens that track it do not.

The New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq run a regular session from 09:30 to 16:00 Eastern Time, Monday to Friday, minus holidays. Between Friday's close and Monday's open there is no official price for any listed stock. Stock Tokens, the on-chain representations of those stocks, keep trading through that window against small pools. The price they trade at is whatever the last taker paid. Nobody can check it against anything, because there is nothing to check it against.

Curfew replaces weekend price discovery with waiting. While the market is closed, a vault opens for each supported ticker. Buyers deposit USDG. Sellers deposit Stock Tokens. Nobody names a price. When the market opens, an oracle relays the official opening print, and everyone in the vault is crossed at that one number. Whatever cannot be matched inside the vault is routed to the on-chain pool, and only that part pays a fee.

That is the whole protocol. The rest of this document explains each piece, what it costs, what can go wrong, and what Curfew deliberately does not do.

Why weekend prices are broken

A stock price is the output of a market: a continuous auction with many participants, deep books, regulated venues and a consolidated tape. When that auction stops, the number it produced stops being a price and becomes a memory. Friday's close is a fact about Friday.

A tokenized stock trading on-chain over the weekend is not participating in that auction. It is trading in a pool whose depth is a small fraction of the underlying market's, with no arbitrage against the real thing because the real thing is not available. Three effects follow.

Nothing to verify against

On a weekday you can compare a token's on-chain quote to the exchange print and see if you are being asked to overpay. On Saturday there is no print. A weekend quote can drift on news, rumour or a single large order, and there is no reference that says it should not.

Thin liquidity, wide spreads

Weekend pools are quiet, so the cost of moving them is low and the incentive to sit in them is also low. A buyer of ordinary size walks the curve and pays a spread that is, in effect, a tax for wanting to trade when nobody has to be there.

The Monday gap

When the exchange opens, the opening auction produces a real print and the token reconverges to it. The distance between Sunday night's on-chain price and Monday's opening print is the gap. Sometimes it favours the weekend buyer, sometimes the weekend seller. It is never something either of them chose knowingly, because at the time of the trade neither could see it.

Curfew's position is simple: if you want the stock and you are willing to wait until Monday, you should get Monday's price, and you should not pay a weekend spread to get it.

The queue

A Curfew vault is a per-ticker contract that accepts deposits only while the real market is closed and settles them at the next opening print. There is one vault per governed ticker.

When vaults open

Vaults open at the regular-session close (16:00 ET, or 13:00 ET on early-close days) and at the start of every weekend and exchange holiday. They close to new deposits shortly before the opening bell so the oracle relay has a clean cut-off. The status strip on the landing page and the countdown in the app both derive from the same exchange calendar and show the exact print a deposit will queue for.

What you deposit

• Buyers deposit USDG, the stablecoin Stock Tokens are quoted against.
• Sellers deposit the Stock Token itself.

You do not enter a price, a limit, or a slippage tolerance. There is nothing to limit against because the price does not exist yet. What you commit is a quantity: how many dollars you want to spend, or how many tokens you want to sell, at whatever the exchange says the stock is worth at the open.

Cancellation

A queued deposit can be cancelled at any moment before the vault locks for the print. Cancellation is free and immediate, and exactly what was deposited comes back. There is no penalty and no waiting period. This is the mechanism that makes “I changed my mind” costless in a way that a weekend market trade cannot be.

The ticket (ERC-20)

When you deposit into a vault you receive a ticket: a standard ERC-20 token, one contract per vault per side per print. A ticket is a queue receipt. Holding 1,000 units of the NVDA-BUY ticket for a given print means you have 1,000 USDG in that vault's buy side waiting for that print.

Why an ERC-20

Because it makes the queue position liquid without making the price of the underlying discoverable. A ticket can be transferred, sold, or used as collateral elsewhere if another protocol chooses to accept it. Someone who queued on Friday and no longer wants the position on Sunday has two exits: cancel, or sell the ticket to someone who does want it. Neither requires a weekend price for the stock.

What a ticket entitles you to

• Your pro-rata share of the cross at the opening print.
• Cancellation and full return of the underlying deposit before the lock.
• Automatic return of the deposit if the print fails (see Halts and stale feeds).

What a ticket is not

A ticket does not accrue anything while it waits. It is not a claim on protocol revenue, not a share of the fee split, and not a position with any exposure until the cross executes. Its only value is the deposit it represents and the place in line it holds. Anyone who tells you otherwise is describing a different instrument.

The cross

At the opening bell the exchange runs its opening auction and publishes an opening print for each listed stock. Curfew's oracle relays that print on-chain. The vault then executes a single internal cross at that price.

The price

The price is the official opening print, unmodified. Curfew does not compute a VWAP, does not sample a window, does not blend on-chain and off-chain quotes, and does not apply a spread. If the relayed print is 176.42, every buyer and every seller in that vault transacts at 176.42.

Matching

The vault holds B USDG on the buy side and S Stock Tokens on the sell side. At print P, the sell side is worth S × P USDG. The crossed quantity is min(B, S × P).

• If B ≤ S × P, every buyer is fully filled from sellers. Sellers are filled pro-rata up to B / P tokens; the remainder of the sell side is routed.
• If B > S × P, every seller is fully filled from buyers. Buyers are filled pro-rata up to S × P USDG; the remainder of the buy side is routed.

Pro-rata means proportional to ticket balance. Two buyers holding 3,000 and 1,000 tickets in a vault that can cross 2,000 USDG are crossed 1,500 and 500 respectively. Time of deposit does not matter. Staked $CRFW holders receive allocation priority within the crossed portion (see $CRFW).

Settlement

Crossed buyers receive Stock Tokens; crossed sellers receive USDG. Routed portions are executed against the on-chain pool and the proceeds distributed. Tickets are burned as their underlying is settled. The entire process for a vault completes in the transaction that consumes the print, or across a small number of transactions when a vault is large.

Routing and fees

A vault is rarely perfectly balanced. The side with more demand has an imbalance that cannot be crossed internally. That imbalance is routed to the on-chain liquidity pool for the ticker, at the open, when the pool is being arbitraged back toward the real print by everyone else.

Fee schedule

The fee is 0.20% of the routed notional, taken from the routed proceeds. Nothing is charged on the crossed portion, so a participant whose entire order crossed pays nothing to Curfew. Routed portions additionally pay whatever the pool itself charges and bear the pool's price impact; Curfew has no control over either.

Where the fee goes

50% — Buy & burn $CRFW

Routed-portion fees purchase CRFW on the open market and burn it.

30% — Rebate to crossers

Returned pro-rata to participants whose orders crossed internally in that print.

20% — Treasury

Oracle relay costs, audits, governance-directed spend.

The rebate is worth explaining. Thirty percent of routed fees are returned to participants whose orders crossed in that same print, proportional to crossed size. The effect is that the imbalanced side pays and the balanced side is rebated, which is the direction the protocol wants people to lean: toward whichever side of the vault is thinner.

Halts and stale feeds

Curfew settles on one number, so the integrity of that number is everything. Two failure modes are handled explicitly.

The ticker does not print

A stock can be halted at the open for news pending, a volatility pause, or a regulatory action. If no opening print is published for a ticker within the vault's settlement window, the vault does not cross. Every ticket rolls to the next valid opening print. Deposits remain cancellable throughout. If a halt persists past the roll limit set by governance, the vault unwinds and every deposit is sent back.

The feed is stale

The oracle relay carries a timestamp and a freshness window. If the relayed print is older than the window, or if the relay does not arrive at all, the vault treats it as no print and rolls. Curfew will not settle against a number it cannot show was produced by the opening auction of the day it is settling for.

What rolling means for you

• Your ticket stays valid and keeps its balance.
• The next print date is updated in the app and on the ticket's metadata.
• You can cancel at any time and receive your deposit in full.
• No fee is charged for a roll or an unwind.

A rolled vault is a vault waiting one more day for a fact. It is not a loss and it is not a fill.

Holiday calendar

Curfew follows the NYSE trading calendar. Vaults are open whenever the exchange is closed: every night from the close to the next open, every weekend, and every exchange holiday. The list below is computed from the same rules that drive the countdown in the app.

Loading calendar…

Observance follows exchange practice: a holiday on a Saturday is observed the preceding Friday (except New Year's Day), and a holiday on a Sunday is observed the following Monday. Governance maintains this calendar and can add unscheduled closures, such as a national day of mourning, when the exchange announces one.

$CRFW

$CRFW is the protocol token. It has a fixed supply of 1,000,000,000. Fixed at genesis. No emissions schedule, no inflation.

Staking

• Allocation priority on imbalanced crosses. When one side of a vault is larger than the other, staked participants are matched ahead of unstaked ones within the crossed portion.
• A share of the 30% crosser rebate, proportional to stake.

Allocation priority only applies within the crossed portion of an imbalanced vault. It changes who gets matched internally versus routed. It does not change the price, which is the same for everyone, and it does not create a fill that would not otherwise exist.

Governance

• The ticker list: which Stock Tokens get a vault.
• The market calendar: holidays, early closes, and how a halted ticker rolls.

Governance cannot set a price, override the oracle, pause withdrawals, or touch user deposits.

What holding $CRFW does not do

Holding $CRFW without staking confers nothing. Staking confers the two utilities above and nothing else. The token is not required to use Curfew, and no part of the protocol is gated behind it.

Risks

Curfew removes weekend price risk from the trade and replaces it with the risks below. They are real. Read them before depositing.

Oracle dependency

Everything settles on the relayed opening print. If the oracle publishes a wrong number, the vault crosses at a wrong number, and every participant is affected at once. Freshness checks and halt handling reduce the surface for stale or missing data; they do nothing against a correct-looking but incorrect value. The relay operator, its data source, and the on-chain verification of that relay are the protocol's single largest trust assumption.

The opening print can be far from Friday's close

You are committing to buy or sell at a price you have not seen. Earnings, guidance, macro data, geopolitical events and index rebalances all land while the market is closed. A stock can open ten, twenty or forty percent away from where it closed. Queuing a buy on Friday means accepting Monday's print whatever it is, and the same is true of a sell. If you would not be willing to transact at a materially different price, do not queue. Cancel before the lock if the news changes your mind.

Imbalanced crosses

When one side of the vault is much larger than the other, most of that side is routed to the pool. Routed volume pays the 0.20% fee, pays the pool's own fee, and moves the pool. A large routed order at the open can execute at a materially worse price than the print, and the print is the only number Curfew controls. The app shows an estimate of the split, but the real split is not known until the vault locks.

Smart contract risk

The vault, ticket and relay contracts hold user funds and can contain bugs. Audits reduce the probability of loss; they do not eliminate it. Contract addresses, audit reports and the upgrade policy will be published here before any mainnet deployment. Until then, nothing is live and nothing should be sent to any address claiming to be Curfew.

Underlying token and issuer risk

Stock Tokens and USDG are issued by third parties. Curfew has no control over their redeemability, their peg, transfer restrictions, or the issuer's ability to freeze or reclaim tokens. A vault holding a frozen token cannot settle.

Halt and roll risk

A rolled vault keeps your deposit locked in a position you may no longer want, for at least one additional day, unless you cancel. If you do not monitor the vault, a roll can carry you past news you would have reacted to.

Chain and infrastructure risk

Robinhood Chain, its sequencer and its bridges are outside Curfew's control. A chain outage over the settlement window delays the cross. A chain outage during the deposit window may prevent cancellation.

Regulatory risk

Tokenized securities are subject to securities law that varies by jurisdiction and changes. Access to Stock Tokens, and therefore to Curfew, may be restricted or withdrawn for users in some places. Curfew does not make eligibility determinations and does not restrict access at the contract level.

Glossary for newcomers

Stock Token

An on-chain token that tracks a listed stock, issued by a third party and trading on Robinhood Chain. One token is meant to represent one share.

USDG

The US dollar stablecoin that Stock Tokens are quoted and settled against.

Opening print

The official price at which a stock first trades when the exchange opens, produced by the opening auction. Published on the consolidated tape at or shortly after 09:30 ET.

Oracle

The service that reads the opening print from the exchange feed and posts it on-chain with a timestamp, so the vault contract can use it.

Vault

The per-ticker contract that holds deposits while the market is closed and executes the cross at the print.

Ticket

The ERC-20 token you receive for a deposit. It records your place in the queue and can be transferred or sold.

Cross

Matching buyers and sellers inside the vault at one price, without touching an external pool.

Routing

Sending the part of the vault that could not be crossed internally to the on-chain liquidity pool for execution.

Imbalance

The difference between the buy side and the sell side of a vault, measured at the print. The imbalance is what gets routed.

Pro-rata

In proportion to holdings. If the vault can fill half of the buy side, every buyer is filled for half of their deposit.

Halt

A pause in trading of a stock imposed by the exchange or regulator. A halted stock has no opening print until the halt lifts.

Roll

Moving a vault's settlement to the next valid opening print because the current one was missing or stale.

Early close

A trading day on which the exchange closes at 13:00 ET instead of 16:00 ET, such as the day after Thanksgiving.

ET

Eastern Time, the time zone of the New York exchanges. All Curfew times are shown in ET and the calendar accounts for daylight saving changes.