How this works.

01Where the salary comes from

Every fee the protocol charges is paid in ETH and split 70/30 between the draw pot and the book account. When the pot crosses its threshold, any wallet can open a round and keeps 0.5% of the pot for the gas it spent.

The round splits the pot across the six desks by their share of this epoch’s covers, converts each slice into that book’s own ticker, and pays it directly into desk wallets pro rata by desk weight.

Everyone on the floor is on the draw. Runner weight is 1.0× and Chef Patron is 7.0×, so the spread across the whole firm is seven to one — the desk changes the size of a share, never whether there is one.

02What a promotion costs

Three things, and money is only one of them. Points, earned by working; a reinvest, paid out of the desk’s own balance; and time served in the desk below. A desk that has the points but not the days does not move.

A new weight does not count for 24 hours. A desk taken minutes before a round pays at the old weight, which is what stops the ladder being climbed on the way into a payout and abandoned on the way out.

03Points

Points cannot be bought at any price. They come from session and from tickets, they are banked on chain against the desk, and they are cleared to zero the moment the desk changes hands.

That last rule is the one that does the work. A desk carrying five thousand points would be worth more than a desk without them, and the whole ladder would become a market in résumés rather than a record of work. Clearing them keeps one price honest for all 349.

04The firm

Eight desks, unchanged from Escoffier except that they now carry weights. Seats is the cap across the whole book — not per section.

05Buying in

The ladder is purchasable up to Broker and no further. Paid in $PEN and burned in full on receipt — a pure supply sink, not revenue. Senior Broker and above are taken with points, a reinvest and time served, and the corner office is only ever taken by contest.

Half the firm being for sale is a deliberate line, not an oversight. Money gets you onto the floor and partway up it; it does not get you the firm.

06The agency

100,000 $PEN for every desk, first to last. 50,000 of that is burned on the spot and the rest goes to the draw. On top of the flat price the agency charges 10% of the ETH notional to hand out whichever desk is next, or 10% to hand out one you named.

The agency only sells. There is no sell-back and no refund, and a desk cannot be handed to anybody else: it is a row against your address, not an object. The only way out is to stop working it, which costs nothing and returns nothing.

That is a deliberate trade. Nobody can buy a seniority somebody else earned, and nobody holds a position purely to flip it — but equally, everything spent getting up the floor is spent.

07Shoot-out

Once a capped desk is full the only way in is a contest against a named holder. Both sides put up a deposit; a successful challenge takes the seat, a defended one splits the deposit and burns half of it.

349 seats are capped in total across Broker and above. The corner office is never filled by promotion, even when it is empty — six of them exist and every one is held by contest.

08The books

Six desks, six books, one per tokenised ticker. The names are ours and the companies have no involvement of any kind — a desk at Ashfield & Co is paid in MSFT, and that is the entire relationship.

09What can go wrong

The pot follows covers. Weight sets the size of your slice, not the size of the cake. Seven times a share of almost nothing is almost nothing.

The owner can withdraw. Protocol contracts include an owner withdrawal function and it reaches the draw pots, not only fee revenue. The owner can also add seats to any capped desk. Both of those are true today and both are worth knowing before you take a desk.

Settlement is from inventory. On-chain stock pools here are shallow and one of the six tickers has no pool at all, so a round pays from pre-funded inventory at the oracle price rather than swapping into a thin book.

Not available everywhere. Swapping into tokenised stock is restricted for US residents.

10Legal

Draw and season distributions are protocol AMM fees redistributed between desks. They are not dividends and confer no equity, ownership or shareholder rights; mechanically the payout is identical to a liquidity provider collecting fees. House names are fictional. Nothing here is financial, investment, legal or tax advice.

BULLPEN is an independent project on Robinhood Chain. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by or connected to Robinhood Markets, Inc., nor to any company whose ticker appears on this site.