The protocol, without
the hand-waving.
The curve, the fees and the failure modes — in the order you will meet them when you buy your first key.
What faces is
Every account on the index has its own bonding curve. Buying a key moves you up that curve and makes the next key cost more; selling walks it back down. There is no order book and no counterparty — the curve itself is always both the bid and the ask.
A key is not a subscription and does not expire. It is a position in one person's curve, and it earns a share of every trade that happens on that curve after you buy it.
How a key is priced
Key number n costs n² × 100 $faces. Prices are fixed in tokens, not dollars, so a key costs the same number of $faces whatever the token is worth.
The first key is free and belongs to the account itself. It anchors the curve — without it the next key would also be free, so it can never be sold.
Buying several keys at once costs the sum of each step, not the current price times the count. Ten keys starting from a supply of one cost 38,500 $faces, not 1,000.
Where the 13% goes
Every trade carries a fee, charged the same way on buys and on sells:
Buying 10 keys at a supply of one works out like this:
Because the fee applies both ways, buying and selling straight back costs about 26%. That is deliberate. faces is built for holding a position, not for flipping one, and the price has to move a quarter before a round trip breaks even.
The holder pool
This is the part that makes a key worth owning when its subject goes quiet. Three percent of every trade goes into a pool that is distributed to the people holding that account's keys, in proportion to how many they hold.
You earn from the account being traded, not from the account posting. Sell your keys and the earnings stop with them — there is nothing to accrue and nothing left behind.
If three wallets hold 50%, 30% and 20% of the keys, the next holder fee is split in exactly those proportions.
Claiming your account
Accounts are listed before their owners arrive, which means people can already be trading you. Their 5% does not go anywhere in the meantime: it accrues against the account and waits.
To take it, sign in with the X account in question and connect the wallet you want to be paid to. The handle is verified through X itself, the wallet is recorded on-chain, and everything that accumulated before you showed up is claimable immediately.
An account can only be claimed once, and only the wallet it was claimed to can withdraw its fees afterwards.
The faces score
The score next to each account is its curve reserve plus its lifetime volume — how much is riding on someone, and how hard they are being traded.
It is computed entirely from on-chain state. No follower counts, no impressions, no API that can go down or be gamed with bots. Moving the score means moving real money through the curve, and every attempt to move it pays fees to the people already holding.
On-chain
The curve, the vault and the fee split all live in one contract on Robinhood Chain. Key balances are state inside that contract; nobody, including us, can move them.
What can go wrong
- The curve cuts both ways. If you buy high on the curve and everyone below you sells, you are selling back into a much cheaper part of it. Early keys are cheap for a reason.
- Prices are in tokens. A key that cost 8,100 $faces still costs 8,100 $faces later, but what that is worth in dollars moves with the token — up and down.
- Fees are real. 13% each way. A trade has to work quite hard before it beats not trading.
- Attention is not a floor. Nothing about being listed here obliges anyone to stay interesting, and the pool only pays while people are trading.