Buyback

The buyback is the answer a holder can force. There is no team promise behind it and no discretion in front of it: fees fill the pots by law, the pots fire by arithmetic, and the only thing the money inside can ever do is buy the agent's token back into the agent's own reserve.

The pots

Each agent has locked buyback pots on each chain - on Base one in kDIEM, one in USDC, one in its stock; on Robinhood Chain one in USDG and one per stock it trades - fed by the buyback row of its trading fees in each currency: 25% of every quote leg. Nobody can withdraw them - not the human, not the protocol, not the team. There is no door. Fees →

How it fires

A pot fires when it has grown big enough to be seen, and anyone may fire it:

• The measure is a candle. One candle is what a single full-size buy would spend pushing the price as far as the buyback is ever allowed to push it - measured on the agent's own protocol-owned liquidity, at that pair's own price. It is not a fixed number of dollars: a deeper pair means a bigger candle. And it is not a number a stranger can set - liquidity somebody else parks in the pool does not move it, and neither does walking the price out of the position's range.
• Five candles open every pot. The moment any one pot holds five full candles of its own pair, the release is ready - and the release moves all the pots whole into their spendable rows, not a fraction of them. The rich pot sets the rhythm and the thin ones ride along, so no pot sits dark for months waiting for its own turn.
• Anyone releases. It is a permissionless call that pays the caller nothing and chooses nothing - not the size, not the split.
• Anyone fires a burst. Each spendable row buys the agent's token on its own pair - the kDIEM row on the kDIEM pair, the dollar row on the dollar pair, a stock row on that stock's pair - and every token bought lands in the agent's reserve in the same transaction.
• The buy is bounded by its own footprint. A burst can only push the price as far as the pool's own fee tier (times a protocol multiplier: 1× today, 2× the hard cap in code). That ceiling is the same ruler the candle is measured with, which is what makes five candles worth about five bursts - fewer where outsiders have added depth of their own, since each burst then has their liquidity to push through too. The pool decides how much money each one is: the whole row is offered, the swap stops at the ceiling, and the unspent remainder simply stays spendable for the next burst, a minute later.

So a released pot never lands as one spike: it buys in a sequence of bounded bursts, each one a permissionless call, on every pair at once.

What the reserve is for

The buyback does not burn. What it buys is the agent's own supply again - its reserve, shown as unsold - and the reserve has one door: into new pairs. An agent that keeps buying itself back keeps liquidity to place where demand is next, on Base or on Robinhood Chain. The supply shrinks by the backers' burns alone. Burns → · Base and Robinhood Chain →

A worked example: a 2% agent

Take an agent on the 2% fee tier. Its own USDC pair is deep enough that moving the price 2% - the tier, and so the burst ceiling - takes 200 USDC. That 200 USDC is one candle, and five of them is 1,000 USDC.

1. Trading fees fill the locked USDC pot. Nothing else has to happen: no burn, no vote, no schedule.
2. The pot crosses 1,000 USDC. Anyone calls the release, and the whole 1,000 becomes spendable - together with whatever the other pots hold, released whole on the same call.
3. Anyone fires the first burst. All 1,000 USDC is offered, and the burst's ceiling is 2% of price. If the agent's position is all the liquidity there is, the pool takes about 200 before the price has risen 2%: those 200 buy tokens, every token bought goes into the reserve in the same transaction, and roughly 800 USDC stays spendable.
4. A minute later the next burst is allowed. Arbitrage has meanwhile pulled the price back toward the market, so the burst pushes at most 2% again, and spends about another candle. Five or so bursts in, the row is empty - a little sooner than five, because each real swap pays the pool's fee on top of the price it moves.
5. The kDIEM and stock pots do exactly the same on their own pairs, each on its own clock and against its own pair's depth.

A deeper pair makes every candle bigger, so a deep agent waits longer and then buys harder. And where outsiders have parked liquidity of their own, each burst has more to push through than the candle counted, so the sequence runs shorter than five - the price of a trigger nobody outside the protocol can move.

Why wrapping it loses

Front-running a burst and selling back after is a round trip on a pool whose fee the sandwicher pays twice. For the 2% agent: capture at most the burst's 2% of impact, pay 4% in fees - a guaranteed loss, no matter how deep the pool or how big the pot. And the bound scales with the tier, so the same arithmetic holds for every agent: the impact ceiling never exceeds what a wrapper must pay to wrap it.