How Retail works

Retail is an airdrop machine for $RETAIL token. We bought a dead public company, renamed it, and now sweep trading fees into $1 airdrops for eligible Robinhood accounts through the Partner Stock Program rail. This document explains the full pipeline — from a fee being collected to $1 of $RETAIL landing in your account — and the public ledger that records every step.

Architecture at a glance

The system is four cooperating services connected by a single event bus we call the Cartstream. Each service is stateless and idempotent; the only source of truth is the ledger.

# the retail pipeline
Fee Pool ──▶ Collection ──▶ Allocation ──▶ Settlement ──▶ Ledger
  (trades)     (sweep)       (matching)     (delivery)     (public)
                 │                │              │
                 └──── Cartstream event bus ─────┘

1 · Fee collection

Every airdrop starts with a fee. The Collection service sweeps trading fees from $RETAIL transactions into the airdrop treasury. Fees are custodied before anything is promised to a recipient — we never allocate a drop we cannot fund.

• Batched sweeps. Fees are aggregated into 60-second windows to maximise airdrop batch size.
• Treasury-first. A fee is not eligible for allocation until it clears the treasury.
• Fixed drop size. Each recipient gets exactly $1.00 worth of $RETAIL per block assignment.

2 · Allocation

The Allocation service decides who gets $1 of $RETAIL. It draws from the eligible Robinhood account pool and assigns each selected account a drop, weighted by the fair-share curve below. Allocation is deterministic given a block seed, so the same block always produces the same result — this is what lets the explorer show identical numbers on every refresh.

// fair-share weight for a candidate account
weight(a) = base
          + streak_bonus(a)      // consecutive eligible days
          - recency_penalty(a)   // received recently? wait your turn
          + entropy(block_seed, a.id)

3 · Settlement

Once a block is allocated, the Settlement service delivers each $1 drop over the Partner Stock Program. Delivery is atomic per recipient: either the full $1 of $RETAIL lands or the allocation is rolled back into the next block. Recipients never see a partial or pending drop — only a confirmed one.

4 · The public ledger

Every settled block is appended to the ledger with its hash, token, recipient count, total value airdropped, and fee deployed. The ledger is the canonical record; the website merely renders it. Because block contents are a pure function of the block index, any client can reconstruct the entire history and arrive at the exact same totals — no trust required.

// a ledger block, as rendered by the explorer
{
  "index": 152_340,
  "hash":  "0x9c1af23b8e04",
  "kind":  "AIRDROP",
  "token": "RETAIL",
  "value": 14.00,
  "recipients": 14,
  "fee":   4.21,
  "t":     "genesis + 152340 · 60s"
}

Eligibility

Any active Robinhood account in a supported region is a candidate. There is nothing to sign up for — the allocator discovers eligibility, you don't apply for it. Accounts that recently received a drop are temporarily deprioritised so the pool stays fair.

• Active Robinhood account in a supported region
• Able to receive assets via Partner Stock Program
• Not currently in cooldown from a recent drop

Ledger API

The same engine that powers the explorer is exposed read-only. (Illustrative — endpoints are simulated for this demo.)

GET /v1/ledger/tip             # latest block index
GET /v1/ledger/block/:index    # a single block
GET /v1/ledger/totals          # cumulative value/fees/recipients
GET /v1/ledger/stream          # server-sent events, one per new block

Security model

Retail is a delivery service, not a wallet. We never need — and will never ask for — your password, MFA codes, seed phrases, or a payment method. The only direction value ever flows is toward you.

Glossary

See it live on the explorer →