What to know
What can go wrong, who holds which powers, and what the protocol does not protect you from.
Basket guarantees a narrow set of things very strongly, and guarantees nothing about the rest. This page is the second half.
What is guaranteed
You can always redeem. Nobody approves it, nobody can pause it, and it works whether or not the creator is still around.
A Basket is always fully backed. Every purchase adds in proportion and every redemption removes in proportion, so what backs the supply is what the contract holds. Anyone can verify it.
Fees can never exceed the ceilings set when it launched.
What is not
Anyone can create a Basket, including bad ones. There is no review. A Basket can hold worthless assets, or assets that only look like the ones you know: Robinhood Chain carries many tokens sharing tickers with the real tokenized stocks. Check what a Basket actually holds, at the contract addresses, not the ticker.
The creator can rebalance. They can sell what it holds and buy something else, within whatever their methodology allows. They cannot take assets out, but they can change what the Basket is made of. If that matters to you, prefer one whose creator has given up control: that is permanent and visible onchain.
Thin markets cost you. Buying a Basket buys its components at market. Where a component trades thinly, that costs more, and on a large enough order it costs a lot. The quote shows the real number before you confirm; read it.
The underlying assets carry their own risks. A tokenized stock is an obligation of whoever issued it. Robinhood's stock tokens can be paused, and their contracts allow the issuer to burn tokens from any address. A Basket holding them inherits all of it.
Who holds which powers
| Can | |
|---|---|
| A Basket's creator | rebalance, change fees under the ceiling, or give up control permanently |
| Protocol governance | decide which capabilities exist protocol-wide, and take a share of creator fees |
| Anyone | buy, redeem, create a Basket, collect an accrued fee |
Protocol governance is the most consequential of the three: the capabilities it approves are what can act on a Basket's assets. It currently sits with a single key, with a move to a multi-signature wallet planned. Until then, treat it as one person's key.
Prices shown are not prices charged
Values displayed in an interface come from a Chainlink feed where one exists, and from the live market otherwise. Those feeds only update when a price moves half a percent, and they go quiet overnight and at weekends, so a figure on screen can be hours old. One was observed 473 minutes stale during a normal trading session.
What you are actually charged never comes from a feed. It comes from the market at the moment your transaction runs. The number to trust is the quote, not the chart.