Terms of use

1. In brief

2. What this covers

These terms govern your use of thehood.markets (“this site”), the website operated by The Hood. Using the site means you accept them. If you do not, stop using it.

They cover the website. They do not govern the smart contracts, because nobody governs the smart contracts — see section 4.

3. The site is an interface, not the protocol

The Hood is a set of smart contracts deployed on Robinhood Chain (chain 4663). This site is one way to read those contracts and to build transactions for your wallet to sign. It is not the only way: the contracts are public, and anyone can interact with them directly from a block explorer, a script or a different frontend.

Consequently, taking this site offline does not stop a token trading, does not free locked liquidity and does not stop a creator earning fees. The site can be removed. The contracts cannot.

4. Immutability, and the audit

The launchpad contracts are immutable: no proxies, no upgrade path, no admin key over your funds. What was deployed is what runs, permanently.

This cuts both ways, and you should understand both. Nobody can change the rules on you after you have bought — and nobody can fix a bug either. There is no upgrade that patches a flaw and no mechanism to recover funds lost to one.

The one administrative control that exists is a pause on new launches. By construction it can never block a claim, a sell or a graduation already owed to someone.

The contracts are audited by Claude Fable 5, and the result is published in full, including what was not fixed. That is on the security page.

5. Custody — what we do not do

This site is non-custodial. It has no accounts, no balances and no deposits. Stated as flatly as it deserves:

• We do not receive, hold, control or have any ability to move your assets.
• We do not see your private key or your seed phrase, and we will never ask for either. Any person or page that does is attempting to steal from you, whatever it claims to be.
• We do not reverse, cancel, freeze or refund a transaction. Nobody can.

Every movement of value is a transaction that you sign in your own wallet and that goes to a contract, not to us.

6. Fees

Four fees exist today, all of them enforced by the contracts rather than by this site. The full detail, with every figure cited to the constant it comes from, is on the fees and payouts page.

• Launch fee — charged once in native ETH when a project is created, and computed from the graduation target the creator chose.
• Trade fee — 2% (200 basis points) of every buy and every sell on a bonding curve, split three ways: the project’s creator, a share held for the creator to allocate to the people who promoted the project, and the protocol.
• Pool swap fee — retained by the Uniswap V4 pool a project graduates into. Its ETH side is split between the creator and the protocol; its token side is burned in full, so nobody receives it and the supply falls.
• Prediction market settlement fee — taken once from a market’s whole pot when it settles, at a rate snapshotted when that market was created. A market that ends with nothing staked on one side charges nothing and refunds both sides.

The live values are read from the factory contract and shown on the create page before you sign anything. If this page and the chain ever disagree, the chain is correct and this page is stale — tell us at legal@thehood.markets.

Fees are not refundable. Network gas is paid to Robinhood Chain validators, not to us, and we never see it.

A fee set in US dollars is charged in the currency you pay with. We convert it at a price we refresh about every 15 minutes, and the charge is pegged to that price until the next refresh. A fee charged in a prediction market’s settlement currency is converted the same way, from that currency’s own price feed at the moment you create the market; if that currency has no price, or its price is out of date, a market cannot be created in it until it is priced again. The amount you pay in ETH, a stablecoin or any other accepted token can therefore be higher or lower than the dollar figure at the moment you pay — a $1 fee can cost the equivalent of $1.50 or $0.50 if the price moves. The amount in the paying currency is shown before you sign.

Every split of a fee is a percentage of the amount actually paid, never a fixed amount. A 10% share to the wheel is 10% of what you paid, and a 25% share to each side of a prediction market is 25% of what you paid, whatever that came to in dollars.

Changes to this are written and not deployed. A flat one-dollar charge to create a launch or a prediction market, the four-way split of that market charge, and a set of surfaces that spend or destroy the platform token — a battlepass, an item mall, quests, bands and seasons — exist in contracts that are tested and are not deployed on any network. Nothing on this site charges for any of them today. They are described on the fees and payouts page, marked as unbuilt where they are, so they can be read before they take effect rather than after.

7. Who may use this site

By using the site you confirm that:

• you are at least 18 years old and legally able to enter into these terms;
• you are not located in, resident of, or acting on behalf of anyone in a jurisdiction where using a launchpad of this kind is prohibited;
• you are not subject to sanctions administered by the UN, the EU, the UK, the United States or any other applicable authority;
• you are solely responsible for determining whether your use is lawful where you are, and for any tax arising from it.

8. If you launch a project

Creating a project on The Hood writes your chosen name, symbol, artwork and links to a public blockchain and to IPFS. That is permanent and public, and neither we nor you can delete it afterwards.

You are responsible for what you launch, and you agree that you will not:

• impersonate a person, project, brand or organisation, or use a name, symbol or artwork you do not have the right to use;
• present a project as endorsed by, affiliated with or vetted by The Hood, Robinhood Chain, Robinhood Markets, Uniswap or any other party — it is none of these;
• make claims about returns, price, listings or partnerships that are not true;
• upload artwork that is illegal, that infringes someone else’s rights, or that depicts the abuse or exploitation of any person.

The token is yours, not ours. Launching one does not create any obligation on us to promote it, support it, list it or keep displaying it.

9. Shops, quests, bands, the wheel and the holder vote

The Hood has a platform token and a set of surfaces built on it. Two of them put you in a relationship with another user rather than with us, and that is the part of this section that matters most.

9.1 Third-party shops — you are buying from another user, not from us

A creator can open a shop inside the item mall and sell their own items in their own launched token. We are not the seller and we are not a party to the sale. The listings, their descriptions, their prices and whatever they represent are the shop owner’s, and payment goes to that shop’s own payout address rather than to us.

• We do not vet, endorse, verify or guarantee anything sold in a third-party shop, including whether what a listing describes exists, is delivered, or is what it claims to be. A shop appearing here is not a statement that we have checked it.
• A purchase is a blockchain transaction and cannot be reversed — not by us, not by the seller, not by a court. There is no refund, no chargeback, no escrow and no dispute process. If a shop owner does not honour what they described, your recourse is against them and not against us.
• A shop records an entitlement in a contract and nothing more. Anything the seller promises to do off the chain is a promise between you and them.
• Opening a shop costs a fee, once, and it is not refundable whether the shop sells anything or not. Opening one does not make you our agent, partner, employee or representative, and you may not present yourself as any of those.
• Shop owners are bound by the same content rules as section 8. Do not impersonate anybody, do not use names or artwork you have no right to use, do not claim we endorse you, and do not list anything illegal. We may stop displaying a shop or a listing on this website at our discretion, on the same terms and with the same limits as section 11 — it changes this website only, and it does not unwind a sale or recover anybody’s money.

9.2 Quests — one user funding another’s reward

A quest is funded out of a sponsoring user’s own reward budget, and the sponsor chooses the tasks, the rates and who qualifies. We choose none of it and we never spend it. A sponsor is not obliged to fund a quest, to keep one open, or to accept any particular person into one, and completing a task creates no entitlement against us.

Do not fake a completion. Task completions are what somebody else is paying for, and fabricating one to collect from another user’s budget is prohibited under section 10 and may cost you access to the reward surfaces entirely.

9.3 Bands, seasons and the battlepass

• Band membership and leadership are decided by the contracts, not by us. A challenge to a band’s leadership costs a fee to open, that fee is not refunded in any outcome including one where the challenge fails, and the rules for whether it succeeds are the contract’s.
• Season standings are computed from activity and are not a promise of a placing or a prize. Every reward on these surfaces is a share of a pot divided against what everybody else did, never an amount anybody is owed.
• A battlepass premium pass is bought by destroying tokens. What you pay is burned rather than received by us, so there is nothing to refund and no refund is possible. It buys a multiplier on the points you earn and a discount in the shop — it is not a claim on our revenue, not a share in anything, and it grants no entitlement beyond those two things.

9.4 The Fortune Wheel is a game of chance

Paying a creation fee earns a spin, and a spin pays a randomised prize from a pot. The outcome of a spin is final. It is not a rebate of the fee that earned it, no spin entitles you to any amount, and there is no arrangement under which a run of poor outcomes is made good. If that is not acceptable to you, do not treat a spin as part of what a creation fee buys — it is not, and section 6 does not price it as one.

The Fortune Wheel’s prize odds, the weights of its segments and its return to player are not published — not on this site, not through its API and not on chain — and we do not disclose them on request. Every segment of the wheel face is drawn the same size and each prize appears on it once; neither says anything about how often a prize is won. The wheel shows a prize only once the draw has published your spin’s result.

9.5 The holder vote binds us

Once a month, holders of the platform token vote on what happens to one of the pool’s fees. The outcome is written by the contract and we cannot overrule it, reverse it, or set the value ourselves — no key on our side can. We do not undertake to campaign, to abstain, or to vote any particular way with tokens the platform holds; the contracts already exclude those from counting.

Holding the token does not make you a member, a shareholder or a partner, gives you no rights over us beyond the single vote the contract implements, and entitles you to no share of anything we earn.

10. Prohibited use of the site

You agree not to:

• use the site to launder money, evade sanctions or finance anything illegal;
• manipulate a market on it — wash trading, spoofing, coordinated pump-and-dump schemes, or launching a project you intend to abandon after selling into it;
• attack the site or its infrastructure: scraping at a rate that degrades it, abusing /api/quote or /api/upload, or attempting to gain access to systems you are not authorised to use;
• interfere with anyone else’s use of it, or attempt to deanonymise other users from on-chain data combined with data taken from this site;
• fake a quest completion, or collect from another user’s reward budget for something you did not do — that budget is somebody else’s money, and this is the one prohibited act on this list whose victim is another user rather than us;
• farm a reward surface from wallets under the same control — self-referral rings, sock accounts staking against themselves, or bands, seasons and quests worked from a set of addresses that are really one person.

Good-faith security research is not prohibited by this section — see the security page for the scope and the safe harbour that applies to it.

11. Removal — what we can and cannot do

We may stop displaying any project on this website at our discretion — for example one that impersonates a brand, carries illegal artwork or is being used to defraud people. The same applies to a shop or a listing inside the item mall, and to a quest, on the same grounds. That is a change to this website only.

We cannot alter, pause, freeze, reverse or delete any token, curve, pool, shop, purchase or transaction. Removing something from the site does not affect it on chain, does not protect anyone who already holds it or bought from it, and does not recover anyone’s money. Do not treat a project or a shop appearing here as vetting, and do not treat its removal as a remedy.

12. Leaderboards — exclusion, and your right to appeal

The site publishes leaderboards — creators, projects, referrers and settlers — computed from public chain events. Appearing on one is not a right, a reward or a promise, and we may withhold any wallet from every leaderboard on the site.

We do that on two grounds and no others:

• Our own operational wallets — the deployer, the treasury, the keeper and our test wallets. Ranking ourselves on our own boards would be self-dealing, and it is the reason this section exists.
• A wallet we determine is gaming or defrauding the leaderboards — for example wash trading to inflate a rank, farming referral sign-ups from wallets under the same control, or launching throwaway projects to move a rate.

Exclusion from a leaderboard affects visibility and nothing else. It does not touch your funds, your tokens, your trades, your referral earnings or your ability to use this site or the contracts. You keep every token you hold, every fee you have accrued and every function the contracts expose — we could not take any of those from you even if we wanted to, for the reasons in sections 4 and 5. All that changes is that a ranking on this website stops listing your address.

Each exclusion records which of the two grounds applied, the reason, and the date. Lifting one does not erase it: both the exclusion and its lifting are kept.

You may appeal. Write to legal@thehood.markets from any channel you like, quoting the wallet address, or reach us on X at @thehoodmarkets. We will review it, and we will tell you which of the two grounds we applied and the reason we recorded — you are entitled to know what you are answering. If we got it wrong, we lift the exclusion. We do not commit to a fixed response time, and we say so rather than promise one we have not staffed.

13. KOL standing — withdrawal, and your right to appeal

Being a KOL is a standing on this platform, and we can withdraw it from an account. This is separate from the leaderboard rule above and it reaches further, which is why it is a section of its own rather than a clause inside that one: a leaderboard exclusion changes what a page shows, and this changes what a creator is able to do with your address.

We do it on the same two grounds and no others — our own operational wallets, and an account we determine is gaming or defrauding the system.

What withdrawing your standing does: a creator can no longer allocate any part of a promotion window to your address, and you stop counting toward the electorate for a peer promotion vote. Your allocation cap reads zero for as long as it stands.

What it does not do, and cannot: it does not touch fees you have already earned, which sit in the splitter contract and stay claimable by you and only you; it does not touch your tokens, your trades or any position you hold; it does not remove your referral code, your referral name or referral earnings already credited to you; and it does not stop you using this site or calling any function the contracts expose. We could not take those from you if we wanted to, for the reasons in sections 4 and 5 — the contracts have no function that would let us.

It is recorded on chain, with a reason, and the contract refuses one without. Not in a database we control — in a public event anybody can read, naming the address, the decision and the reason we gave. We cannot withdraw a standing quietly, and we cannot revise the reason afterwards: a correction is a second entry, and both remain.

It is reversible, and reversing it returns what you had. Your rank and your lifetime earned figure are untouched while it stands, so restoring an account puts it back at the standing it held rather than at the bottom. That is deliberate: a power that could not be undone cleanly is one that should not be used at all.

You may appeal, on the same terms as a leaderboard exclusion — write to legal@thehood.markets quoting the wallet address. We will tell you the ground and the reason recorded, and if we got it wrong we lift it. We do not commit to a fixed response time rather than promise one we have not staffed.

14. No advice, no endorsement

Nothing on this site is financial, investment, legal or tax advice, an offer to sell or a solicitation to buy any asset. We are not your broker, adviser or fiduciary. Every figure, chart, label and ranking on the site is descriptive information read from a public blockchain, not a recommendation.

Labels such as “Hot”, “New”, “Climbing” or “Graduated” are mechanical descriptions of on-chain activity. They are not judgements about quality, legitimacy or prospects.

15. Provided as-is

The site is provided “as is” and “as available”, with no warranty of any kind — no warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy, availability or non-infringement.

In particular we do not warrant that the site will be available or uninterrupted; that data read from the chain is current (blocks are produced faster than any page can re-render, and a displayed figure is a snapshot of the block it names); that a quote will be the price you actually receive; that a third-party RPC endpoint, IPFS gateway or wallet will behave; or that the contracts are free of defects.

16. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent the law allows, The Hood and everyone working on it are not liable for any loss of funds, tokens, profits, opportunity or data arising from your use of the site or the contracts — including losses caused by a contract defect, a price movement, a failed or front-run transaction, a chain reorganisation or halt, an RPC or gateway outage, a compromised wallet, a phishing site, a project launched by someone else, a purchase from another user’s shop, a quest that paid less than you expected, or the outcome of a wheel spin or a holder vote.

You use a launchpad on a blockchain at your own risk. Read the risk notice before you buy anything. Nothing here excludes liability that cannot lawfully be excluded.

17. Changes

We may change these terms. The date at the top of this page is the date of the current version, and continuing to use the site after a change means you accept it. Material changes will be noted on @thehoodmarkets.

18. Contact

Email legal@thehood.markets, or reach us on X at @thehoodmarkets. Vulnerability reports go to the security page instead — that route is monitored on a commitment, this one is not.

The Hood’s contracts are immutable, audited by Claude Fable 5. Nothing on this site is financial, investment, legal or tax advice.