A staking + yield token

Stake BOUNTY or USDC to underwrite AgentBounty and earn CAUTIO emissions — plus a share of real protocol fees that grows as bounty volume does. You underwrite against verdict failure, compute and cloud outages, datacenter incidents, natural catastrophes hitting the infrastructure, and oracle feed failures.

All trigger events are signed by oracle networks — not by our team. Chainlink Functions is the primary oracle: it re-runs verdict checks, fetches provider health attestations (AWS Health, Cloudflare status), and aggregates parametric nat-cat feeds. Pyth, RedStone, and EAS attestations operate as secondary aggregators feeding the same guarded module. The protocol pays only when the data says it must.

CAUTIONER stakers underwrite the insurance tier that sponsors opt into when they want guaranteed-correct settlement on high-value bounties — premium-paying sponsors fund the real-fee share of staker rewards, in exchange for protocol-backed refunds when the verdict path fails. This is the medium-term wedge that turns emissions into real cash-flow yield.

// the name is held back until launch. everything else on this page is open and subject to change. // daily design-process updates will publish here until then.

Every bounty platform secretly hopes settlement works. CAUTIONER makes the hope explicit: holders stake to underwrite every settled bounty, every compute and oracle dependency, and the physical infrastructure behind them. They earn the protocol's real cash flows; they take the loss when a signed oracle event proves the system failed.

AgentBounty is the bounty market for work that needs adjudication. Sponsors fund work in USDC. Reviewers stake BOUNTY to back their verdict. But the system can fail in more ways than one — and in every case, until now, the hunter ate the loss. CAUTIONER rewrites that line. Stakers are the third party who pays when the platform cannot.

What the pool coverssubject to change

The full enumeration. Each line names the failure mode and the signed data source that triggers a payout from the underwriting pool. Specific oracle adapters, heartbeats, and dispute windows are part of the slashing-mechanism design (v0.2); nothing on this list is committed to a particular firm or feed yet.

• Verdict failure Reviewer collusion, quorum stall, dispute deadlock, EIP-712 verdict signed under duress. trigger · dispute-module attestation + EAS receipt
• Compute / cloud-provider outage AWS regional outage, GCP / Azure regional incident, Cloudflare edge failure, GPU rack offline at a critical agent host during a paid run. trigger · AWS Health webhook → oracle adapter · Cloudflare status API → oracle adapter
• Datacenter incident Fire, flood, power loss, sub-sea cable cut, cooling failure — physical incidents at the rack a hunter or sponsor relied on. trigger · provider postmortem attestation + Pyth or EAS event
• Natural catastrophe (parametric) Earthquake, hurricane, flood, wildfire, grid collapse hitting the underlying infrastructure of a counterparty. Parametric trigger: magnitude / wind-speed / outage hours cross a published threshold. trigger · parametric oracle (e.g. Arbol, Lloyd's CAT-bond style feed) signed onchain via Chainlink Functions
• Oracle / data-feed failure Chainlink feed stale beyond heartbeat, RedStone update gap, Pyth confidence collapse, EAS attester silent through a dispute window. trigger · oracle-of-oracles guard reports the silence + dispute-module flag
• Sponsor griefing A sponsor disappears, refuses to settle, or rage-cancels a paid run after a hunter has shipped evidence. trigger · settlement-contract state + escrow timeout

How to qualify for the CAUTIO airdrop?subject to change

One snapshot — 2026-06-19 · 00:00 UTC. Two ways to qualify for the airdrop: hold BOUNTY (tiered) or an Agent Bounty Plate at that block. Holding Base-ecosystem AI-agent community tokens then multiplies the airdrop you qualified for — up to a 2.0× cap — but does not make you eligible on its own. (Your BOUNTY tier only changes when you can start earning staking yield, not whether you get the airdrop.)

1 · BOUNTY holders — tiered

How much BOUNTY you hold at the snapshot sets your tier and the hour your underwriting-pool (yield) access opens. Both tiers receive the airdrop immediately at TGE.

2 · Agent Bounty Plates holders — NFT

Hold at least one Agent Bounty Plate — the 100-piece ERC-721 on Base, 0x536fDf3027ae6F34499B4452aFbD9E1B872f6Bd2 — at the snapshot block, and you're an airdrop recipient alongside the BOUNTY tiers.

Multiplier · Base-ecosystem AI-agent communities — a boost, not a way in

This is a boost on the airdrop you already qualify for (through BOUNTY or a Plate) — holding a community token does not, on its own, make you eligible. For each listed token you hold above its threshold at the snapshot, your airdrop is multiplied +0.25× (×1.25), stacking with each additional community up to a ×2.0 cap (double). Not partners — Base AI-agent communities whose work we admire. The list grows before snapshot; tokens and thresholds appear here as confirmed.

Are you a Base AI-agent community and want on this list? My DMs are always open — message me on X at @goekhan and we'll work something out.

New here? The full 10-question airdrop FAQ walks through all of this — the three routes, the token, the risks — in plain English.

Distributionsubject to change

100,000,000 total supply. ERC20 capped. Immutable token contract. No mint after deploy. No cliffs anywhere — everything either unlocks at TGE or vests linearly from block one. All allocation figures below are working numbers that may shift during final mechanism design.

Lock mechanic

Stakers choose their own lock. There are no cliffs imposed by the protocol. There is no fixed unbonding period. The lock duration is itself the cooldown.

staker self-selects:
  6h   ─── 1.0x  ── lightest exposure, fastest exit
  1d   ─── ~1.1x
  7d   ─── ~1.4x
  30d  ─── ~2.0x
  90d  ─── ~2.7x
  180d ─── ~3.3x
  365d ─── 4.0x  ── full multiplier; full year of slash exposure
  >365d ── 4.0x (capped; locking forever is not gamed)

What stakers earn

Two parts. Primary — CAUTIO emissions: the 30% staking-emissions bucket streams to stakers over 18 epochs, weighted by your lock multiplier. This is the headline yield and it needs no outside capital — but it is token emissions (dilution), it is finite, and it is only worth what the token is worth. Secondary — a share of real protocol fees: every settled bounty produces fee revenue (reviewer fee, sponsor cancel fee, optional insurance premium), split on-chain at settlement and paid in the fee's own currency (USDC or BOUNTY). This is real cash flow, but it starts small and grows only with bounty volume. Early yield is mostly emissions; the goal is for real fees to take over as volume builds.

// the 60% staker share is the "real yield" — variable, paid in the fee's own currency, only as large as actual bounty volume. the 25% team share is paid in the bounty's own currency (USDC or BOUNTY) so core contributors have cash flow independent of token price. the 15% core-contributor allocation vests from block one — 5% at TGE, the rest streaming over 36 months — and core contributors stake into the underwriting pool on the same terms as everyone else.

Architecture

Token contract is immutable. Underwriting pool is pausable. Fee router and yield router are upgradable behind a 7-day timelock once governance is live. The slashing module reads exclusively from a guarded oracle aggregator — no team-signed transactions can trigger a payout from the pool.

flowchart LR
  A[BOUNTY holders ≥3B] -->|snapshot| M[Merkle airdrop]
  F[Friendly communities] -->|+0.25x each, cap 2x| M
  M -->|immediate| T[Token
100M cap]
  T -->|stake BOUNTY or USDC
lock ≥6h, mult 1x to 4x| P[Underwriting pool]
  E[BountyEscrow] -->|protocol fees| R[Fee router]
  E -->|Aave float yield| Y[Yield router]
  R -->|60%| P
  R -->|25%| Team[Team multisig]
  R -->|15%| Tr[Treasury]
  Y --> P
  EC[Emission controller
18-epoch decay] --> P
  CL[Chainlink Data Feeds + Functions
primary oracle for parametric triggers,
verdict re-runs, dispute resolution] --> O
  PY[Pyth price & status
secondary aggregator] --> O
  RS[RedStone push feeds
secondary aggregator] --> O
  EAS[EAS attestations
reviewer reputation + dispute receipts] --> O
  AWS[AWS Health / Cloudflare
status webhooks → Chainlink Functions] --> O
  CAT[Parametric nat-cat feed
Arbol / Lloyd's-style → Chainlink Functions] --> O
  O[Guarded oracle aggregator
Chainlink-Functions-native] -->|signed events| S
  P -.dispute slash window.-> S[Slashing module v0.2]
        

Daily design updates

What we are not promising

Where this leaves you