The Manual

Gold has outlived every currency ever printed against it. AURUM is a reserve protocol with a single, deliberate habit: accumulate tokenized gold and never stop. The treasury holds SPDR Gold Shares • Robinhood Token (GLD) — a tokenized claim on the world’s most trusted gold ETF — plus a hard floor of USDG and its own liquidity.

AUR is the unit of account for that habit. It is not pegged to gold, but it is not unbacked paper either: the assay window (§08) redeems AUR for GLD at the vault’s backing, any hour of any day. Every mechanism — bonds, staking rewards, LP fees, range defense — points in one direction: more gold in the vault per AUR outstanding.

Buy. AUR trades against GLD in the protocol-owned pool. Market buying is the simplest way in and directly deepens the pairing the treasury earns fees from.

Bond. Sell USDG, GLD or AUR/GLD LP to the treasury and receive AUR priced by a reverse Dutch auction (§07), vesting linearly over five days — claims land as staked sAUR, earning from the first second. Bonding is the engine of accumulation: USDG bonds harden the floor, GLD bonds place metal directly into the vault with zero slippage against thin public liquidity, and LP bonds grow protocol-owned liquidity.

Stake. Deposit AUR into the accrual vault and receive sAUR. There is no rebase: rewards stream in across each eight-hour epoch and compound into the sAUR share price. Your balance is constant; your claim on the vault is not. Unstaking burns sAUR and returns AUR at the current share price, any time.

The treasury is the vault. It holds three classes of reserves and nothing else:

• ◆USDG floor. A 5% slice of the genesis raise plus all USDG bond proceeds, held as stable backing. The floor never leaves the vault — not even through redemption.
• ◆GLD bullion. Acquired at genesis, through GLD bonds, and as LP fees. The habit itself.
• ◆Protocol-owned liquidity. The AUR/GLD pool, owned by the treasury, sitting behind a multisig and a 48-hour timelock. Fees accrue gold natively.

Every AUR carries a computable backing: reserves valued at oracle prices, divided by supply. The treasury can only move funds through the permissioned operator path — no discretionary withdrawals, no team multisig raids.

AURUM opens with a fixed-price genesis sale in USDG. Terms are locked in the contract before the first deposit and cannot be altered mid-sale:

At finalization the contract mints allocations, splits the raise, acquires GLD, creates the AUR/GLD pair, and hands the LP position to the treasury — in one atomic transaction. If the softcap is missed by the cutoff, every deposit is refundable in full.

AURUM runs a minimal range-bound stability system with bands denominated in GLD against the protocol’s own thirty-minute TWAP — self-contained, with no dependence on external price feeds. When price presses above the upper wall, a cushion bond opens selling AUR for GLD at band price: resistance that fills the vault. When price falls through the lower wall, the treasury buys back and burns AUR through the router, rate-limited per epoch so support regenerates instead of exhausting. Band geometry is governance-set behind the timelock.

Every buy and sell of AUR on the registered AUR/GLD pool pays a 5% transfer tax, skimmed at the token level the moment the trade touches the pair. The taxed AUR accumulates in the TaxCollector, where anyone can call processTax() to swap it to GLD and deliver it straight into the treasury — guarded against sandwiching by a TWAP-banded minimum output, and against waste by a dust threshold.

Protocol plumbing never pays the toll: staking, unstaking, bond payouts and claims, redemptions, RBS buybacks and burns, mints and the genesis flows are all exempt — only anonymous market traffic on the pool is taxed. Governance can tune the rate but can never raise it above a hard-coded 10% cap. Every swap through the tax is more gold behind every AUR that stays.

Bond markets do not sit at a fixed discount. Each market runs a reverse Dutch auction: the AUR price opens at a premium to the thirty-minute TWAP and decays in a straight line toward a floor set at a discount below it. Both endpoints track the live TWAP, so the whole ladder slides with the market — only your position on it moves with time.

The catch, and it is the design: every deposit resets the auction back to its opening premium. Wait for the floor and you may get the best price of the cycle — or watch someone else take it and hand you back a fresh premium. No buyer can sweep a market at its cheapest; each purchase re-prices the next. Patience is rewarded, greed is taxed, and the vault wins either way.

Three guardrails make bonds safe for the vault. The auction floor is max(TWAP discount, live GLD backing per AUR) — if price ever trades below backing, the floor rises to meet it and bonds simply cannot mint below the vault’s floor: non-dilutive by construction. Each market’s outstanding unclaimed debt is hard-capped at a governance-set share of supply, so bond issuance can never outrun the token. And when you claim, the vested AUR doesn’t land idle in your wallet — it is deposited into the staking vault and delivered as sAUR, earning epoch yield from the moment of claim; unstake whenever you like.

Beyond USDG and GLD, a third market bonds AUR/GLD LP tokens: liquidity handed to the treasury becomes protocol-owned forever. It stays staged until genesis finalization seeds the POL pool and registers the pair — then the vault can buy its own order book.

The vault stands behind its paper. At any time you may burn AUR at the assay window and receive its GLD backing — treasury gold divided by supply — paid from the vault itself. A 2% assay fee is retained by the treasury, which means every redemption leaves the remaining AUR a little more golden than before.

Two guardrails keep the promise honest. Redemption pays GLD only: the USDG floor and the protocol’s liquidity cannot leave through this window — the treasury enforces it in code, not policy. And redemptions draw on a per-epoch capacity that refills linearly, so no single rush can drain the vault; when the tank runs low, the queue waits for the refill, not for a bailout. The oracle freshness of the price behind your payout is enforced on chain.

Most staking programs print yield out of thin air and call it revenue. AURUM runs the opposite rule: GLD backing per AUR is not permitted to fall. Once per eight-hour epoch, a permissionless poke() snapshots the treasury’s value in GLD terms. Only the epoch-over-epoch growth — real revenue from bond proceeds, LP fees, and assay fees — can fund an emission, and the mint is capped at exactly the amount that leaves backing untouched. No revenue, no emission. The stream rolls into the sAUR share price over the epoch, as always.

Genesis allocations vest over five days from finalization. If you would rather not wait, the sale contract offers a one-way door: claim early and half of your total allocation is burned forever while the other half is released to you immediately (less anything already claimed). The allocation then closes for good — there is no partial exit and no return. Burned AUR never touched the market, so treasury GLD is divided among fewer claims: the exit of the impatient pays the patient.

The team takes no allocation at genesis and earns no fee stream — ever. The only path to compensation is the incentives bond, and it only activates if the protocol succeeds first: it unlocks above a $33M market capitalization and is hard-capped at 10% of supply, cumulative. If the vault never grows, the team never earns. That is the alignment.

AUR and sAUR are cryptoassets, not securities, shares, or deposits. Holding AUR confers no claim on GLD, on physical gold, on SPDR Gold Shares, or on any issuer, custodian, or person. The treasury’s assets belong to the protocol, not to token holders.

GLD (0xC9a981FE…eBFC4e) is a beacon-proxy token issued by a third party on Robinhood Chain. The issuer can upgrade, pause, or freeze it, and secondary liquidity is thin. This is a core, known risk of the protocol — treat the vault’s gold as only as reliable as its issuer. Smart-contract risk, oracle risk, and total loss of value are all possible. Nothing in this manual is investment, legal, or tax advice. Do not bond, stake, or buy with funds you cannot afford to lose.