Glossary
Every word this site uses that you might not have met before, in plain language. Grouped roughly in the order you'll run into them.
The token
- $VALUES
- The index token. Holding it means holding a share of the whole basket of assets the DAO tracks, without buying each one yourself. This is the free, spendable form — you can send it, swap it, or stake it.Nine decimal places, on Polygon. Total supply is capped at 10,000,000.
- sVALUES
- Staked $VALUES. When you stake, your $VALUES is exchanged for sVALUES at one to one, and the sVALUES balance grows by itself each day as rewards are paid. It is the same value, in a form that earns.You can't spend sVALUES directly — unstake it back to $VALUES first.
- The Values Index
- The rulebook: which assets are in the basket, how much of each, and when that gets revisited. The index is the idea; $VALUES is the token that carries it.
- Basket
- The collection of on-chain assets the index tracks. Buying one $VALUES gives you exposure to all of them at once, in the proportions the index sets.
- Capitalization-weighted
- How much of each asset the basket holds is decided by that asset's size in the market, not by anyone's opinion. Bigger assets take a bigger share.
- Rebalance
- Prices move, so the basket drifts away from its intended proportions. Rebalancing trades it back to the target weights, on a fixed schedule rather than whenever someone feels like it.
- Total supply
- Every $VALUES that exists, wherever it sits — in wallets, staked, in the treasury, or in the liquidity pool. Capped at 10,000,000.
- In circulation
- The part of the supply that is loose in the market: total supply minus what's staked, held by the treasury, or locked in the pool.
Staking and rewards
- Stake
- Lock your $VALUES into the staking contract and receive sVALUES in return. Staked tokens earn the daily reward; unstaked ones don't.
- Unstake
- The reverse: hand back sVALUES and receive $VALUES. There is no waiting period — you can do it whenever you like.
- Rebase
- The moment the reward is paid. Once per epoch, every sVALUES balance grows by the same fraction at the same time. Nobody sends you anything and you don't claim it: the number in your wallet simply gets bigger.If a rebase doesn't run on a given day, nobody earns for that day, and it isn't paid back later.
- Epoch
- One reward period. On Values DAO an epoch is 24 hours, so a rebase happens roughly once a day. Epochs are numbered, and the count only goes up.
- APY
- Annual percentage yield — what a year of daily rewards adds up to, if today's rate held for the whole year and you never unstaked. It assumes compounding, which is why it's much larger than the daily rate times 365.It is an estimate from today's numbers, not a promise. It moves on its own as people stake and unstake.
- Compounding
- Tomorrow's reward is calculated on your new, larger balance rather than your original one. Small daily growth turns into much larger yearly growth this way — 0.2% a day compounds to over 100% in a year.
Buying and selling
- Swap
- Trading one token directly for another, with no order book and no counterparty waiting on the other side — the pool itself quotes you a price and settles instantly.
- USDT0
- The dollar-pegged token Values DAO trades against on Polygon. One USDT0 is intended to be worth one US dollar, which is what makes it useful for pricing $VALUES.
- Liquidity pool
- A shared reserve of two tokens that people can trade against. Values DAO runs a $VALUES/USDT0 pool on Uniswap; the more sits in it, the less a large trade moves the price.
- Slippage
- The gap between the price you were quoted and the price you actually get, because the pool moved between the two moments. The app sets a floor: if the result would be worse than that, the trade is cancelled rather than filled at a bad price.
- Approval
- A separate transaction that gives a contract permission to move a specific token on your behalf. Nothing can touch your tokens without one, which is why buying or staking for the first time takes an extra step.Also called an allowance.
- Permit2
- A single contract, used across the whole of Uniswap, that holds token permissions in one place instead of granting them to every app separately. Swapping asks for a time-limited window through it, rather than an open-ended allowance.
- Gas
- The fee the network charges to process a transaction, paid in POL on Polygon — usually a fraction of a cent. It is paid to the network, not to Values DAO, and you need a little in your wallet before anything else will work.
Governance
- DAO
- Decentralized Autonomous Organization: a group whose rules live in smart contracts rather than in a head office. There is no single owner to trust, because every rule and every decision is public.
- Governance
- How the DAO decides things: members propose, members discuss, members vote, and the result is recorded on-chain where anyone can check it.
- Proposal
- A change put to the members — to the methodology, the weights, or how the treasury is used. It has to be written down and voted on; nothing changes quietly.
- Vote
- A member's say on a proposal, weighted by how much they hold. Votes are recorded on-chain, so the count can be verified by anyone rather than taken on trust.
- Treasury
- The DAO's shared funds, held on-chain. It backs the index, pays the daily staking rewards, and moves only by governance decision.
- Safe
- The multi-signature wallet that holds the treasury. “Multi-signature” means several people must approve before anything moves — no single person can spend it alone.
Wallets and the chain
- Wallet
- The app that holds your keys and signs your transactions — MetaMask and the rest. It isn't an account with us; we never hold your tokens and can't move them.
- Polygon
- The blockchain Values DAO runs on. It works like Ethereum but settles in seconds for a fraction of a cent, which is what makes a daily rebase affordable.
- On-chain
- Recorded on the blockchain itself, in public, permanently. When we say a vote or a rebalance is on-chain, we mean you can go and look at it yourself rather than believe our word for it.
- Self-custody
- Your tokens sit in your own wallet, under your own keys. Nobody can freeze them, and nobody can recover them for you if you lose your recovery phrase — the same fact, viewed from both sides.Also called non-custodial.
- Smart contract
- A program that lives on the blockchain and executes exactly as written, the same way for everyone, with no one able to intervene. Staking, swapping and the treasury are all smart contracts.