How it works · v0.1

The volatility layer for tokenized equities

1. The asymmetry

A tokenized share on Robinhood Chain trades every hour of the week. The equity behind it trades 6.5 hours a day, 5 days a week — 32.5h out of 168h. For the remaining 135.5h there is no national best bid and offer, no consolidated tape, and no listed option quoting.

Holders carry that window whether they intend to or not. The exposure is real: news arrives, index futures move, correlated crypto assets reprice, and the underlying reopens somewhere other than where it closed. What does not exist is an instrument that expresses it.

2. Why listed options do not solve it

The obvious hedge is a listed put. It is unavailable for exactly the same reason the hedge is needed: US options exchanges keep the same hours as the equity market, and do not trade in extended hours at all. The instrument that would cover the gap is closed for the whole duration of the gap.

3. Constructing a surface with the lights off

During the session, surface construction is ordinary: consolidate listed quotes, fit a skew per expiry, publish. The problem is the other 135.5h. Volquote builds the closed-hours surface from three inputs.

Proxies. Correlated instruments that do keep trading — index futures, crypto majors with an established beta to the name, and the tokenized share itself. Each carries a confidence weight that decays with how far the proxy relationship has drifted from its recent behaviour.

Realised volatility. The token's own high-frequency realised vol across the closed window, which anchors the front end when no forward-looking quote exists.

Flow. What is actually being traded against the venue. Flow is the only genuinely forward-looking input available when no options market is open, and it is weighted accordingly.

The result is a surface with an elevated front end — correctly so, because the nearest expiry spans a window nobody else is pricing — and a term structure that reverts toward the listed curve as the reopen approaches.

4. Gap contracts

The flagship instrument is cash-settled on the move from Friday close to Monday open in the underlying, referenced to a published settlement price. European exercise, USDC settlement, no physical delivery of a stock token and no assignment mechanics.

It could not have existed before tokenized equities traded continuously, because before that the gap was not something anyone was exposed to for 135.5h at a stretch.

5. Architecture

Surface construction runs off-chain, because it has to be fast. Pricing and greeks are closed source, because publishing a quoting model publishes how to trade against it. Settlement runs on Robinhood Chain — chain ID 4663, 100ms blocks, settling to Ethereum — because it has to be checkable by anyone.

6. Status

Nothing is deployed. The surface model and the closed-hours dataset are in build; gap contracts go to testnet next, with a published settlement reference, before any capital touches them. Every surface and implied volatility shown on this site is illustrative.

Not investment advice. Nothing here is an offer to sell or a solicitation to buy any instrument.