Instrument 01 · Live on Base · Immutable
CS1. The compounding treasury claim.
CS1 is Causeway's first asset token, live on Base, and it is deliberately exploratory: the first production iteration in a sequence of instrument designs. Its economics are immutable. The burn schedule, supply rules, and transfer logic are fixed in deployed code, with no pause, freeze, blacklist, or exemption list at the transfer layer.
Iteration, for Causeway, never means amendment. What a deployed instrument teaches us shapes the next instrument, never a revision of the last.
Supply and burns are read from the chain. Treasury value and VOO price are published by the oracle and reconciled by independent attestation. Stored value per unit is a treasury accounting metric, not a price claim.
Flow of funds
The lifecycle of a CS1 token.
One door in: the primary-market contract, at the published price, for everyone. The operator cannot mint to itself, receives no tokens through any protocol path, and pays the same burn every holder pays when it moves its own tokens.
A buyer pays USDC to the primary-market contract
The buyer pays 101% of base cost. The extra 1% is a one-time mint fee, charged once at mint. There is no recurring management fee on CS1.
Tokens mint instantly at the current oracle price
The full 100% of base cost mints as CS1. Because the oracle counts USDC held by the primary-market contract, the payment enters the treasury numerator in the same transaction that expands the supply denominator.
Automation sweeps the USDC
99% of swept USDC purchases VOO at the custodian; 1% settles the mint fee. Purchases execute on 24/5 brokerage rails.
The oracle updates
Published treasury value counts VOO at market, USDC awaiting sweep, and cash in transit at the broker. Per-token value is treasury over on-chain supply, exactly.
The holder transfers or trades
Every transfer pays the tiered burn. Exit is a sale on the token's Uniswap v2 pool at whatever price the market offers.
The tiered burn
Turnover accrues to holders.
| USD value of transfer | Burn rate |
|---|---|
| Under $1,000 | 0.50% |
| $1,000 to under $10,000 | 0.40% |
| $10,000 to under $100,000 | 0.30% |
| $100,000 to under $1,000,000 | 0.20% |
| $1,000,000 and above | 0.10% |
Tiers are denominated in the USD value of the transfer, priced by the oracle at the moment of transfer. Boundaries are exact: a transfer of exactly $1,000 pays 0.40%. As stored value per token rises, the same token quantity moves into lower tiers over time.
- Every transfer burns. Sells into the pool, buys from the pool, wallet-to-wallet movements, and liquidity operations all pay the tiered burn. There are no exemptions for any address, contract, or venue, including Causeway's own wallets.
- Every burn destroys tokens in full. No portion is routed anywhere. Supply falls; the treasury is untouched; backing per remaining token rises.
- The schedule resists wash volume. Because the rate declines with size, fragmenting a large transfer into smaller ones strictly increases the total burn paid.
- The honest round-trip number. A buy and a later sell each pay the burn, plus 0.6% in pool fees across the two swaps. At the smallest tier that is roughly 1.6% for a round trip, before price impact. CS1 is built for holding, and the pool prices that intent into every entry and exit.
The primary market
One door. Published terms.
New supply enters circulation through a single path: the primary-market contract, at the current oracle price, plus the one-time 1% mint fee. Minting authority on the token is role-gated, and the minter set is verifiable on-chain by anyone.
Verify the contracts →The primary market closes over weekends and U.S. market holidays so that minting stays aligned with the custodial execution rails that convert USDC to VOO. The schedule of mint windows is published.
Stored value, stated plainly
Stored value per unit is a treasury accounting metric, not a price claim.
CS1 has no redemption mechanism: no queue, no window, no in-kind path, on-chain or off. The only path from CS1 back to dollars is a sale on its trading pool at whatever price the market offers, and no mechanism forces that market price toward stored value per unit. The two can diverge, and a discount can persist.
We state this plainly because it is true, and because it defines the design problem the next instrument solves. What CS1 omits, a price anchor and guarantees that survive the operator, defines CS2.