Tomorrow's memory at today's price.
A forward fixes what you pay for memory you have not taken yet. The whole of it is one number — twenty per cent — and this page is mostly about what that number means.
The idea
You buy gibibyte-hours now, at today’s index, and hold them. When you redeem them, the network credits you at the index of that day — but never above a ceiling fixed when the batch opened.
Memory rises past the ceiling: you are credited at the ceiling and pay the difference yourself. Memory falls: you are credited at the lower price. A forward never obliges you to buy above the market.
That asymmetry is deliberate. What is being sold is protection against a rise, not a bet on one, and it is bounded on both sides — for the holder by the ceiling, for the network by the same number.
Why twenty per cent
Without a ceiling this would be an open-ended promise: if memory tripled, the network would owe three times what it took in, and nothing in it could say how much it was on the hook for.
With one, the arithmetic is closed before anything is sold. A batch that sold for V can never cost more than 1.2 V to deliver, and the reserve already holds 0.95 V of that — so the most a batch can lose is a quarter of what it sold for, and the size of the batch is our choice.
- Ceiling
- +20% over the index on the day the batch opened
- Held in reserve
- 95% of everything the batch took in
- Worst case for the network
- a quarter of what the batch sold for
- Priced off
- a seven-day time-weighted average, both sides
The cap is snapshotted into each batch when it opens, so changing it later never rewrites a deal somebody already made.
Buy
Pick a batch and a number of gibibyte-hours. The page shows what it costs now and what it would cost if memory ran all the way into the ceiling — the two ends of what you are buying.
You cannot buy a batch whose ceiling is already below the index. There would be nothing in it for you: you would pay today’s price and be delivered at less.
Hold
What you hold is an ordinary ERC-20, one per batch. It is transferable, so a forward bought from somebody else appears in your console exactly like one you bought yourself.
Both buying and redeeming are priced off a seven-day time-weighted average rather than the price of a minute. It costs an honest holder nothing and removes any point in trying to time the publication of an index the network publishes itself.
Redeem
Redeeming burns the hours and credits your account. From there it spends on rentals like any other balance.
What you are credited is rental balance, not cash. It is never withdrawable. Without that restriction a forward would be a cash bet on an index this network publishes itself, and nobody would ever need to rent a byte of memory to collect on it.
What can go wrong
A batch has an expiry. Hours nobody came for stop being an obligation when it passes, and what backed them becomes free reserve — so redeem before the date on the card.
And memory can fall. If it does, your forward is worth less than you paid, exactly as any fixed price is when the market moves the other way. The ceiling bounds the upside you were buying; it does not promise you a floor.