Dated contracts expire. Perpetuals solved expiry with funding payments and liquidations. There is a third design: a token that holds a ladder of dated claims and rolls a small published fraction every day. It has no expiry, no margin, and no funding leg, and its cost is visible on the ladder itself. This note describes the mechanism in general form.
Part 1: The Problem With Both Existing Answers
Suppose a trader wants a permanent position on some number: credit stress, volatility, a commodity spread. Markets offer two containers, and each demands ongoing work.
Dated contracts settle and die. The holder of a March future who still wants the view in April must sell the old contract and buy the next one: pick the moment, pay the spread, repeat forever. Institutions run entire roll programs for this chore, and every roll is a decision that can be timed badly.
Perpetuals removed expiry by adding a funding leg. The position lives forever, but a payment flows between longs and shorts on a clock, the rate swings with crowding, and the whole construction requires margin accounts and forced liquidation. The holder escaped the calendar and inherited a balance sheet.
Part 2: The Ladder Roll
The third design starts from a market that lists dated claims on a schedule: a new window opens every fixed interval, several windows trade at once, and each settles on its own date. That calendar is the raw material.
Picture four contracts on that calendar, one settling each year: 2027, 2028, 2029, 2030. The standing token holds a basket spread across them; call that collection the ladder. Each day it sells a small published fraction of its oldest holdings and buys the newest window at market prices. The fraction is fixed in advance and stays fixed. Instead of replacing an entire position every few months, the token replaces a tiny piece every day, and the holder does not roll anything: the token rolls for them. Held long enough, every position migrates from the front of the ladder to the back, and the token itself holds no claim to its settlement date.
The ladder. Holdings spread across dated windows; each day one published slice leaves the oldest rung and enters the newest. The roll is the whole mechanism.
Three properties follow. The token has no expiry: rolling into each new window keeps live claims on the ladder by construction. It needs no margin or liquidation, because every underlying claim is fully paid at mint, so the wrapper holds assets, never debts. And it has no funding leg: nothing flows between longs and shorts, because there is no short side of the wrapper at all, only a portfolio being rebalanced on a public schedule.
The wrapper comes in a pair. A dated market of this kind has two sides, and each side can carry its own ladder. One standing token rolls the risk side and holds permanent protection, the product for a holder whose exposure has no end date. The other rolls the opposite side and holds the carry that quiet regimes pay, the product for a holder who is selling insurance for a living. A standing token on both sides at once adds nothing: the two ladders together are a claim on the escrowed dollars minus two roll costs, which is cash, bought expensively. The interesting products are the sides, not the pair.
Part 3: Where the Cost Went
A permanent position has a cost; the designs differ in where it hides. The future hides it in the roll decision. The perpetual hides it in a floating rate that must be watched. The ladder puts it in daylight: each daily slice pays the spread between the window it leaves and the window it enters, at sizes and times published in advance. The cost of standing exposure becomes a line anyone can compute from the ladder composition and the live prices.
The same transparency disciplines the token in a downturn of interest: a wrapper that rolls a fixed fraction daily shrinks its own footprint when its holders leave, without a death spiral, because nothing is borrowed and no one can be underwater. The worst case for a holder is the value of the ladder itself.
Part 4: Accounting That Keeps Generations Apart
A standing product that pools holders across time carries an old suspicion, that money from late buyers props up early ones. Here the separation is structural. Roll costs are consumed from each holder's own balance, in proportion to what remains of it. A new buyer pays the going price for exposure and starts a fresh clock. New demand deepens the book the wrapper trades on, which benefits every holder, but no dollar of a new buyer's money can stand behind an old buyer's position, because every underlying claim was funded in full before either of them arrived.
Part 5: What the Wrapper Publishes
The design reduces to three published commitments: the daily roll fraction, fixed in advance; the ladder composition, visible at all times; and the price curve it marks against, which is the live market for the underlying windows. Nothing else is needed and nothing is discretionary. A reader who has followed our work on scalar markets will recognize the pattern: take a mechanism that usually lives inside a dealer or an exchange, fix its parameters in public, and let the market price the rest.
The Case
The mechanism is general. Any market with dated, fully collateralized claims listed on a calendar can carry a standing token built this way: credit windows, volatility terms, rate windows. It should arrive second, not first. The wrapper trades on the underlying books every day, so it needs those books deep before it exists; a dated market must prove its liquidity through at least one full cycle before a ladder starts rolling across it. This ordering is how listed markets have grown before: the index fund arrived after the stocks it holds were liquid, not before, because a portfolio that trades on underlying books needs those books to exist first.
Sequenced that way, a scalar market grows in two steps. Step one is the market itself: dated pairs, an order book, market makers, settlement on a published number. Everything at this stage is about proving liquidity and price discovery in the windows. Step two wraps that market into investment products: a standing claim on each side, built from the ladder, priced by the windows the first step made liquid. The dated pair serves a view with an end date. The two ladders serve views without one, permanent exposure to risk for the holder who wants protection that outlives any window, and permanent exposure to calm for the holder who wants the carry. The market comes first; the products are built on it.
Notes
This note describes a mechanism, not a live product. Parameters shown as fixed and published are design requirements, not current listings.
On the dated pair markets this design builds on: see Scalar Prediction Markets for Finance, in this research section.