Risks

Stock Miner (formerly MineStreet, then HoodMiner; renamed Stock Miner 2026-07-14 — name only, every number unchanged; token ticker now $MINER, was $TICK; NFT symbol RIG).

This page is not a legal disclaimer we were told to write. It is the page we would want to read. Nothing on it is softened.

See also: Litepaper · Mechanics · FAQ

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1. The model is inflow-dependent. Most of what you earn is other people's money.

Stock Miner is inflow-dependent. The money that pays miners is, overwhelmingly, money that other people paid in. Our own Monte Carlo simulation — published in full at docs/tokenomics-report.md — found that roughly 53–60% of a first-day buyer's lifetime earnings are paid directly out of the mints of people who bought later, and that in the v1 modelling, where the vault held ETH rather than a tokenized stock, 100% of every payout was recycled buyer capital with zero external yield. The tokenized-stock vault we actually shipped adds real exogenous exposure — the vault genuinely holds the stock, so its price movement and its corporate actions come from outside the system — but it does not change the core of the thing: if purchases stop, payouts fall. And people who arrive late earn substantially less than people who arrived early. In every single scenario we simulated, including the optimistic ones, the bottom-decile late buyer ended the year having earned 0.15x to 0.19x of what they paid for their miner. That is not a tail risk we are hedging against. That is the outcome for the worst-off tenth of latecomers in our own best-case model. Read that number again before you buy anything.

The detail, since you're still here

The pool that pays you is filled by three things: other people minting miners (60% of each mint, instantly), the vault dripping (1%/day of what it holds), and marketplace fees (20% of the 5% fee). The first of those is by far the largest, and it exists only for as long as people keep buying.

Our simulator ran 300 paths across five scenarios — growth, plateau, decline, whale shock, and dead launch. The late-buyer numbers, from the published report:

There is no scenario in that table where buying late works out. Not one. The optimistic scenario is also a losing scenario for the people who arrive at the end of it.

The structure that produces this is not subtle: the pool is filled first by early buyers and drained first by early miners, and the hard supply caps mean primary inflow stops entirely once a ticker sells out. After that, the only money entering a pool is the vault drip and marketplace fees. The simulator's blunt summary of the average case is that the typical buyer sees about 0.82x of their mint price returned over a year — a negative-sum game with a house take of roughly 18%, distributed as early cohorts around 2.5x and late cohorts around 0.2x.

That is a wealth transfer from late buyers to early buyers, and it is not a bug. It is the shape of the machine.

The vault is the one thing that pushes against this. It holds real tokenized stock, so it brings in real exogenous exposure and it keeps paying after minting stops. It is real. It is also not large enough to change the paragraph above, and you should not let it comfort you into thinking otherwise. And holding the underlying is not free: value swaps ETH → stock on the way in and stock → ETH on the way out, and in the worst governed case that round trip costs up to ~6% in swap spread (each leg is floored at 3% slippage). The vault buys real exposure; it is not a lossless store.

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2. The lifetime caps are ceilings, not promises

The tiers advertise lifetime caps of 2.0x / 2.5x / 3.0x the mint price. These are the points at which a miner stops earning. They are not projections, targets, or expectations.

Here is the arithmetic, from our own report:

• Sum of all advertised lifetime caps, per ticker: 24.4 ETH.
• Maximum money that can ever reach holders on that ticker, even at a full sellout: about 8.9 ETH.
• The pool can fund roughly 36% of the caps it displays. The caps are approximately 2.75x oversized relative to the money that could ever pay them.

Most miners will never reach their lifetime cap. In our simulations, only early cohorts got close. If you are reading "3.0x lifetime cap" as a number you might one day hold, you have misread it. It is a ceiling on how much a miner is permitted to earn before it burns out, and the aggregate of those permissions is a promise the money cannot keep.

We considered lowering the caps to numbers the pool could actually fund. We chose instead to keep them and tell you this. If you would rather we had lowered them, that is a reasonable position and the governance forum is open.

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3. Smart-contract risk

The contracts have been audited internally — by our own security review process, across every phase of the build, with findings fixed and re-tested.

An external, independent audit is pending and has not been completed. We are not going to claim otherwise, and you should not treat "audited" without a qualifier as meaning what it usually means. Until an external audit is published, the code has been reviewed by the people who wrote it and by no one else.

Smart contracts can contain bugs that no amount of review finds. A bug in the pool accounting, the cap enforcement, the marketplace escrow, or the adapters could cost you everything in the protocol. There is no insurance that covers this — see §4 for what the "Insurance Fund" actually is and isn't.

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4. The Insurance Fund is small. Much smaller than its name suggests.

5% of every mint and 30% of the treasury bucket go to an "Insurance Fund" intended to backstop pools if inflows stall.

Our own simulator found that the mint-fee treasury tops out at roughly 5.2 ETH protocol-wide for an entire year in the best case, and the insurance fund it feeds ends the year holding under 0.06 ETH.

That is not a backstop. It is a rounding error. At current parameters, the Insurance Fund cannot meaningfully defend a pool against a stall, and you should not factor it into any decision. We are disclosing this rather than letting the word "insurance" do work it hasn't earned. Making it real would require seeding it from the $MINER treasury allocation or an ETH endowment — that is a governance decision that has not been made.

The same report finds that mint fees cannot fund operations either; the protocol runs on the 15% $MINER treasury allocation and marketplace fees.

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5. Chain risk: a single sequencer

Stock Miner is built on Robinhood Chain, an Arbitrum Orbit L2 that settles to Ethereum.

It runs a single, Robinhood-operated sequencer. In principle, that operator can censor or reorder transactions, and if the sequencer goes down, the chain stops producing blocks. Your claims, your sales, and your votes stop with it. This is a liveness and censorship risk that does not exist on a decentralized chain, and it is not one we can mitigate — we can only tell you it's there.

Withdrawals to Ethereum L1 go through the standard Arbitrum canonical bridge, with a 7-day challenge period. Getting value out of the chain is not instant.

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6. Tokenized-stock issuer risk

The tokens in our vaults, and the tokens you are paid in, are Robinhood Stock Tokens. Understand precisely what they are.

They are SPV-backed derivatives. They are not shares. Holding one does not make you a shareholder of Alphabet or Tesla. You have no shareholder rights, no vote, no direct claim on the company. What you hold is a token whose value tracks a stock, backed by a special-purpose vehicle, issued by a third party we do not control.

We read the contracts on-chain. Here is what the issuer can do:

• Pause all transfers, globally or on an oracle signal (e.g. a market halt). If this happens, your rewards are deferred and retryable, never lost — but you cannot get them out until the pause lifts.
• Block any address. The tokens use a sanctions deny-list. An address on it cannot send or receive.
• Burn tokens from any holder (adminBurn, role-gated). Including, in principle, from our vaults.
• Rebase balances on corporate actions such as stock splits. These are not fixed-balance ERC-20s.

Our architecture quarantines these failure modes to the delivery boundary — minting never depends on a stock being live, and pool accounting is in ETH, so a pause or a rebase cannot corrupt the ledger. But it cannot make issuer risk go away. If a stock token is permanently paused, delisted, or admin-burned, the protocol's fallback is a governance-declared emergency mode that reverts that ticker to ETH payouts. That is a mitigation, not a guarantee.

And on HOOD, specifically

There is no Robinhood tokenized stock for HOOD. It does not exist. The HOOD pool therefore pays out in Stock Miner's own HOOD ERC-20 — a token we issue, whose liquidity and price we seed and govern. It is not a claim on Robinhood, it is not backed by an SPV, and it is not economically the same thing as being paid in GOOGL. We could have quietly let the ticker imply otherwise. We're telling you instead. HOOD remains the only launch ticker with this gap.

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7. You carry price risk between minting and claiming

Your reward accrues in ETH and is converted to the tokenized stock at the moment you claim. How much stock your ETH buys depends on the market when you claim, not when you minted.

Each claim is a real swap: it pays a DEX fee, it suffers slippage, and it is exposed to MEV. Those costs are yours. The app bounds slippage at 1% by default and you can change it, but you cannot make the cost zero.

Separately: the daily caps are dollar-denominated but enforced through a governance-set ETH/USD rate behind a 48-hour timelock — not a live oracle. The cap is a governance-pegged dollar equivalent. If ETH moves sharply, your cap is temporarily loose or tight in real terms until governance catches up.

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8. Regulatory and geographic risk

Stock Miner is not available to U.S. persons or U.K. residents. The frontend geo-fences. Circumventing that is your violation, not our permission.

Tokenized equities and reward mechanics sit on live regulatory surface — MiCA in the EU, and securities law generally. That surface is moving. A regulator could take a view of this product that makes it impossible to operate in a jurisdiction, including yours, with no notice.

The tickers are real trademarks belonging to real companies. Stock Miner is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Alphabet, Tesla, Robinhood, or any other company whose ticker appears in the game.

Legal review is ongoing and is a condition of mainnet launch.

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9. Governance risk

Voting weight is sqrt(staked $MINER), per wallet, and there is no proof-of-personhood layer. Splitting a stake across N wallets multiplies voting power by roughly √N. Someone determined enough to run 25 wallets at the 10,000 $MINER threshold gets about five times the voting power of the same tokens held in one wallet.

We disclose this in full in mechanics.md §7. It is inherent to quadratic voting without identity. The blast radius is bounded — the only thing a vote can do is promote a ticker from a pre-approved list — but it is a real weakness in a real system.

Protocol parameters and treasury movements sit behind a 3-of-5 multisig and a 48-hour timelock. That means five named humans, three of whom can queue a change that executes two days later. It is a check, not a decentralization claim, and we are not going to describe it as one.

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10. The short version

• Payouts come from purchases. If purchases stop, payouts fall.
• Buying late is, in every scenario we modelled, substantially worse than buying early. The bottom decile of late buyers earned 0.15x–0.19x of their mint price.
• The lifetime caps are ceilings the aggregate money cannot fund. Most miners will never reach them.
• The external audit is not done.
• The insurance fund is too small to insure anything.
• The chain has one sequencer. The stock tokens have an issuer who can pause, block, burn, and rebase them. The HOOD pool doesn't pay a real stock at all.
• You could lose everything you put in.

Stock Miner is a game with transparent rules and a real, disclosed house edge. Play it because you want to play it. Don't play it because you think it's an income stream — it isn't one, we have never called it one, and we have published the simulation that shows why.

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Nothing on this page or anywhere in Stock Miner's documentation is investment advice, a projection of returns, or an offer. Stock Miner does not promise, project, or imply any return. Not available to U.S. or U.K. persons.