How Ruby works

A gem is an ERC-20 backed by a fixed basket of tokenized shares plus a reserve that holds some of the gem itself. The weights are set when it is cut and do not drift: no manager rebalances them, and changing them is a vote rather than a decision.

Minting hands the basket in and the gem out. Burning does the reverse. Between those two, trades go through the reserve, which is why a gem holds a slice of itself — without it there is nothing to trade against inside the band.

Each gem carries a peg and two edges. Above the upper edge the gem is worth more than the basket behind it, so minting is profitable: someone buys the shares, mints, and sells the gem, which pushes the price back down. Below the lower edge the same trade runs backwards. Inside the band nothing is forced and the reserve takes the trade.

A wide band drifts further before anyone is paid to close it. A narrow one is corrected constantly, and every correction is a fee somebody pays. The cutter picks; the clarity grade says what the pick costs.

A basket is only as good as the pools underneath it. Ruby grades every plan — in the cutter, while you build, and on each gem's page afterwards — from four things it can measure rather than assert:

• Spread. How many equal holdings the weights actually behave like, not how many tickers are in the list.
• Fill. The largest order that never asks a single pool for more than 1% of what it holds. The thinnest facet sets it, and that facet is named.
• Venues. A facet with one pool has one place to be repriced.
• Band and reserve. How far the gem can drift, and how much of its own backing is itself.

The grade runs FL, IF, VVS, VS, SI, I, and every point it takes off is attached to a named inclusion. It is a read on mechanics, not a prediction about prices.

Locking RUBY gives weight equal to the amount times the fraction of the maximum lock still to run: four years counts one, two years counts a half, and it falls every block to zero at unlock. Weight is not transferable and cannot be delegated, so it cannot be rented for the length of a vote. Unlock times round down to a Thursday 00:00 UTC boundary, which is also when the epoch turns.

Once a week the Minter mints the budget — 240,000 RUBY to start, falling 2% every 4 weeks to a floor of 20,000 — and splits it across gauges by relative weight. Locked holders set those weights.

The same weights push caps: each gem's share of the gem-gauge weights times the total deployed cap, floored at 1% and capped at 40%, and the protocol applies the lower of that and the ceiling the Bench allows. Votes can tighten a cap. They cannot loosen one past what governance already agreed.

The Bench Governor handles parameters, listings and caps: 1 d delay, 5 d vote, 4% quorum, then 48 h in the Timelock. About eight days end to end.

The Vault Governor handles one thing: replacing an implementation. 7 d vote, 8% quorum, 7 d in the UpgradeTimelock, with both floors enforced in the contract. About fifteen days, and no shorter path exists.

The Assay Office is a guardian multisig that can cancel a queued operation and pause. It cannot propose, execute, unpause or move a single token. Its only power is to stop.

Prices are read from each ticker's deepest USDG pool with a slot0 call, in integers, at page load. There is no price feed, no indexer and no subgraph anywhere in this site.

A tokenized share is not the share: it is a token that tracks one, and it can trade away from it. A pool can be drained, and a drained pool keeps whatever price it was abandoned at — which is why the catalogue drops anything holding less than $2,000 and why clarity names the thinnest facet in your basket.

A gem can trade below its basket for as long as nobody finds it worth closing. The band decides when that stops being true, not the protocol. Tokenized shares are not available to US persons, and nothing here is investment advice.