bigfish, without the hand-waving

What this is

bigfish lists 57 people who built this industry. Each one has a curve. You buy keys on that curve; the price of the next key goes up as more are bought and down as they are sold. While you hold, every trade on that curve pays you.

The people listed did not sign up for this and are not affiliated with bigfish. A profile is a public X handle plus a curve. Nothing is ever posted in anyone's name, a key gives access to nothing, and any listed person can walk in, prove the handle is theirs, and take the profile plus everything it has earned.

This is an open clone of the friend.tech and fame.family model, moved to Robinhood Chain and recast on founders instead of traders. We are not pretending otherwise.

The curve

The key numbered n costs n² × 0.0001 ETH. Prices are set in ETH, not in dollars: key #10 costs 0.01 ETH whatever ETH is worth that day.

Buying or selling several keys at once costs exactly the sum of the individual keys, so batching changes nothing except gas.

cost(from, amount) = (S(from + amount) - S(from)) * 1e14
S(n) = n * (n + 1) * (2n + 1) / 6      // sum of squares

Key #1 belongs to the profile itself and can never be sold. It is minted for free at listing, which means the reserve held by the contract is always exactly what every remaining key can be sold for. The curve cannot run dry.

The 13%

Every trade, buy or sell, pays 13% of the curve price on top of it. It splits three ways, always:

Buying and immediately selling costs about 26%: 13% on the way in, 13% on the way out. That is written here, on the trade panel, and nowhere is it dressed up as anything else. If you flip a key you lose a quarter of it.

A buyer never earns fees on their own buy, and a seller never earns fees on their own sell. The holder cut is distributed before new keys are minted and after sold keys are burned.

Getting paid to hold

The 3% is split across all keys of that profile at the moment of the trade. Ten keys out of forty gets you a quarter of that trade's holder fee. You claim it whenever you want; unclaimed fees are not lost, they sit in the contract with your name on them.

feePerKey += holderFee / supply         // at every trade
earned(you) = feePerKey * yourKeys - alreadyPaid(you)

You get paid when the profile is traded, not when the person posts. The 3% lands whether the founder has ever heard of bigfish or not.

The claim

A listed person logs in with X, connects the wallet they want to be paid at, and sends one transaction. They get key #1, the 5% their curve has accumulated so far, and every future 5% goes straight to that wallet.

Here is the honest part. The contract cannot check X. What it checks is an EIP-712 signature from one address, the claim signer, held by our backend. Our backend signs only after X has confirmed, through OAuth, that the person logging in controls that handle. That is a centralised component and the same one fame.family uses.

What the signer can do: assign an unclaimed profile to a wallet. What it cannot do: move the curve reserve, touch anyone's keys, re-assign a profile that is already claimed, or pause anything. If our signer key leaked, the worst case is profiles being assigned to the wrong wallets going forward. Existing keys and the reserve are untouchable.

We store no X tokens and no database. The access token is used once to read your username, then dropped.

On chain, off chain

There is no indexer and no database. Every number on this site is read from the contract or reconstructed from its events on the public RPC.

The bigfish score

The score ranking the market is volume traded + ETH currently in the curve, both read from the chain. No followers, no impressions, no engagement, no weighting we could quietly change. A profile climbs because people put real ETH through it.

Contracts

One contract, no proxy, no upgrade path, no pause, no admin withdrawal of the reserve. The owner can do exactly two things: list profiles, and rotate the treasury and signer addresses. A listing that has never been traded can be removed, which exists so a typo in a handle is fixable; the moment a curve has any volume it is permanent.

The contract exposes a solvency() view returning its balance and everything it owes. Anyone can call it at any time and check that the first number covers the second.

Risks

• 26% round trip. Buying and selling immediately loses about a quarter of your money to fees. This is the single most likely way to lose here.
• The market can stay empty. A curve with no buyers pays nothing. Most of these profiles may never be traded and may never be claimed.
• The claim depends on our signer. A centralised key authorises claims. It cannot touch funds, but it is a single point of failure for the claim flow.
• Nobody verified the identities but us. Before a claim, the link between a profile and a real person is editorial. We checked every handle by hand. We can still be wrong, and we say so on every unclaimed profile.
• Short window, by design. bigfish is a product of the moment, not a multi-year roadmap. There is no team token, no airdrop and no promise of anything after the window closes.
• Unaudited code. The contract is tested, including invariant tests on solvency, and it is not audited. Do not put in more than you would shrug off.

FAQ