Getting Started
Your First Trade

Your First Trade

Community tokens on Superhero do not trade on an order book. Each one has a bonding curve: a contract that mints new tokens when you buy and burns them when you sell, with the price determined by supply rather than by a counterparty. There is always liquidity and never a bid-ask queue.

Start at superhero.com/trends/tokens (opens in a new tab). It is sorted by market cap by default, so established communities surface first.

Buy

  1. Open a token from the trending list. You land on /trends/tokens/<token name>.
  2. Choose the Trade tab. The token page's tabs are Feed, Trade, Info, Transactions and Holders; the last three appear once the token exists on chain.
  3. Press Connect if you have not already. Trading needs a connected account.
  4. Make sure Buy is selected, and enter an amount. The two fields are linked: type AE and it shows the tokens you would receive, or type tokens and it shows the AE required.
  5. Read the quote. Check the slippage setting before you commit.
  6. Press buy and approve in your wallet.
  7. The confirmation shows what you received, and, on a buy, any protocol DAO tokens minted to you alongside.

Selling is two transactions

Selling an AEX-9 token requires granting the sale contract an allowance first, so the app runs:

  1. Approve allowance: step 1 of 2.
  2. Sell with the existing allowance: step 2 of 2.

Buying is a single transaction: the AE rides along with the call, so there is nothing to pre-approve.

Reading the quote

It is an estimate, not a fill price

The quote is computed against the curve's state at the moment you type. Between your click and your transaction landing in a block, other people's buys and sells move that state. On a rising curve, the tokens you receive for a given amount of AE can be slightly fewer than quoted.

The quote does not tick. It is recomputed only when you change the amount or flip between Buy and Sell, not on an interval, and not when the token's supply changes underneath you. Retype the amount before you press Buy if the card has been open for a while, and treat the slippage setting, not the displayed number, as your actual protection.

Slippage

Default1%
Allowed range0 to 50%
StoredPer browser, in local storage under tokenTrade:slippage
Passed toEvery buy and sell call, as the contract's tolerance parameter

Too low and trades fail when the price moves. Too high and you accept a worse execution silently. Change it deliberately, not to force a failing trade through.

Max does not mean your whole balance

The Max button withholds a reserve, because a trade for every last aetto cannot pay its own fee:

max = balance − balance × (slippage + 1) / 100 − 0.001 AE

At the default 1% slippage that is roughly a 2% slippage allowance plus a flat 0.001 AE gas reserve. This is the usual cause of "insufficient balance" on a balance that looks sufficient.

The spread is structural

Every curve trade carries a 1% spread between the buy price and the sell price. The contract splits it:

On a buy, the AE you spend is allocated:
  ├── 99.0%  → the bonding curve reserve (what sellers redeem against)
  ├──  0.5%  → the community's DAO treasury
  └──  0.5%  → the affiliation system
                ├── 0.300% → level 1 referrer
                ├── 0.125% → level 2 referrer
                ├── 0.050% → level 3 referrer
                └── 0.025% → level 4 referrer

Unaffiliated affiliation fees are burned rather than accumulated. Buying and immediately selling the same amount loses about 1% before any price movement.

Protocol DAO tokens

Buying also mints protocol-level DAO tokens to you, proportional to purchase activity. The confirmation screen shows the amount and symbol. These are separate from the community token you bought; see Protocol DAO.

What you are signing

Superhero's built-in wallet names the call rather than showing raw bytes:

  • Buy tokens: "Spends the AE attached to this call to buy tokens from this sale contract."
  • Sell tokens: "Sells your tokens back to this sale contract for AE."
  • Lets another account spend your tokens up to this amount: the allowance step of a sell.

Check two things on that screen every time: the contract address matches the token you meant, and the AE amount is what you typed. Token amounts are shown in raw base units, not scaled by the token's decimals, so count digits rather than eyeballing magnitude.

Verify the result

WhereWhat it tells you
Transactions tab on the token pageRecent buys and sells with timestamps and transaction hashes; yours should be at the top
Holders tabTop addresses and balances; your address should now appear
aescan.io (opens in a new tab)The raw transaction: sender, contract called, gas consumed, block
Your walletThe token balance, discovered from the middleware's AEX-9 balance index

If the token has not appeared in your wallet's list yet, that is an indexing delay rather than a failed trade. The transaction on aescan is authoritative. See Managing AEX-9 Tokens for how balance discovery works.

Every token uses the same curve

The factory deploys one shared BondingCurveExponential contract and every community sale points at it. The parameters are constants with no setter:

a = 10^15    k = 10^10    initial_price = 10^11    decimals = 10^18
minimum_count = 10^12     sell_return_percentage = 9950    sell_return_precision = 10000

Two tokens at the same supply cost exactly the same; a token's price says how much has been bought, nothing about how it was configured. minimum_count = 10^12 aettos (10^-6 of a token) is the smallest tradable amount; below it the call aborts with MINIMUM_TOKENS_REQUIRED. See Curve Parameters.

Before you buy anything meaningful

  • Price is a function of supply, not of demand from a counterparty. An early buyer's gain comes from later buyers pushing along the curve.
  • The 1% spread is a floor on round-trip cost.
  • A community token is not equity and carries no claim on anything. Read Token Risks.
  • Double-check addresses and amounts before signing. Start with an amount you would shrug at losing.

Related

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