How it works

flowchart TD
  T["Trades on the curve"]:::key -->|"2% fee, collected by anyone"| P["Pot, in USDC"]
  T -->|"150 counted swaps"| R["Round closes, tickets freeze"]
  R -->|"10 slots later"| V["Reveal, by anyone"]
  P --> V
  V --> W["Three prizes, sometimes the jackpot"]:::key
  W -->|"sent in the same transaction"| U["Winners' USDC accounts"]
  classDef key fill:#3a2d10,stroke:#f6c869,color:#ffeccb

Fees fill the pot

Every trade on the curve pays a 2% fee in USDC. Meteora’s curve program splits it. Meteora takes 20%. Of the rest, 16% goes to the creator and 84% goes to the pot. That puts 1.344% of each trade’s value in the pot.

The pot’s share waits in the curve’s pool until someone calls the pot program’s collect instruction. Anyone can call it. Collect moves the fees into the pot’s USDC account and pays the caller 0.5% of what it moved. See Fees and where they go.

Holding is your ticket

• Your tickets for a round are the lowest balance your token account held from the start of the round to its close, counted in tokens.
• Tokens you buy during a round count from the next round. Tokens you sell or send count against you at once.
• A balance under 10,000,000 tokens counts as zero.
• Only token accounts owned by regular wallets count. Pool vaults, the pot and other accounts owned by programs never hold tickets.
• There is nothing to sign up for. The hook records your balance whenever your tokens move.

See Tickets and the holder table.

Rounds fill with counted swaps

• A swap is a trade with the curve’s pool, a buy or a sell.
• A swap counts if it moves at least the floor, a number of tokens set by the program.
• A round closes on the swap that brings it to 150 counted swaps. There is no minimum age.
• Only one draw can be pending at a time. If a round fills while a draw is pending, the first swap after the reveal closes it. So draws come at most about every 5 seconds.
• If trading is slow, anyone can close a round that is 12 hours old with the commit instruction, for a $0.05 bounty.

The adaptive floor

The floor decides which swaps count. It steers toward rounds of about an hour, in which counted swaps carry 90% to 95% of the round’s trading volume. That share has no units, so the program needs no price.

Each time a round closes, the floor for the next round is set from the round that just closed:

The round that just closed	The next floor
Lasted under 1 hour	Raised by 1 hour divided by its length, at most x1.25
Counted swaps carried over 95% of its volume	Raised by at least x1.125
Lasted 1 hour or more, counted swaps under 90% of its volume	Lowered by 1 hour divided by its length, at most halved
The same, with counted swaps under 50%	Lowered by 1 hour divided by its length, at most to an eighth
Anything else	Unchanged

• The volume-share rules only apply to rounds with at least 16 swaps of any size.
• The floor starts at 10,000,000 tokens and stays between 100,000 and 10,000,000,000 tokens.
• Inside a round, one rule can lower it. If a round runs past 1 hour while counted swaps carry under half its volume, the floor a swap must meet falls as 1 hour divided by the round’s age. It goes no lower than an eighth of the floor, and never under the minimum. This undoes someone pushing the floor up and walking away.

What this does:

• Dust swaps can’t move the counter.
• Every round shorter than an hour raises the next floor, by up to 25%, so forcing many quick rounds gets more expensive each time. The floor drifts back once the forcing stops.
• Quick rounds also pay little. See the payout rule.

The draw

When a round closes, its tickets freeze, and the program names a target slot 10 slots ahead, about 4 seconds. After that slot, anyone can call reveal. The target slot’s hash, read from Solana’s SlotHashes sysvar, seeds the draw. See The draw.

How much a draw pays

Each draw pays a share of the free pot that grows with the time since the previous draw’s commit:

$$f = 1 - e^{-\Delta t / \tau}, \qquad \tau = 4.5 \text{ hours}$$

• That is 3.6% after 10 minutes, 19.9% after an hour, 59% after 4 hours and 93% after the 12-hour fallback.
• The three prizes split it 60% / 25% / 15%. Each prize is a separate pick weighted by tickets, so one account can win more than one.
• If a draw would leave less than $5, it pays out the whole free pot. It sweeps the jackpot too only when the market is dead: the round closed on the 12-hour fallback with no swaps of any size.

See The payout rule for why this can’t be drained by forcing rounds, and how the pot clears itself as trading fades.

Prizes arrive by themselves

The caller who reveals, called the liquidator, sends every prize straight to the winner’s USDC account in the reveal transaction, which carries one memo listing every delivered prize. There is nothing to claim. The liquidator earns the larger of $0.05 and 0.25% of the three regular prizes (a jackpot paid in the same draw doesn’t count).

The jackpot

The jackpot builds from 20% of the pot’s inflow, kept apart from the free pot. Each draw pays it with the chance $1 - e^{-\Delta t / 48\text{ h}}$, about once per 48 hours on average. It is capped at 5 times its mean, with the excess flowing to the free pot. A dust draw sweeps it only once trading has stopped completely. See the jackpot.