How a station works
A station is an NFT that owns a vault. The vault fills with tokenised stock over time, and whoever holds the NFT owns whatever is in it.
- 01What you get
- 02Activating a station
- 03What a round does
- 04Where the money comes from
- 05What we take
- 06Coins that pay in stock
- 07Buybacks
- 08Selling a station
- 09The numbers
- 10The accounts
- 11Early-minter refunds
What you get
Minting burns 100,000 STN and issues a Metaplex Core NFT with a vault address derived from it. The burn happens inside the mint instruction, before the NFT exists — Solana transactions are all-or-nothing, so there is no version of this where somebody gets a station without the supply going down.
The vault is what makes it a station rather than a picture. It holds real tokenised stock, it is owned by the NFT rather than by you, and it travels with the NFT when you sell. The picture is one of ten ops colorways. That is the collection. The book is the product.
| You pay | Amount | Where it goes |
|---|---|---|
| Deposit | 100,000 STN | Burned |
| Surcharge | 0.5 SOL | 0.45 pot · 0.05 protocol |
| Account rent | ~0.023 SOL | Your own accounts · refundable |
Activating a station
A freshly minted station earns nothing until you activate it. Press Activate on the mint page or your profile, approve the transactions, and it is done once — permanently.
Solana will not let one account hold a balance of more than one token. Each stock needs its own account on your station, created and rent-funded ahead of time, and ten of those do not fit in the same transaction as the mint. That is the only reason this is a second step.
Nothing is lost by waiting. What a station is owed is recorded from the moment it is minted and keeps accruing whether its accounts exist or not. Rounds skip it until they do, then pay it in full.
What a round does
The moment the pot clears 0.1 SOL it is spent — all of it — on whichever stock is next in the rotation. What it bought is split equally across every live station. Not proportionally, not weighted by how long you have held: one station, one share.
A round is one transaction however many stations exist, because it writes a single number rather than paying five thousand accounts. Your share is the difference between that number and where your station last stood — counter minus stamp. Delivering it into the vaults happens afterwards, one transaction per station, and anybody can trigger it.
The rotation holds thirteen now. Ten of them started as tokenised equities; later slots were added without rewriting existing vaults. Nothing about $STN is privileged: it takes its turn, and a station owns its share of it exactly as it owns a share of Apple.
Where the money comes from
Everything the protocol spends passes through one account — the pot. Three things fill it.
| Source | Amount | To the pot |
|---|---|---|
| Mint | 0.5 SOL surcharge | 0.45 SOL |
| Sale on Magic Eden | 5% royalty | Full |
| STN traded on pump.fun | Creator fees | 80% · swept every 2 min |
The 100,000 STN deposit funds none of this. It is destroyed, it goes nowhere, and nobody receives it. Total supply is permanently smaller every time a station is minted.
621 stations were granted, not minted, to settle the early-minter refunds. Those burned nothing and paid no surcharge. They share rounds exactly like any other station.
What we take
0.05 SOL per mint — a tenth of the 0.5 SOL surcharge — and a fifth of the creator fees the token earns as it trades. The other four fifths go to the pot.
| Event | Protocol | Pot |
|---|---|---|
| Mint surcharge | 0.05 SOL | 0.45 SOL |
| Deposit | N/A | N/A · burned |
| Royalty on a sale | N/A | Full |
| Creator fees | 20% | 80% |
Coins that pay in stock
Anyone can launch a coin from the launcher. It is an ordinary pump.fun coin and you are its creator. The one difference is what happens to its creator fees.
| Share | Where it goes |
|---|---|
| 75% | Buys the chosen stock and goes to holders |
| 15% | The pot, which buys stock for stations |
| 10% | The protocol |
The 75% is swapped into the stock the coin chose and sent straight out to holders. It is split pro rata. Hold twice as much as someone else and you get twice as much as they do.
| Holder | Holds | Gets |
|---|---|---|
| A | 50% of supply | 50% of the payout |
| B | 30% of supply | 30% of the payout |
| C | 20% of supply | 20% of the payout |
The cost of paying holders comes out of the fees rather than out of the protocol, which is what lets this run without anybody topping it up. A coin that earns nothing costs nothing and simply waits.
There is nothing to claim and no button to press. The stock arrives in your wallet. If your share is worth less than about 0.002 SOL of rent, it is not sent this time. Nothing is lost — it goes back in and is divided again on the next round.
The launcher lists names that are not (yet) in the station rotation — McDonald's, Palantir, Alphabet, Coinbase, MicroStrategy, GameStop, Gold. A coin can pay those. Stations still earn only from the thirteen in rotation.
Buybacks
A portion of launcher trading tax is reserved for buybacks of $STN. This split does not move the 75 / 15 holder and pot legs, and it does not change what a station is owed.
Over time the protocol will keep experimenting with fee splits — to increase pots, memes, and the token. The numbers page is the source of truth when a split changes.
Selling a station
Selling a station is selling the NFT. Transferring the token transfers everything the station owns — its accounts, its stock, and anything a round has credited but not yet delivered. A listed station is still live and still paid by every round while it sits on the market.
In practice that means listing it on Magic Eden. The collection carries a 5% royalty, and it goes to the pot rather than to us.
The numbers
| Setting | Value |
|---|---|
| Deposit | 100,000 STN · burned |
| Surcharge | 0.5 SOL |
| Protocol share | 0.05 SOL per mint |
| Royalty | 5% · to the pot |
| Round threshold | 0.1 SOL |
| Supply | 5,000 stations |
| Stocks in rotation | 13 |
| Account rent | ~0.002 SOL per account |
| Launcher split | 75 holders · 15 pot · 10 protocol |
The accounts
Program, pot, protocol wallet, config and collection are published on-chain. This preview uses dummy addresses so nothing here can be confused with a live program.
Early-minter refunds
The first 96 stations burned 1,000,000 STN each against 100,000 today. The wallets that paid that price were owed the difference. Thirteen settled in SOL; fifty-five took stations — 621 of them. The full list lives on the refunds page.
That is what paying the debt in stations costs, and it is worth being plain about: the refund was real, and so was its effect on everyone else.