PLEDGE
The only crowdfund where failing pays you.
Scroll, and watch them reach
Failing pays you.
Hit the goal and it gets built. Miss it, and every early backer is paid.
Both endings work for you
Goal met by the deadline
The creator is paid and the thing gets built. That is what you pledged for. The creator also gets the bonus back, untouched.
Goal missed
Every backer is refunded in full. Every dollar pledged in the first half also earns the bonus rate on top, paid from the deposit the creator locked on day one. You were paid for being early.
One example campaign, start to finish. A 1,000 USDC bonus at 20% covers 5,000 USDC of early pledges.
The campaign opens
1,000 USDC
Bonus locked before anyone can pledge. Goal 10,000 USDC in 30 days.
You pledge on day 3
100 USDC
Inside the first half, so your bonus is fixed now: 20 USDC.
Day 30
Anyone settles
No admin. The program counts the vault against the goal.
Goal met at 10,000 USDC
It gets built
Creator gets 9,800 USDC plus the 1,000 USDC bonus back. 200 USDC fee burns PLEDGE.
Goal missed
120 USDC back
Your 100 USDC in full, plus your 20 USDC bonus.
Now try to lose money
Move your pledge through the campaign. Whatever day you pick, look at the worst case.
A 30-day campaign for 10,000 USDC with a 20% early bonus.
Day 3
If the goal is met
You put in
100 USDC
You end with
It gets built
Your pledge paid for it. The creator also gets the bonus back.
If the goal is missed
You put in
100 USDC
You end with
120 USDC back
Your 100 USDC refunded in full, plus a 20 USDC bonus for pledging in the first half.
The bonus is fixed the moment you pledge. In this example it pays on the first 5,000 USDC of early pledges; the app tells you how much room is left before you sign.
Late pledges earn nothing
Waiting until a campaign looks doomed and then piling in for the bonus pays zero. Only pledges made before the halfway point earn it, and each backer's share is fixed when they pledge, so nobody arriving later can shrink it.
One example campaign: 22 pledges over 30 days, 3,900 USDC of them early.
- Day 1, 250 USDC+50
- Day 2, 40 USDC+8
- Day 2, 500 USDC+100
- Day 3, 100 USDC+20
- Day 4, 75 USDC+15
- Day 5, 1,200 USDC+240
- Day 6, 60 USDC+12
- Day 8, 300 USDC+60
- Day 9, 25 USDC+5
- Day 11, 800 USDC+160
- Day 12, 150 USDC+30
- Day 14, 400 USDC+80
Day 15, halfway
Day 16, 900 USDC+0- Day 17, 50 USDC+0
- Day 19, 2,000 USDC+0
- Day 21, 300 USDC+0
- Day 22, 120 USDC+0
- Day 24, 700 USDC+0
- Day 26, 45 USDC+0
- Day 27, 1,500 USDC+0
- Day 29, 260 USDC+0
- Day 30, 90 USDC+0
Blue numbers are each backer's bonus if the goal is missed, at 20% of what they pledged early. The pledges on the right are refunded in full and nothing more.
We did not invent this. We put it in a vault.
The dominant assurance contract
Economist Alex Tabarrok proposed it in 1998: a fundraiser that pays backers a bonus when it fails, so pledging is the better move whatever anyone else does.
The lab test
In 2021 Timothy Cason, Alex Tabarrok and Robertas Zubrickas ran it with 280 people at Purdue. A 20% refund bonus paid only on early pledges lifted the share of funded campaigns by more than half, and cost less than paying it to everyone.
It never caught on because someone has to be trusted to hold the bonus and pay it out. On PLEDGE nobody holds it: the program does.
- No bonus43.5%
74 of 170 campaigns
- 20% refund bonus for every backer60.5%
133 of 220 campaigns
- 20% refund bonus for early backers only67.0%
154 of 230 campaigns. This is the rule PLEDGE runs.
Paying only early backers also cost less: 12.79 lab dollars of bonus per campaign, against 21.43 when every backer was paid.
Cason, Tabarrok and Zubrickas, “Early refund bonuses increase successful crowdfunding”, Games and Economic Behavior 129 (2021), 78 to 95. Read the paper
Nothing to trust
The refund and the bonus are not promises. They sit in a vault the program controls, and the rules below are the only way out.
Campaigns raise SOL or USDC for real work, from 1 to 90 days, with a bonus rate the creator picks between 1% and 50%. No campaign ever sells a token.
No bonus, no campaign
The creator's whole bonus moves into the campaign's vault in the same transaction that opens it. A campaign without it cannot exist.
No take-backs
Pledges stay in the vault until the deadline. Nobody can pull money out early, the creator included.
Anyone can settle
Once the deadline passes, any wallet can close the books. Goal reached means success. Anything less means failure. No admin decides.
Your bonus is fixed when you pledge
It is the rate times the early part of your own pledge. Pledges that come later, from anyone, cannot dilute it.
Refunds always fit
The vault holds every pledge plus a bonus that can cover every early pledge it accepts. Once the bonus is spoken for, new pledges are refund only.
Success burns PLEDGE
A campaign that reaches its goal pays a 2% fee. All of it buys PLEDGE on the open market and burns it. Failed campaigns pay nothing. A creator who locks PLEDGE for the campaign's life pays no fee at all.
PLEDGE burned forever
0
Fees spent buying it
0 USDC and 0 SOL
Share of supply removed
0%
Nothing burned yet. The first campaign that reaches its goal starts the burn.
Anyone can run the burn. Each run spends at most 0.1% of the pool and must get at least 98% of the pool's own 30 minute average price, so there is little in it for a front-runner.
Carry a stone.
If the arch closes, you helped build it. If it does not, you walk away with more than you brought.