FAQ

Will Therm save me money on gas?#

Not necessarily, and not on average. The rate you lock is priced off the recent base fee, adjusted by the quote curve, plus a 3% premium. On quiet days you will pay more per transaction than you would at spot. You come out ahead when the base fee rises above your locked rate while you are transacting, which on Robinhood Chain happens on exactly the days that matter most. Think of it as buying a fixed price, not a discount.

What exactly is a therm?#

One therm is 100,000 units of gas on Robinhood Chain, held as an ERC-20 token with 18 decimals. It is a quantity of gas, not an amount of money. A typical stock-token swap uses around 320,000 gas, so it burns about 3.2 therms whatever the base fee is at the time.

Can I get my USDG back, and do therms expire?#

No, and no. Therms are non-refundable: the pool never buys them back for USDG or ETH. If they were refundable, holders could redeem whenever gas got cheaper and keep them whenever it got more expensive, and the pool could not survive that. They also never expire; a therm stays valid until it is burned paying for gas. Therms are transferable, so you can give or sell them to someone else, but Therm does not run a market for them.

What happens during a spike?#

Nothing changes for you. Your transactions keep burning the same number of therms, and the pool pays the higher base fee in ETH. What does change is the price of new passes: the quote rises with the base fee and with falling coverage, and if coverage falls below 0.5×, new sales pause until the spike passes.

Why can I only burn 50 therms an hour?#

The hourly cap stops anyone buying a large balance while gas is cheap and burning all of it in the few minutes a spike lasts, which would drain the pool. Fifty therms is about fifteen stock-token swaps an hour, well above normal manual trading. If you need more throughput, contact us about a protocol sponsorship policy, which has its own caps. The reasoning is covered in Spending therms.

What if the pool runs out of ETH?#

Losses are absorbed first by the pool's reserve surplus, then by staked $THRM. If both are exhausted, the paymaster stops sponsoring until the pool is recapitalised. Your therms stay in your wallet but cannot be spent in the meantime. This is why the app shows coverage ratio live, and why you should keep some ETH for time-critical transactions. See Risk disclosures.

Do I need $THRM to use Therm?#

No. Buying and spending therms only requires USDG and a compatible wallet. $THRM is for staking into the backstop and, later, governance.

Which wallets work?#

MetaMask and other injected browser wallets, Rabby, Coinbase Wallet, Safe, and any WalletConnect v2 wallet. Robinhood Wallet connects through WalletConnect: choose it in the connect modal and scan the QR code from the Robinhood Wallet app. To spend therms, your account must be able to send ERC-4337 user operations, either as a smart account or through EIP-7702 delegation where your wallet supports it.

Does Therm cover the L1 data fee?#

Yes. Robinhood Chain is built on Arbitrum, which charges the cost of posting data to Ethereum as additional L2 gas on each transaction. That gas is included in what the paymaster pays and burns therms like any other gas.

Is Therm audited?#

Not yet. No contracts are deployed and no audit has been completed. We will not accept real deposits until a full audit is published. The demo on this site is a simulator and never asks you to sign a transaction. See Security.