Positions & weighting
A position is one NFT paired with a committed amount of SOL. You cannot list one without the other. That SOL — the position's backing — is doing three separate jobs at the same time, and understanding all three is the fastest way to understand Ripstr.
What backing does
1. It funds your standing bid. If a purchaser draws your NFT and decides they would rather have SOL, they receive 85% of your backing and you get the NFT back. Backing is therefore the price at which you are publicly willing to buy your own NFT back.
2. It sets your selection weight — inversely.
weight = 10^24 / backing_lamports probability = weight / total_weight
More backing means less weight, which means your position is drawn less often. This is the protocol's headline mechanic and it is easy to get backwards: heavier backing makes an NFT rarer.
3. It is your stake, not a fee. Backing is returned to you when the position is allocated or when you withdraw it. It is your own capital the entire time. The protocol never lends it, never pools it with other positions, and never spends it on anything else.
The odds, concretely
Take three positions backed at 0.01, 0.10 and 1.00 SOL. Their weights are proportional to 100, 10 and 1.
| Backing | Relative weight | Odds per pull |
|---|---|---|
| 0.01 SOL | 100 | 90.09% |
| 0.10 SOL | 10 | 9.01% |
| 1.00 SOL | 1 | 0.90% |
A pool with six listings backed between 0.01 and 0.80 SOL produces odds from 54.812% at the bottom of the range down to 0.685% at the top. The ratio between the extremes (80×) is exactly the ratio between the backings, because weight is a pure inverse — nothing else feeds into selection.
What this means in practice
- Lightly-backed positions are the pool's inventory. They are cheap to list, drawn constantly, and turn over fast.
- Heavily-backed positions are the pool's reserve. They are rarely drawn, so they survive many acquisitions, and every one of those acquisitions pays them a fee share.
- You cannot buy rarity for free. Making your NFT rarer means committing more SOL, which also raises the standing bid you are advertising. The two are the same number. There is no way to look rare and cheap at once.
- You cannot buy a bigger fee share either. The fee split is equal across active positions. Size changes how long you stay in, not how much you take per pull.
Minimum backing
The pool enforces a floor of 0.01 SOL per position by default. It is a configurable parameter; setting it to zero disables the floor entirely.
Isolation and solvency
Every position's backing is held separately and can only ever settle for that position. Nothing about the protocol lets one position's outcome be paid out of another's capital.
Fee accounting rounds conservatively in the protocol's favour — a position's fee checkpoint rounds up when it joins and down when it claims — so the total credited to depositors is always less than or equal to the total collected. The pool is solvent by construction, not by monitoring.
Adding, raising and withdrawing
- You may raise the backing on an existing position. That lowers your selection weight (making the position rarer), raises your standing bid, and is also the only way to challenge for the crown.
- You may shrink your backing. That raises your weight, lowers your standing bid, and forfeits the crown if you hold it.
- You may withdraw the position entirely and take back the NFT and the backing. Only the depositor who created a position can ever withdraw it — no administrator has an instruction that can move it.
- Withdrawals, repricing and crown claims are all blocked while any acquisition request is still unsettled. See Pricing & allocation for why that matters.
Earning while you wait
An active position accrues a share of every acquisition fee the pool collects during its own tenure — not before it activated, not after it left. Earnings accumulate as a withdrawable balance you pull whenever you like, separately from the position itself. See Fees & protocol revenue.