The self-custody option.
Your assets never leave your wallet.
Every options market ever built requires you to give up custody of your assets — to an exchange, a protocol, a pool, a desk. caput doesn't. The seller deposits into escrow on the XRP Ledger. The buyer locks margin and premium into escrow. Both wallets retain signing authority for the entire term. The AMM settles. No intermediary holds assets at any point. Self-custody escrow-options. The first of their kind.
Every options market requires custody transfer. An exchange holds your deposit. A DeFi protocol locks your tokens in a smart contract. An OTC desk uses a third-party escrow agent. In all cases, your assets leave your control and you trust an intermediary to return them. That intermediary is the source of every structural risk in derivatives — insolvency, exploit, admin key compromise, withdrawal freezes.
caput eliminates the intermediary. Your assets go into escrow on the XRP Ledger — a ledger object, not a protocol, not a smart contract, not a pool. Your wallet remains the only signing authority. The escrow enforces timing and conditions. The 2-of-2 multisig enforces bilateral agreement. Custody never transfers. The ledger is the clearinghouse.
The seller deposits an asset and locks it for a fixed term. By doing so, they create a market opportunity that would not otherwise exist. In return, the seller earns premium — income for providing the market and for the duration their capital is locked. The seller's deposit is returned at settlement. This is not a directional position — the seller is compensated for creating the market and managing the risk of doing so.
The buyer pays a fee (premium) to participate in the market the seller created. They lock margin — defined risk capital with a known maximum loss. In return, the buyer gains access to directional exposure on XRP/RLUSD with uncapped upside. This is not about one party winning at the other's expense. The seller earns income for providing the market. The buyer pays for the opportunity to participate in it. Both parties are managing risk.
In a self-custody option, the seller is not hoping the buyer fails. The buyer is not hoping to take the seller's deposit. The seller created a market and was paid for it. The buyer accessed that market and paid a fair fee. At settlement, the AMM determines the outcome based on what actually happened in the market. The seller is made whole. The buyer's margin absorbs any shortfall, or the buyer receives any surplus. Both outcomes are the contract working as designed — not one party defeating the other.
A binary. Software you download once and run on your own infrastructure. We sell it for XRP. After the purchase, we're out of the picture — we don't host, don't custody, don't participate in your contracts, and don't provide ongoing service. You own the tool. The architecture is described in full in the self-custody option paper.
Centralized options exchanges hold your funds, your keys, your terms, and your counterparty risk. You're trading with the venue, not against another participant. Withdrawals queue at someone else's discretion.
Direct OTC works for desks moving eight figures. For everyone else, the legal, escrow, and settlement overhead eats any premium worth collecting. Trust assumptions multiply on every contract.
Most on-chain options are token-wrapped synthetics with pool counterparties and oracle dependencies. The "option" is a yield product. There is no seller on the other side, no fixed counterparty, no real handshake.
Both parties sign the deploy bundle in their own wallets. Premium pays. AMM converts. Escrows lock. Atomic — all or nothing.
The clock runs. Bot polls AMM. Mark-to-market computed every ledger. Buyer can exit. Seller cannot.
Buyer voluntary close. Soft liquidation at 90% (both co-sign). Hard liquidation at 100% (automatic, pre-signed). Or expiry hits and settlement fires.
AMM swaps back. Funds resolve to whoever's owed. Bot updates min-count log. Position is caput.
This is the entire seller-to-buyer interface. The seller publishes terms. The buyer imports the invitation, picks their margin, accepts. Both sign in their own wallets. Funds lock atomically. The clock starts ticking.
No order book. No matching engine. No platform between you. The card is the trade.
caput sells software, once, for XRP. After that we are not on the other end of anything. No accounts, no logins, no support tickets, no SLA. You run the bot. You sign every transaction. Whatever happens after deploy is between you, your counterparty, and the XRPL.
The bot constructs transactions. You sign them in your own wallet — Xaman, hardware, whatever you use. Funds move from your address to escrow contracts you co-control with your counterparty. We have no signing authority. We can't freeze. We can't recover.
Your full locked margin may be consumed. The 10% buffer is a buffer, not a guarantee. There are no top-ups. The seller is locked in for the full tenor. If the AMM you reference moves against you and stays there, you will be liquidated. Don't lock what you can't lose.
The source ships under BSL 1.1 and converts to Apache 2.0 after four years. Audit the binary or the source before you run it. Run an LLM over it. Check the hash. We're not your lawyer, your broker, or your counterparty. We're a tool.
One-click deploy from GitHub. Persistent process, simple billing. About five dollars a month. Sane default.
Small VMs, cheap, multi-region. Good for users who want geographic redundancy or want to be near a specific XRPL cluster.
Free tier for hobby use, paid for serious. Same shape as Railway, different host. Good fallback choice.
Docker image runs anywhere with outbound network. Raspberry Pi, NAS, home server, any VPS. Total sovereignty.
What is this? How do I make money? What's my maximum loss? What do I pay? Can I close early? How do I know the seller won't cheat? Do I need to install anything?
Environment variables, bootstrap flow, wallet setup, host-specific deployment, contract defaults, changing config after launch.
Organized by symptom. Startup problems, deploy failures, runtime issues, settlement errors, wallet problems, recovery procedures.
Pick your tier, configure your bot, pay in XRP, download the binary. Then we're done.