Questions from the trenches
The mechanics, in plain language.
An autonomous, onchain venture capital mechanism. A percentage of every $TRENCH transaction accumulates in a treasury; the DAO's largest stakers surface investment opportunities; the wider staking community votes on them; and returns are recycled through burn and staking mechanics. There is no fund manager.
Stake $TRENCH. You receive dTRENCH, a non-transferable receipt that represents your position in the DAO. Voting weight is snapshotted when a proposal opens, so stake before a vote begins if you want a say in it.
Voting power that can be bought on a DEX or borrowed for a single block is not governance, it is an auction. dTRENCH can only be minted by staking and burned by unbonding. That closes the door on flash-loan governance attacks entirely.
Unbonding burns your dTRENCH immediately, so your voting power disappears the moment you queue the exit — you cannot vote on your way out and collect before the consequences land. The underlying $TRENCH releases after the cooldown period.
The top 50 dTRENCH holders. Partners are the proposal class: they can submit investment proposals to the DAO. Their role is to identify opportunities worthy of consideration, not to control the Treasury.
They get no vote at all. For as long as someone holds a Partner seat their voting weight is zero. Partners find the deals; The Many decide which deals receive capital. Whoever sets the agenda does not also count the votes.
Claim a free seat if one is open and you meet the stake threshold. If all fifty are taken, challenge a seated Partner you out-stake and take their place. A seat is not property — fall below the threshold and anyone can prune you from the table.
Nobody. Once The Many have authorized a deal and the Treasury holds enough capital, execution is permissionless — any address can trigger it. The fund itself is encoded into the system.
When an investment returns value, that value is converted to $TRENCH and split exactly in half: 50% is permanently burned, and 50% is distributed to dTRENCH stakers. Investment success reduces supply and rewards committed capital in the same transaction.
Trading costs 1.45% on a buy and 1.45% on a sell. It is charged by the pool on each swap and collected in ETH, not inside the token — sending $TRENCH between your own wallets is free. The fee funds the investment treasury and the development of Trench Capital itself.
All investment protocol mechanics begin three days after deployment of the token, so the Treasury has time to accumulate before the first deal can draw on it. Until then, staking and governance run normally but no capital can leave.
Four things: only Partners can propose, quorum and a majority of The Many must approve, any sufficiently supported group of Partners can flag a proposal as outside the mandate, and every passed proposal waits in a timelock before it can touch the Treasury.
Anything that makes Robinhood Chain a more complete onchain economy: infrastructure, DeFi, trading applications, consumer products, developer tooling, RWA infrastructure, liquidity, new financial primitives, culture and media. The common denominator is whether it contributes to the ecosystem.
No. Trench Capital is a venture mechanism and venture investing loses money regularly. We will fund things that fail, misread markets, and lose capital. The objective is not to eliminate failure — it is to make the winners matter.