The Protocol Note.

The complete rules in prose. If any page of this property disagrees with the contract, the contract is right, and the page is a bug.

Ebbline is a single market with a memory of its own direction. The whole supply of 150,000 EBBL is created once, and every unit of it sits in the market at launch. There is no reserved balance, no later entry, and no way to add units. The supply can hold or fall; it cannot rise.

Each trade on the market leaves 2% behind. This is the Draw. The Draw does not leave the market’s machinery: it gathers in the Shallows, the balance the hook holds, and it waits for the reading.

The reading is the only input the system has. The hook is part of the market itself and measures, for each window, the buy volume minus the sell volume across that one market. One market, one signal. Nothing is imported from outside: no price feed, no oracle, no operator’s judgement.

When a window closes on net inflow, nothing happens beyond the gathering. The Draw stays in the Shallows and the supply is untouched. Nothing is issued against inflow, ever.

When a window closes on net outflow, an Ebb settles. The Draw that gathered in the Shallows buys EBBL back from the market, and the bought units settle in the Silt. The Silt is permanent: retired units leave the supply at the moment of settlement and can never return. Nothing is reissued, ever. Every settlement is recorded on-chain with the amount retired and the supply after it, so the whole history of retirement can be read back at any time.

The rules that matter cannot change. The Draw is fixed at 2%. The window rule is fixed. The supply is fixed at 150,000 EBBL with no issuance path. None of these has a setter. The deployer’s authority ends at deployment: no one can move a holder’s balance, pause the market, or reissue a retired unit. What a holder can expect is therefore simple to state. Every trade feeds the Draw. Outflow is answered by buying, paid for by the market itself. Retired units stay retired. And no rule behind any of those sentences can be edited after launch.

The Console shows the parameters as they stand in the contract, the live readings once the market exists, and the Record — one row for every Ebb that has settled. The whitepaper states the complete rules: the parts and their boundaries, the parameters and where each lives, the mechanism in exact terms, worked examples, the failure cases, and how to verify every claim on the explorer.