What is YouCoin?
YouCoin is a high-performance exchange that allows you to long and short any social entity on the internet, with leverage. Every social profile and every piece of content is automatically assigned a tradeable fair-launched coin the moment it exists.
See something going viral? Enter the link into YouCoin and immediately start trading it.
This includes profiles you would expect (prominent creators, public figures, established accounts) and profiles you would not. Obscure channels, niche posts, and even you. Yes, you.
Illustration only — real prices and volumes will show at launch.
Why Coins?
Coins are the natural unit for trading attention. Every social profile and every individual post and video on the internet has a coin that you can find by simply entering the link to that profile or piece of content into YouCoin. For the first time, if you see something or someone going viral, YouCoin lets you take a position on it: long or short, with or without leverage. And speaking of leverage...
Introducing MicroPerps
On YouCoin, you can use leverage and short tokens from the moment they launch, which has not been possible before. This is perhaps the most interesting aspect of the platform.
To achieve this, YouCoin introduces the Micro Perpetual (MicroPerp), a new derivative built specifically to enable leverage and short exposure on thinly-traded, small-cap assets, while remaining capable of scaling to the most liquid assets in the world. Standard perpetual futures need deep spot liquidity and active market makers to function. MicroPerps are designed to work without either, which makes leveraged markets possible on assets that have historically been too illiquid to support them at all.
MicroPerps work on anything with a numerical feed, no matter how infrequently that feed "ticks." That includes the long tail of YouCoins, but it extends well beyond, to prediction markets, equities, commodities, real estate, interest rates, and even esoteric things like weather data. In addition, anyone can create a new MicroPerp market on any feed, the same way anyone can launch a token today. There are no staking thresholds and no gatekeepers. MicroPerps are permissionless in the original sense of the word.
Liquidation if underlying drops ≥ 10.00% against you. Higher leverage = tighter liquidation band.
YouCoins are the natural testing ground for MicroPerps: they share the exact illiquidity profile MicroPerps were built to enable. Shortly after launch, however, permissionless market creation will open up broadly, and anyone will be able to create a liquid market on any feed.
Fee Structure
Trading fees on each coin are used to power growth of the platform. 50% of fees go to the verified owner of the associated profile or post. This is a direct way for creators, and increasingly AI agents, to earn from the attention they generate. Profile earnings decay at a rate of 1% per day continuously until they are claimed in order to incentivize claiming.
The other 50% is used to buy and burn $YOU, the exchange's native token, automatically and algorithmically. A small portion of that flow (10% of $YOU buybacks) is routed to buying and burning $DESO to support the proliferation of decentralized social media.
* Creator earnings are subject to a 1% daily continuous decay until claimed
As a concrete example, for every $1 billion in trading fees the exchange generates, ~$500 million goes to profile owners, ~$450 million goes to buy and burn $YOU, and ~$50 million goes to buy and burn $DESO.
Why YouCoin?
Nobody has figured out how to make long-tail illiquid tokens work long-term. Launchpads for spot memecoins are generally predatory, and end in total extraction from the traders that made the platform successful in the first place. Meanwhile, few have even attempted to bring leverage and shorting to the long tail, let alone done it well.
YouCoin addresses the key problems with the existing launchpad ecosystem while simultaneously innovating to bring perps down to the most illiquid (and fun) segment of the market. From this initial wedge, YouCoin can expand into perps on major crypto assets like Bitcoin, as well as RWAs. Virtually all other exchanges go top-down, only supporting perps for the most liquid assets. MicroPerps give YouCoin the unique and differentiated ability to go bottom-up.
We start with coins on profiles and posts because attention is a scarce and highly-contested resource on the internet. YouCoin was designed to make noisy highly-illiquid signals like attention tradeable for the first time. In the long-term, this advantage will expand to make every signal tradeable.
Who Are We?
We are a small team of crypto and high-frequency trading veterans led by Nader Al-Naji, a sequoia and a16z-backed technologist and repeat founder who is the creator of the DeSo blockchain, and who pioneered algorithmic stablecoins with his first company Basis.