How to launch a token paired with a stock

2026-09-07

Robinhood Chain carries tokenised stock – ERC-20 tokens issued by Robinhood Europe that track a single share or ETF. On openfair you can launch a token paired with one of them: the bonding curve collects TSLA, NVDA or SPY instead of ETH, and when it fills, the token lists on Uniswap V3 against that same asset. This guide covers what the pairing changes, what it costs, and the risks it adds.

What "paired" means

A normal openfair launch is priced in ETH: buyers send ETH, the launch contract holds it, and graduation seeds a TOKEN/ETH pool. A paired launch replaces ETH everywhere in that sentence with one allow-listed ERC-20. Buyers approve the curve and call it with an amount of the pair; sellers are paid back in the pair; the graduated pool is TOKEN/PAIR, with its liquidity locked forever in the same harvester contract as every other openfair launch.

The pair is written into the launch contract at creation and can never be changed. There is no swap at graduation and no path back to ETH inside the launch – a paired token is a token that trades against a stock, permanently.

Which assets can be used

Only assets on an on-chain allow-list, held by a registry contract the factory reads. Each entry stores the asset's decimals and a Chainlink USD price feed. Anything not on that list is rejected by the factory, not by the website – so a launch cannot be paired with an arbitrary token that merely looks like a stock. The create page shows the current list with each asset's live USD price; the same list is available to integrations as GET /api/v1/quotes and through sdk.quotes.list().

Economics are anchored in dollars

"A 5 ETH target" means nothing when the unit is one share of a several-hundred-dollar stock. So the registry stores the creation fee, the listing target and the starting market cap in USD and converts them through the pair's price feed at the moment of creation. A launch paired with a $400 stock and one paired with a $30 stock therefore raise the same dollar amount, and both start at the same starting market cap as an ETH launch does today. The number you see on the create page is that conversion, already done.

The conversion happens once. After creation the curve lives entirely in the pair's units and never looks at the feed again: if the stock doubles, the launch's target is still the same number of shares, now worth twice as much.

Launching, step by step

Hold the pair asset in your wallet, plus a little ETH for gas. The creation fee is paid in the pair, not in ETH.
Open the token creator, connect your wallet, and pick the asset in Pair with. Leaving it on ETH launches exactly as before.
Fill in name, ticker, supply, fees and anti-snipe as usual. The fee, target and starting market cap lines are now shown in the pair's ticker.
Sign two transactions: an ERC-20 approval, then the launch itself.

Why two signatures

Native launches send the fee as transaction value, which needs one signature. An ERC-20 cannot be attached to a transaction that way: the factory has to pull it with transferFrom, and that requires an allowance first. The approval is for the exact amount the launch owes plus 1% – the extra covers a price tick between the two transactions, because the factory re-reads the feed when the creation lands. Buyers on the curve sign the same two steps the first time they buy.

Trading a paired token

Everything a buyer sees is denominated in the pair. The price per token, the progress bar, the trade history and the "you receive" line on a sell all read in the pair's ticker, and a USD figure is shown alongside as information only. Quick-buy amounts are fractions of a share rather than fractions of ETH. After graduation the token trades in a normal Uniswap V3 pool against the pair.

The risks the pair adds

The issuer keeps control of the pair. A tokenised stock is a derivative issued by a company, not a share and not a permissionless asset. Its issuer can pause all transfers, block individual addresses, and burn any holder's balance – including a curve's raise or a locked liquidity position – and being paused does not stop the burn. openfair detects a pause or a block and stops offering buys, sells and refunds while it lasts (they would revert on-chain anyway), but no contract on either side can prevent a burn.
The price feed runs 24/5. Equity feeds hold their last answer through the weekend and market holidays. That only affects the USD figures shown next to a launch, which are marked as stale when the feed has been quiet for more than four days – the curve itself keeps trading in the pair around the clock. A feed that stays stale past that window blocks new creations with that pair until it publishes again.
Weekend and holiday drift. Because the token trades while the underlying market is shut, a tokenised stock can sit at a premium or a discount to the last close. A launch paired with it inherits that drift: the same number of shares can be worth noticeably more or less in dollars than the market's closing price implies.
Eligibility. Stock Tokens are not offered to U.S., U.K., Canadian or Swiss persons and are not available everywhere. openfair does not check this for you; check your own eligibility before you launch or buy.

What does not change

Everything that makes an openfair launch an openfair launch: one immutable, auto-verified contract per token, no mandatory trading fee, liquidity locked by construction in a harvester with no withdrawal function, on-chain anti-snipe, and the Fair Launch seal on the same terms. Launches priced in ETH are untouched and continue to work exactly as they always have.

The full disclosure is in our Terms of Use. Ready? Create a paired token, or read how openfair works first.