Today we are publishing the Vault Standard, the rulebook every project on Shorolink has to satisfy before its launch opens. It is deliberately short, because a collateral rule that needs a legal team to interpret is not much of a rule.
It covers four things: what a vault is allowed to hold, how the basket is valued and published, when founders can draw from escrow, and how a holder redeems. Every launch is measured against the same four answers, and the answers are public before anyone subscribes.
Why a Standard, Not a Recommendation
The usual approach to launch quality is a rating, a badge, or a curated list. All of those ask the buyer to trust the curator. We wanted the opposite: a rule that either holds or does not, and that anyone can check for themselves against the chain.
So the Standard is written as constraints on the contract rather than opinions about the team. A vault may only hold instruments on the approved collateral list. It may never hold the launch token it backs. Redemption cannot be paused by the issuer. Escrow releases only against milestones published before the launch opened.
None of those require judgement to verify. They are either true of a deployed contract or they are not, which is the entire point of writing them this way.
What This Changes for Holders
For a holder, the practical effect is that two numbers now exist side by side: what the token trades at, and what it can be redeemed for. The gap between them is the premium being paid for the project, stated plainly rather than buried in a narrative.
That changes the shape of the downside. A project can still fail, and plenty will. What no longer happens is a holder discovering that failure and the absence of any underlying claim at the same moment.
It also changes the incentives at the top of a launch. When the raise capitalizes a vault instead of a wallet, the fastest path to being paid is shipping against the milestone schedule, because that is the only path that opens escrow.
What Comes Next
The approved collateral list starts narrow, limited to broad-market funds deep enough to exit at size without moving the price. We expect to widen it slowly and to publish the reasoning each time, since every addition is a change to what backing actually means.
The Standard, the collateral list, and the vault contracts are all published on the founder documents page. Applications are open.