How a stepwell holds water

What a ladder is

A stepwell is an old kind of well with stairs cut down its walls, so you can reach the water at whatever level it sits. Stepwell does the same with liquidity: instead of one big position, your deposit is cut into rungs, small Uniswap V3 positions stacked at different prices. The price is the waterline. As it rises and falls it crosses your rungs one by one.

Each rung is a concentrated-liquidity range. While the price is below a rung, that rung holds only the base token (say NVDA). While the price is above it, the rung holds only the quote token (say USDG). When the price moves through a rung, Uniswap swaps it from one token into the other, and the rung earns the pool's swap fee on every trade it takes part in.

Put together, a ladder behaves like a row of limit orders that earn fees while they wait: "buy a little more every 2% it drops" or "sell a little every 5% it climbs". On a normal exchange a resting limit order earns nothing. On Uniswap it earns its share of the swap fee each time the price trades through it.

Three shapes

The shape decides how much liquidity sits on each rung. The range and the number of rungs are separate choices; any shape works with any range.

How the weights are set

Stepwell spreads liquidity (Uniswap's L), not dollars, across the rungs. For each rung it takes the midpoint price and measures how far it is from spot:

• Flat: every rung gets weight 1.
• Crest: weight follows a bell curve centred on spot (or on the nearest edge when spot is outside your range), never below 5% of the peak.
• Steps: weight grows in a straight line from 20% next to spot to 100% at each edge of the range, measured separately on each side.

Steps also leaves out the one tick-spacing cell that contains the current price, so no rung straddles spot. That is what makes every Steps rung one-sided: the ones below spot are pure buy orders, the ones above are pure sell orders. Flat and Crest keep one rung across spot, which needs both tokens.

Which tokens you deposit

The builder works this out from where the rungs sit, and the deposit boxes balance themselves to the shape:

• Range entirely below spot: you deposit only the quote token (USDG, WETH…). It's a buy ladder.
• Range entirely above spot: you deposit only the base token. It's a sell ladder.
• Range across spot: both, in the exact ratio the rungs need. Type one amount and the other fills in.

Build, step by step

1. Pick a pool. The builder lists Uniswap V3 pools on Robinhood Chain with more than $5K liquidity, sorted by 24h volume. Tabs filter Stocks, Pons tokens and Majors; search by symbol or address. Stock pools show an after hours badge when the NYSE is closed.
2. Set the range. Drag the two handles on the chart, type a price, or type a percentage from spot. The tan bars behind are the pool's existing liquidity, so you can see where depth already sits. Edges snap to the pool's tick spacing.
3. Choose a shape and the number of rungs (1 to 32). The histogram and the chart update live. Very narrow ranges hold fewer rungs than you ask for; the builder tells you how many fit.
4. Enter your deposit. Only the token(s) the ladder needs are open. Use Max to fill from your balance.
5. Read the preview. It shows the range, what you send, what goes into rungs, the Stepwell fee, and what is refunded in the same transaction. The If price goes to… box tells you what you would hold at any price, plus your average buy or sell price. The table lists every rung.
6. Approve. One approval per token, for the exact amount, to the StepwellBuilder contract.
7. Build. Right before sending, the app re-reads the pool price on-chain, re-quotes the rungs and simulates the call (eth_call). If the price moved, you'll see Price moved, re-quoting and it tries again. If the simulation passes, your wallet asks you to confirm one transaction that mints every rung to you. You get an explorer link and the ladder appears in My wells.

Templates

Templates set the range, shape and rung count in one click. Everything stays editable afterwards.

Stocks never close here

Tokenized stocks on Robinhood Chain trade around the clock, while the NYSE is open about 6.5 hours on weekdays. When the exchange is closed, on-chain prices still move with news, futures and other markets, and they often jump when the NYSE reopens.

Stepwell marks stock pools with the current NYSE session (open, pre-market, after hours, closed, holiday, in New York time) and shows the next open. Two ways people use this:

• Resting orders over the weekend. A buy ladder under the Friday close fills if the price sags on Saturday, and earns fees from the traders who move it.
• Weekend gap. A two-sided Steps ladder around the last close catches moves in both directions and hands you the other token at better prices than the close.

Public exit ladders

A ladder can be flagged public when you build it, with a short label (up to 31 characters, stored on-chain). The Board then shows it with your shortened address, its label and its price range.

It is made for teams and large holders of Pons tokens. Instead of selling into the market without warning, you post a sell ladder in the open: "we sell from +10% to +200%, in 16 steps". Holders can see exactly where supply will come out. The flag is a label only: the rungs are ordinary positions you can drain at any time, and the Board shows when they go.

Private ladders still count towards the Board's depth view, without owner or label.

Harvest & drain

My wells lists every Uniswap V3 position in your wallet, grouped by ladder, with each rung's range, current amounts, unclaimed fees, whether it is in range and how much of it has converted.

• Harvest collects the fees of every rung in one transaction: NonfungiblePositionManager.multicall([collect(...)]), recipient you, maximum amounts. Your liquidity stays where it is.
• Drain closes a ladder: for each rung decreaseLiquidity (all of it), collect (tokens + fees) and burn (the empty NFT), batched in one multicall. The app reads each rung's liquidity and the pool price on-chain right before, sets a 1% minimum per rung, simulates, and asks you to confirm. Ladders over 16 rungs are split into a few transactions.

Both are sent by your wallet straight to Uniswap's position manager. Stepwell's contract is not involved, takes no fee and needs no approval for them.

The board

The Board reads every Built event from the StepwellBuilder contract and the live state of each rung. Per pool it draws water steps: price runs bottom to top, spot is the waterline, teal steps below it are liquidity waiting to buy, ink steps above are liquidity waiting to sell. The wider the step, the more is waiting at that price. Rungs that were drained, here or elsewhere, drop off.

Fees

How the money moves in a build: the app sums the rung amounts per token and sets amountMax = sum + floor(sum × feeBps / 10,000) (the contract's own grossUp). You approve exactly that. The contract pulls it, checks it covers the rungs plus the fee, mints each rung to you, takes the fee on what the pool actually accepted, and refunds everything else in the same call. If its own token balances do not return exactly to where they started, the transaction reverts.

Wallet & network

Any EVM wallet works (MetaMask, Rabby, Coinbase Wallet…). Press Connect wallet: Stepwell asks to switch to Robinhood Chain and offers to add it if your wallet doesn't know it.

Contracts

Robinhood Chain mainnet. Addresses are read from this site's contracts.json.

What the builder enforces

• 1 to 32 rungs per build; ticks are multiples of the pool's tick spacing, ascending and non-overlapping; no empty rung.
• The pool must exist in the Uniswap V3 factory for the token pair and fee tier.
• Every rung is minted with recipient = msg.sender: positions go to you, never to the contract.
• Leftovers are refunded in the same call; the call reverts if the builder's balances don't return to their starting level. Allowances to Uniswap are reset to zero afterwards.
• Reentrancy guard on build(). Two-step ownership. The owner can only change the fee (≤ 0.5%) and the treasury.

The contracts have been tested on a fork of Robinhood Chain mainnet but have not been externally audited.

If Stepwell disappears

Nothing you own depends on us. Every rung is a normal Uniswap V3 position NFT held by your wallet in the official NonfungiblePositionManager. Stepwell's contract keeps no record you need and holds no funds.

• Your positions show up in any interface that supports Uniswap V3 on Robinhood Chain.
• You can always manage them directly on the explorer: open the position manager contract, Write contract, and call decreaseLiquidity, collect and burn with your token IDs. The IDs are in your wallet's NFT list and in My wells.
• This site is static. If it goes offline, the chain doesn't.

Risks

Impermanent loss

A ladder is a set of trades waiting to happen. When the price moves through your rungs you end up holding more of the token that fell and less of the one that rose. Compared with just holding, that can be a loss, and fees may or may not make up for it. For a buy ladder this is the point (you wanted to buy the dip) but if the dip keeps going, you hold the falling asset.

Out of range

A rung only earns fees while the price is inside it. If the price runs past your whole ladder, every rung is fully converted and earns nothing until the price comes back. Nothing is sold back automatically.

Tokenized stocks

• They trade 24/7 on-chain while the underlying exchange does not. Weekend and overnight prices can move hard and gap at the open.
• After-hours liquidity is thin; one large trade can sweep several rungs.
• A token is not the share itself. Its value depends on its issuer and structure, and corporate actions (splits, dividends, halts) may be handled differently from the stock. Availability may be restricted in some jurisdictions.

Pons and other small tokens

Low-cap tokens can lose most of their value fast. A buy ladder under a falling token keeps buying it.

Smart contracts

StepwellBuilder is small and does one thing, but it is not externally audited. Uniswap V3, the tokens you deposit, and Robinhood Chain itself carry their own risks. Fee-on-transfer and rebasing tokens may not behave as expected.

$WELL

$WELL is Stepwell's community token on Robinhood Chain.

The only official contract address is the one shown here and pinned on our X and Telegram. Admins never DM first. $WELL carries no promise of return and no claim on Stepwell's fees.