Features get copied in a weekend. Five things about BASIS cannot be, because they are decisions made in the contracts rather than screens bolted on top of them.
A feature is a weekend of work. A structure is a rewrite.
Most of what a DeFi platform ships can be copied by a competent team in a few days. A forum, a referral code, a campaign, a new screen: all of it is copyable, and none of it is a reason to choose one venue over another for very long.
Five things about BASIS are not in that category. They are not screens or campaigns. They are decisions taken inside the contracts, and each one leans on the others, so copying any single one in isolation does not get you the behavior.
BASIS runs on Robinhood Chain and trades in USDG. Each section below names where it applies.
1. Payout architecture
Applies to: prediction markets
On a classic order book a prediction share pays $1 and not a cent more. That is the definition of the instrument. A share is a claim on a dollar, so the payout is capped at a dollar.
BASIS uses a pool. Winners split the whole pot. The price you paid is not the price of a claim on a dollar. It is your stake in what everyone put in, and there is no ceiling on what that stake turns out to be worth. On a wide field where the crowd was wrong, the same correct call can pay a multiple of the capped version, because the losing side's money stays in the pot.
This is not a fee schedule that can be tweaked. It is what the payout function does. A book that wanted this behavior would have to stop being a book.
Nobody has to quote a price
On a classic order book, somebody has to stand in the middle, quoting both sides and carrying inventory against traders who may know more than they do. Everyone who trades pays for that, in the spread. In a pool nobody stands in the middle. You pay the 0.60% fee on a bet, and the price is set by where the money goes. (If you want out early, you can still sell to another trader on the peer-to-peer order book. Nobody has to quote for the market to exist.)
A second consequence: a pool price cannot move without money landing. A quote can be pulled. A bet in a pool cannot.
Which markets exist at all
A book has to find someone willing to quote every outcome. On a hundred-way field that is a hundred separate quoting problems, so books either skip the market or list a thin version of it. Structured bets are worse. An exact finishing order, a parlay, a survivor pool: each one is a correlated pricing problem that needs a team and a risk model.
In a pool there is nothing to quote, so a wide field is built the same way as any other market. BASIS markets carry up to 150 outcomes. Winner, Podium and UP/DOWN markets are live. Exact order, Parlay and Survivor are coming, and they are not exotic add-ons: they are the same pool pointed at a different question. A parlay can read the results of BASIS's own markets on-chain, so there is no counterparty to source.
Wide fields, longshots and structured bets are where a pool does its best work, and they are where a book is thinnest.
2. Token math
Applies to: the launchpad, and to Predict+ where it meets the markets
Every token on BASIS picks one of six families at launch, and the choice is fixed forever.
At one end sits Yolo, a plain memecoin with full moves both ways and a floor that stays at the launch price. At the other end sits Stable+, where the price can only hold or rise in its base asset. In between, Utility+, Floor+, Meme+ and Yolo+ move both ways over a floor that only rises. The price can fall, just never below that line, and the calmer the family, the smaller the dips. There is no side fund propping the floor up and no team promising to defend it. It is a pricing rule the contract applies to every trade.
What it costs
A calmer family swings less in both directions, so the same dollar of buying moves its price less than it would move a plain memecoin. That is the trade: less upside per dollar, in exchange for smaller dips and a floor you can borrow against. A founder who wants the full ride picks Yolo. A founder who wants holders to be able to borrow picks a family with a rising floor.
What a floor makes possible
Collateral becomes trustworthy. A loan can be sized against a price with a known lower bound in a way it cannot against a price that can go to zero. On BASIS you can borrow the full floor value of a token, before fees. A loan is sized at the floor, which never falls, so its collateral is designed to cover the debt.
Leverage stops needing a liquidation engine. BASIS offers up to about 37x, depending on the token and the size of the buy, and no position is closed because the price dipped. Positions end on a date, checked against the block time. A flash crash does not take your position, because price is not what decides whether you still have one.
Predict+, where this meets the markets
A prediction market on BASIS carries two different bets on the same event. The first is the ordinary one: back an outcome, win a share of the whole pot if you are right, lose your stake if you are not.
The second is the activity bet. Most markets have a linked Predict+ token that trades on a Stable+ curve, so its price can only hold or rise in its base asset. It trades on the activity around the market rather than on the result. You can hold it without picking a winner, and a market that draws heavy trading can leave a Predict+ holder ahead, before fees and slippage, even when it resolves against their opinion.
The third option is the interesting one. Because a Stable+ token can be borrowed against at its full value (before fees), a holder can put the same dollar to work twice: hold the Predict+ token, borrow against it, and place the outcome bet with the loan. Two exposures from one stake. If the bet loses, the loan still has to be repaid or extended before it expires, or the Predict+ collateral that covers the debt is taken to repay it.
3. Depth without liquidity providers
Applies to: the whole platform
A conventional venue needs liquidity providers. They have to be paid, and they can leave. Every new market has a cold-start problem: the first person to arrive finds nothing to trade against, so nobody wants to be first.
BASIS has no liquidity providers. Depth exists before any trading does, in two places at once:
- A new token trades from its first block. The creator sets the starting depth at launch, and can never touch that liquidity, because there is no pool to pull.
- Every outcome in a prediction market is buyable from the first dollar, including the ones nobody has touched yet.
There are no LP positions anywhere on the platform to hold, farm or lose. That absence is the feature.
4. One machine
Applies to: the whole platform, including loans, leverage, vaults and vesting
None of the first three stands alone, which is the point of drawing this as a map rather than a list. Lending works because the token families produce a floor, and that floor is there from a token's first trade. Predict+ only exists because tokens and markets live in the same system. Remove any one and the others degrade.
A launchpad, prediction markets, lending, leverage and vaults sit behind one account. Every base, from USDG to SPY+, NVDA+ and GLD+, has its own vault, lending and leverage. Every action is open to AI agents too, through an MCP server with 205 tools and SDKs with 595 methods. A competitor would have to merge several products to match the surface, and their pieces still would not connect.
Credit is the connective tissue
Most lenders run a liquidation engine: a price feed with a health factor attached. BASIS lending has no health factor to watch. A loan ends on its date, not on a dip. Before expiry you repay or extend. If you do neither, after expiry a keeper closes the loan: the collateral that covers the debt is taken to repay it, 10% of the rest is the liquidation fee, and you claim the remainder. Claim within 365 days of the liquidation; after that the leftover may no longer be claimable. You never owe more than your collateral.
The cost is knowable before you sign. Borrowing $1,000 for a year costs 2% to open plus 0.005% a day, about $38 in total, fixed when you take the loan. Extending costs only the daily rate, and repaying is free. Lenders that float their rate with utilization change the cost of a loan you already hold, underneath you.
Borrowing against tokens, vault stakes and vested tokens is what turns locked allocations into working capital, and it links every product on the platform to every other one.
One dollar, several jobs, several fees
The same dollar can do several jobs. Stake it in a vault and earn from trading and borrowing fees. Borrow against that stake, which keeps earning while it backs the loan. Put the loan into a market. Capital waiting on a long-dated prediction can earn in the meantime, which turns markets that would otherwise freeze money into places worth putting it.
The platform earns from several streams rather than one, because trades, bets, loans, extensions and leverage each carry a fee. The base fee is 0.60% on every trade and bet, capped at 2% in the contract, and each $1 of it is shared between the vault, the operating team, referrers, Alpha+ authors and the BASIS buyback. Creators earn their own creator fee, 0% to 1%, plus 20c of every $1 of loan-side fees on their token. A creator is paid when holders borrow against the token, not just when they trade it.
5. The evidence
Applies to: the payout claims above, and nothing else
The payout claims are not projections. They come from a full order-flow replay of 111 settled markets on a large order-book prediction venue: every trade on every outcome, across fields of 3 to 104 outcomes with a median of 13.
Run through the BASIS payout function, 61% of winning wallets and 71% of winning money would have finished ahead of the capped payout. Across the 77 markets a longshot won, the winning side would have taken 1.33 times as much. Money that arrived in the first 5% of a market's life, in the markets the favorite went on to win, would have done 4.95 times better in the widest fields. In fields of 31 outcomes or more, it beat the book in every single market.
These are replays. They say what the same order flow would have paid under a different payout function, not what anyone has earned.
What is copyable
A forum, a referral code and a campaign are growth mechanics, and anyone who wants them can copy them. The five above cannot, because they are not features sitting on top of the system. They are the shape of it.
None of that removes ordinary risk: fees, execution and contract risk still matter.
For the mechanics behind each of these, see Why BASIS Chose Pools, Stable+: The Token That Can Only Go Up in Its Base Asset, Floor+: Speculation With a Safety Net, Zero-Liquidation Lending and The Predict+ Playbook.
Basis Team
Published Aug 29, 2026