The bell rings.
The tokens keep going.
Tokenized equities settle on a chain that has never heard of closing time. The exchange that gives them a price, however, keeps office hours. Vesper is a desk built for the hours in between — and an instruction set for the agents that want to work them.
Price discovery stops. Trading does not.
A US listing is priced by a continuous auction between 9:30 and 16:00 New York, five days a week. That is 32.5 hours out of 168. The token wrapper does not observe the calendar: it settles at 3am on a Sunday exactly as willingly as at noon on a Tuesday.
For the other 135.5 hours, someone still has to answer the question "what is this worth right now" — and the venue that usually answers it has gone home.
Right now, the answer comes from a curve
Overnight liquidity is mostly constant-product pools. A pool does not form a view; it reports a ratio. It will quote Friday's number all through a weekend in which the company was downgraded, sued, or acquired, because the only input it has is its own inventory.
A pool cannot be wrong, exactly. It can only be late.Late is expensive. Informed traders take the stale side, everyone else widens or leaves, and the quoted spread ends up carrying a risk premium that nobody is actually managing.
An agent can hold a view. That is the whole edge.
A model can read the tape that is still running after hours — index futures, the ADR, the sector, the wire — put a number on the stock, and post a bid under it and an ask over it. Every impatient order that crosses pays the agent for standing there.
The skill is not the arithmetic. It is knowing the moment your number went stale and pulling the quote before somebody else notices first. A curve cannot do that. A model can, and Vesper is built around the assumption that this is worth something.
Two prices, and the nerve to withdraw them.
A quote is a signed message, not a transaction
The agent forms a reference price, then publishes a bid below and an ask above it, spaced wider than its own uncertainty. Quotes are signed off-chain with a short time-to-live — 15 to 60 seconds — so posting costs nothing, cancelling costs nothing, and an agent that crashes stops quoting on its own within a minute. Only a fill is ever written to the chain.
What one fill actually pays
The maker earns half the spread and gives back whatever the taker knew that the maker did not. The residual is the business. Sizing is in USDG, which is a 6-decimal token — worth checking, since assuming 18 puts every order off by a factor of a trillion.
| Half-spread captured | +0.082 |
| Adverse selection | −0.026 |
| Settlement and venue fee | −0.005 |
| Net per fill, USDG | +0.051 |
Those are the simulator's numbers over one synthetic evening, not a
promise. python quoter.py demo prints your own.
"I don't know" is a valid output
The way this strategy loses money is holding a quote through a headline. So the agent is allowed — expected — to answer that it cannot price the name right now, and that answer voids every open quote at once by bumping a single nonce.
A maker with no live quotes has no exposure. Standing down cheaply and often is not a failure mode of the design; it is the design.
One hundred and four names.
Every pair is a Robinhood tokenized equity quoted against USDG. The registry is not hand-maintained: each address is read from the chain and its symbol, name and decimals confirmed by direct contract call before it is served.
| Pair | Name | Tier | Holders |
|---|---|---|---|
| Loading the registry… | |||
Served live from /v1/pairs. Full board with addresses on the desk.
USDG · Global Dollar
0x5fc5360D0400a0Fd4f2af552ADD042D716F1d168 — 6 decimals, verified by contract call.
The Book is not deployed yet
Nothing on this site custodies anything. The settlement contract is unpublished, /v1/contracts reports it as pending, and the kit refuses to run live until that endpoint returns a verified address.
One file, two dependencies.
No framework and no account. The kit makes a keypair, checks itself against the live chain, and runs the full quoting loop against a simulated tape so you can read the strategy before it can cost anything.
# 1 — dependencies pip install eth-account requests # 2 — the kit curl -L -o quoter.py https://vesperagent.trade/quoter.py # 3 — see where you stand python quoter.py doctor # 4 — one simulated evening, with attribution python quoter.py demo
| Command | State |
|---|---|
| init | Creates and stores a local keypair |
| doctor | Checks Python, deps, RPC reachability and chain id |
| pairs | Pulls the served registry, filters by tier |
| session | Reports the session clock and the next transition |
| demo | Full simulated evening with per-fill PnL attribution |
| run | Refuses until the Book is deployed and verified |
Prefer a button? Download quoter.py — or read it first, it is one file and it is meant to be read. The agent-facing instruction set is skill.md, written to be handed to a model without further explanation.
Reasonable objections.
If this edge is real, why is it still here?
Because it is small, it is nocturnal, and it is spread across a hundred illiquid names. A desk with people on salary cannot justify staffing 3am on a Sunday for cents on tokenized mid-caps. The hours that make this uneconomic for a firm are precisely the hours an agent is indifferent to.
Won't more agents compete it to zero?
To zero, no — toward the cost of the risk, yes. Somebody has to carry inventory across the night and eat the gap risk at the open. That is a real cost and it does not vanish because competition arrives. It accrues to whoever prices it most accurately, which is the bet here.
What happens when I am simply wrong?
You are filled on the wrong side and you carry it. The kit sizes for that: per-name caps, a nightly loss limit that flattens and stops, and a hard rule that an unpriceable name gets no quote. Losing evenings are expected — the design goal is that no single one is interesting.
Is Vesper connected to Robinhood?
No. Robinhood Chain is a public EVM network and the tokenized equities on it are public contracts; reading them requires no relationship with anyone. Vesper is an independent project, not affiliated with or endorsed by Robinhood Markets, and this should not be read as a claim otherwise.
Can I see it working before trusting it?
That is what the simulator is for, and why the registry endpoint is public. Every number on the live desk is fetched in your browser from an endpoint you can open yourself, and every token address links to the block explorer.
Vesper is an independent, experimental project. Tokenized equities carry the market risk of the underlying and the technical risk of the wrapper. The venue is not live and accepts no capital. Nothing here is investment advice.
Vesper · $VESP · Robinhood Chain 4663