Your stocks, paid to wait.
Hold Apple and plan to keep holding it? Promise to sell it at a higher price you choose, by a Friday you choose, and a buyer pays you for that promise today. If the price never gets there, the shares come back to you and the money stays with you. Holding dollars instead? Promise to buy below today's price, and get paid the same way.
Four moments in the life of one option
A covered call on half an Apple share, from the day you write it to the Friday it ends.
Write
Pick a stock you hold, a strike above today's price and a Friday. Valorem locks the shares and gives you two things: the option, and a claim that is your receipt for what you locked.
List
Name your price. The listing goes on chain through Seaport, where anyone can see it and buy all of it or part of it. Until someone does, you can take it down.
Get paid
A buyer pays your price in dollars, straight to your wallet, in the same transaction that hands them the option. That money is yours whatever happens next.
Friday
If the buyer exercised, they paid the strike for your shares and your claim collects the dollars. If not, your claim collects your shares. Either way, you redeem it in one click.
Two promises, both fully backed
Every option here is backed in full by what it promises. There is no borrowing, no margin call and no liquidation, because there is nothing to call.
Call Covered call
You hold shares. You promise to sell them at your strike, above today's price, any time before your Friday. The shares are locked until then.
- You are paid now, whatever happens.
- If the price stays under your strike, your shares come back on Friday. You keep them and the payment.
- If it goes above, you sell at your strike. Everything above it goes to the buyer, not to you.
Put Cash-secured put
You hold dollars. You promise to buy shares at your strike, below today's price, any time before your Friday. The dollars are locked until then.
- You are paid now, whatever happens.
- If the price stays above your strike, your dollars come back on Friday. You keep them and the payment.
- If it falls below, you buy at your strike, which is more than the shares are then worth.
Thales, seeing a great harvest of olives coming, paid small deposits in the winter for the use of every olive press in Chios and Miletus. When the season came, he let them out at his own price.Aristotle, Politics I.11, retold. The first option on record.
The press owners kept the deposit either way.
That is the writer's side of every option. Thales got the upside of a good harvest, and the owners got paid in winter for a promise. Olea is named for the olive tree, Olea europaea, and lets you stand on either side.
You write, and a buyer pays you now for a promise about later. Or you buy, and pay a little now for a price you can hold someone to.
The payment is real. So is what you give up.
We wrote a one-week covered call, 5% above the price, on every stock we list, every Friday that Robinhood's own feeds cover. Each was priced fairly from that stock's measured swings. Then we checked what happened.
of weeks, the shares were called away
Out of 204 stock-weeks across 35 stocks, Fridays Aug 7 to Sep 11. The fair-price model expected 24%.
collected, against 274 pts given up
Premiums summed over every stock-week, as a share of each week's price, beside the gains handed over above the strike in the weeks the shares were called.
given up in one week, by one stock
NBIS, the week of Aug 7: that much of the price went above the strike, to the buyer. A single week like that can outweigh months of payments.
This assumes a buyer paid a fair price. Nobody has to. On a new market, with few buyers, you may get less or sell nothing, and then the shares simply come back on Friday. The median fair payment was 1.43% of the price a week, and much less on steady stocks: Apple's measured swings are 21% a year. Covered calls trade away a stock's best weeks for a steady payment. Whether that suits you is your decision, and this is not advice. Every week and every number is in the docs.
Olea deploys nothing
Every transaction Olea builds is a call from your wallet to a contract that was on Robinhood Chain before this site existed. We hold no key, no role and no fee in any of them.
Valorem clearinghouse
Writes the option and holds the collateral until it is exercised or expires. Physically settled, fully collateralised, with no oracle and no liquidation. Its source on this chain matches Valorem's own repository line for line. Zellic audited that code; the copy here differs from the audited release in three lines, which the docs name.
0x9a7b…C0C0Seaport 1.6
Moves the payment and the option in one transaction, or neither. A listing is a Seaport order you publish yourself, so the list of offers is Seaport's own public log. There is no Olea server anywhere.
0x0000…B395Robinhood's own prices
The price beside every option comes from Robinhood's feeds on this chain, not from a trading pool. We found 35 of them and set aside 15 stocks whose "price feed" was a Uniswap pool's price read back.
How the list was madeChecked on the chain, not described
Every transaction the app sends was run against the real Valorem, the real Seaport and real stock before this page went up. Each refusal was checked for the named error it had to give.
Properties on Robinhood Chain
Writing, listing, buying and exercising against the real Valorem, Seaport and AAPL at block 67,370,420. Each is one eth_call with no contract deployed, and every refusal is checked for its named error.
After Friday, on a fork
What a claim pays after expiry, what can no longer be done, and how two writers share an exercise. Each claim returns exactly what was locked, to the unit.
Deliberate breaks, caught
We broke the app's own transaction builder 25 ways. Each break was caught by the check named for it, after a clean control run.
Random sequences
2 seeds of 36 random writes, listings, purchases, exercises, redemptions and jumps in time, with 11 invariants checked after every step. Every planted break was caught by the invariant named for it.
The real page, clicked
In Chrome, on a fork, under the deployed security policy: connect, write, list, buy, exercise, take down, redeem after Friday.
Valorem is Valorem
The verified source at 0x9a7b…C0C0 is the repository's master exactly. It differs from Valorem's audited v1.0.0 release in 3 lines, named in the docs.
Every address, asked
Each token, feed and contract in the config was read back on chain and asked to prove what it is, with a random-address control that must fail.
Colour, proved in pairs
Every card against the photograph at its darkest and brightest, and every ink against the thinnest glass it sits on, with a control pair that must fail.
Against the live chain
The deployed page in a browser, reading the real node: prices, the board, the wallet, and the answers compared with a reader outside the page.
Before you write one
Can I lose my shares?
With a covered call, yes, but only by selling them at your own price. If the stock is above your strike when the buyer exercises, your shares go to them and you get the strike in dollars, plus the payment you already received. You never get less than you agreed to. You do miss everything above the strike.
Can I get my shares back before Friday?
While your options are unsold, you can exercise them yourself. You pay the strike and take the shares back now, and your claim returns that money after expiry. Once a buyer holds them, the shares stay locked until they exercise or Friday passes. That is the promise they paid for.
What if nobody buys my listing?
Then nothing is paid. You can take the listing down, lower the price, or leave it. Your shares or dollars stay locked in Valorem until Friday and come back to you when you redeem your claim. This is a new market on a new chain, so expect few buyers at first. We would rather say so.
Who can exercise, and when?
Whoever holds the option, at any moment until Friday 20:00 UTC. That is 4pm in New York in summer, when the market closes. After that it is worthless and your claim collects everything. If several people wrote the same strike and date, Valorem spreads each exercise across their claims by its own fixed rule. Between them the claims always return exactly what was locked, which we check.
Does Olea charge anything?
No. There is no Olea fee and no Olea contract. Valorem has a 0.15% fee switch that belongs to whoever deployed it. It is off as of the last check, and the app reads it live before every transaction and adds it to what you approve if it is ever on. You pay the chain's gas, measured in the docs.
Is this audited?
Olea itself is not audited, and there is no Olea contract to audit. It is a web page that builds transactions. Valorem's code was audited by Zellic, and Seaport by several firms. The copy of Valorem on this chain differs from the audited release in three named lines. Neither contract was deployed or is controlled by us.
Is this investment advice?
No. Options move money in ways that surprise people. A covered call caps your gains, and a put can make you buy a falling stock. Read what it costs you before you write one. Tokenized stocks on Robinhood Chain are not available everywhere.