How Grief Tokens Work: Bonding Curves Meet Fan Sentiment
A deep dive into the pricing mechanics behind Elegy — linear bonding curves modified by a live sentiment multiplier.
The Elegy pricing model combines two mechanisms: a linear bonding curve and a sentiment multiplier. Together they create prices that move with both trading activity and real-world emotional events.
The Formula
price = (0.008 + 0.000001 × supply) × sentimentMultiplier
sentimentMultiplier = 1 + (score / 100) × 2
The sentiment multiplier ranges from 1x (score = 0, no grief) to 3x (score = 100, peak grief). This means a high-grief token costs up to 3x more than a recovering one at the same supply level.
Why a Bonding Curve
Bonding curves guarantee liquidity — you can always buy or sell directly against the contract. There's no order book, no counterparty needed. The contract mints tokens on buy and burns on sell, adjusting the price based on supply.
This makes Elegy work even with small trading volumes. You don't need a liquid market to trade grief.
The 5% Platform Fee
Every buy transaction sends 5% to the Elegy treasury. This funds ongoing development and the AI agent infrastructure that keeps sentiment scores current.
Max Supply: 10,000
Each Grief Token has a hard cap of 10,000 tokens. Once a team's supply hits 10,000, no more can be minted. Scarcity kicks in. At peak grief, reaching the cap creates genuine urgency.
Selling: Proportional Reserve Payouts
When you sell, your payout is calculated as your proportional share of the reserve — not a fixed price. This means:
sell payout = (amount / total supply) × reserve × 95%
The 5% sell spread stays in the reserve, rewarding long-term holders. The more buyers enter at higher grief prices, the larger the reserve grows — and the more your share is worth when you exit.
This model ensures the reserve can always cover sells, regardless of how much the sentiment score moves between your buy and sell.
The Oracle
Prices don't update automatically — an AI agent pushes signed scores to the SentimentOracle contract every 30 minutes. The oracle verifies the ECDSA signature and updates the on-chain score. The bonding curve reads the latest score on every trade.
This means prices can change even without anyone trading — just from new sentiment data hitting the oracle.