Baseline

The YES Collective launched YES V1 on Blast in March 2024 after an initial liquidity event deposited 311 ETH and set a $1.90 starting price. YES was the proof of concept: fees and trading reserves were meant to remain with the token market instead of rented liquidity providers.

The experiment exposed its own bookkeeping. A March credit-default defect left roughly 717,000 burned or defaulted YES counted as circulating. The team intervened with a five-signer multisig and Operation YEV. In June, V2 trading opened before every V1 position had migrated; Baseline stopped it, said no funds were lost, and committed 1,163.19 ETH to the relaunch. These were separate failures, and each pushed the design away from its first assumptions.

V1 depended on Uniswap V3 ranges. V2 added new ranges and an Afterburner. V3 moved to Base in early 2025 with a fixed supply, but Baseline’s own retrospective says the constant-product curve still constrained the product. Mercury replaced that inherited curve with a market maker that reads circulating supply, pool inventory and reserves together.

Baseline scheduled the Mercury process to begin on 20 April 2026: pause the old markets, snapshot spot and debt positions, move Base YES balances one-for-one to Ethereum B, and combine borrow and loop accounting into Credit. The B contract was created the next day. That establishes the intended chain move and rebrand, but the prospective FAQ and deployment record do not prove that every account completed migration on 20 April.

Mercury divides reserves into backing and buffer. Backing reserves divided by circulating supply produce Baseline Value (BLV). Buffer reserves sit on the curve above that level for ordinary price discovery. Baseline describes the result as an onchain path for circulating B to exit at or above BLV.

That sentence has limits. BLV is calculated by protocol contracts and depends on their accounting, reserve assets and execution. It is neither a fiat peg nor a claim against a legal guarantor, and Baseline says it has no formal insurance fund. Market price can fall toward BLV, while contract, reserve and operational risk remain.

B itself is unusually simple. Its verified ERC-20 code minted 21 million units once and exposes no owner, later mint, blacklist, token pause or upgrade proxy. Baseline’s token page presents 12,577,625 circulating and 8,422,375 as token-owned liquidity, with zero team and investor allocation. Its live API reported 11,499,558.975603086853429721 circulating at review, showing that the rounded 60/40 table is a presentation of moving pool inventory rather than a vesting schedule.

The Mercury Relay and controller provide the economic functions beyond the token. Stakers earn variable rewards from trading fees; borrowers and users of Multiply have their collateral staked automatically. Credit takes deposited B as collateral and uses its Baseline Value (BLV) to set the amount of reserve assets available to borrow. The opening fee is 1%, with no continuing interest, expiry or conventional liquidation threshold. Multiply repeats borrowing and buying B, so a price decline toward BLV can magnify losses even without a liquidation event.

Published controller functions allow administrators and authorized actors to pause the protocol or a pool and change reserves, deployers, executors, fee recipients and percentages. A 2026-09-05 live call to the Relay returned the 3-of-6 operations Safe as its admin. The direct Safe responses show that the published treasury is a 1-of-1 Safe whose sole owner is that operations Safe. Current individual executor and creator-pauser assignments were not enumerated, so capability should not be mistaken for proof that every role is occupied.

A passive B balance carries no documented vote, fixed yield, company equity or legal share of protocol revenue. Future buybacks or distributions are framed as possible uses of fees. Baseline’s natural-person founders and legal issuer were not identified in the reviewed official record, so users can inspect code and multisig thresholds more easily than the people behind them.