METHOD
The whole thing is one formula and one walk.
REALIZED VOLATILITY
the prints the Chainlink feed published inside the window — not a sample anybody chose
252 sessions of six and a half hours: 5,896,800 seconds of open exchange
the session seconds the window spans, from the NYSE calendar on chain
The sum is of squares, so the sign is gone before it is stored: that single line is what makes the product direction agnostic. The denominator is session time, not calendar time — sixty-eight hours of every week the tape is flat because the exchange is shut, and dividing by calendar seconds would quote every name a third of its volatility. The jumps across those closed stretches are still counted in the numerator. They are realized, and close-to-close volatility has always meant exactly that.
Why the tape is already a measurement
Robinhood’s equity feeds publish on a 0.5% deviation or a 24-hour heartbeat. A round is therefore an event, not a clock tick. A quiet name prints four times a week; a name being repriced prints four times in six minutes. So the count of prints is nearly the measurement on its own, and the squared returns make it exact. No keeper samples anything, and no on-chain actor can produce a print — these are observations of the equity market itself.
The feed publishes the price of one token — the share price times the ERC-8056 multiplier Robinhood uses to pay dividends. A dividend lifts the multiplier and drops the share; the product moves through neither. A return computed off this feed is a return, never a corporate action, and nothing here ever has to adjust for one.
Why settlement is a proof
An aggregator keeps every round it has ever published, in a mapping, forever, and round ids inside a phase are consecutive integers. So a window’s variance is exhibited rather than asserted: anchor on the last print at or before the open, walk cursor + 1 one id at a time, and stop on the first print past the close. That last print is not a sample. It is the proof that no further print falls inside the window.
Nothing can be skipped, because the id after the one you dropped will not follow the one you kept. Nothing can be invented, because every fold reads the aggregator. And anyone can do it, in any number of pieces, at any hour, and get the same number to the wei — so there is no first-mover advantage in settling and no way to settle wrong.
A name that has simply stopped printing ends the walk on the feed’s own latest round once the window is shut: the same proof by a different route, which is why a Friday close never waits for Monday’s open. A feed migration restarts the round count under a new phase; the walk bridges the join and counts the move across it, rather than losing it exactly where it is worth the most.
Why there is no margin engine
An uncapped variance swap needs collateral calls, a health curve, a liquidator and a price oracle. All of that apparatus exists only because the quoted number is unbounded. Cap the band and it disappears: both legs are fully covered by the dollar that minted them, nobody can be closed out, and the contract never has to value a position. What it costs is real — past the cap the SPARK stops paying, so a genuinely violent week is under-rewarded. That is the trade, and the cap is graven per series with no setter.
Why nobody chooses the strike
A window is struck at the realized volatility of the window before it, read out of the contract’s own storage. Nobody quotes it, so opening a window is permissionless: there is nothing left to choose. It also chains the weeks — a window cannot open until the one before it is settled, because its strike is that settlement. Which is what pays for the walking: the mint fees of a window accumulate into a pot that goes, whole, to whoever finishes its tape.
A name nobody has settled for a month catches up without an admin: a window whose close is already past opens as a benchmark, which mints nothing and costs no tokens. And a feed that goes silent for thirty days lets anyone unwind a series at half a dollar to each leg — symmetric on purpose, so neither side can profit from an outage nor engineer one.
THE TABLE
An owner can admit a name, follow a feed proxy Chainlink rotates, and set that table. It cannot touch an open series, change a settled volatility, move minted collateral, or stop a redemption.