Four ways to build on Mayflower, and how to find a fifth

Every builder use case on Mayflower runs on the same primitive: a market that acts as its own counterparty, with a floor that can rise and cannot fall. There is no pool to seed and no market maker to hire. Revenue comes from usage rather than from trading against your users.

What changes between use cases is who arrives, and what they bring. This article covers the four entry points as they stand today: launching a market, backing a treasury, building on a listed market, and launching an institutional product.

The primitive underneath all four

The AVM (Assured Value Machine) enforces a solvency invariant before any transaction executes: the reserve equals the area under the price curve at all times. Price is deterministic. The floor is a guaranteed minimum redemption price. It can rise as the market operates, and it can never fall. The machinery is in production: it runs Mayflower Reserve, and it has processed more than $500M in historical protocol volume.

One clarification worth making early, because it is the most common misread: the floor is denominated in each market’s reserve asset rather than in dollars. A market reserved in SOL guarantees a minimum redemption in SOL. If SOL falls in dollar terms, the floor’s dollar value falls with it, while the guarantee in SOL terms holds. The floor is a solvency claim about the market. It does not hedge the reserve asset. The full scope of what the guarantee covers, and what it does not, is documented at mayflower.systems/get-started.

Everything below is a different way of putting that primitive to work.

1. Launch a market

You have an asset that needs a market. Run one, or run a venue that hosts many.

On a conventional venue, liquidity is a prerequisite. Someone seeds a pool, someone hires a market maker, and the asset trades against that inventory. On an AVM market, liquidity arrives with the buyers. As buyers arrive and supply grows, the reserve grows with them, and the floor steps up behind the price. The floor is the reserve.

You bring: the asset, the audience, and the distribution.

Mayflower provides: a market that is its own counterparty, with no pool to seed and no market maker to hire.

Your users get: a floor that can rise and cannot fall, and an exit that does not depend on finding a buyer.

You earn: the fee schedule you set, on every market you run.

2. Back a treasury

You hold a native token and a balance sheet you would rather not spend. Make the token the reserve asset.

The market is denominated in your token, so every buyer of the reserve-backed asset is a buyer of yours. Circulating supply flows into the reserve, leaves the open market, and sits behind a rising floor. Fees from the market’s activity route to your treasury.

Compare that to the standard playbook for defending a price: paying market makers, running buybacks, or spending the treasury directly. Here the defense is structural. Supply that enters the reserve is supply that is no longer for sale.

You bring: a native token and a balance sheet you would rather not spend.

Mayflower provides: a market denominated in your token, so demand for the reserve-backed asset is demand for yours.

Your users get: floored exposure to your economy, and zero-interest credit against the floor without selling.

You earn: fees on the market’s activity, rather than paying market makers to defend a price.

3. Build on a listed market

You consume a market rather than create one. This path is available today and not yet in use, which makes it the most open ground of the four.

Listed markets expose their reserves, positions, and floors onchain. Your product reads that state and builds on top: a vault, a yield mechanism, an interface, a structured position. Because the floor is a protocol-level guarantee, anything your product holds carries that guarantee with it.

The economics split cleanly. Market economics stay with the market. Product economics stay with you.

You bring: the product surface, whether that is an app, a vault, or a structured position.

Mayflower provides: reserve-backed assets whose positions, floors, and reserves are readable onchain.

Your users get: your product, with a floor underneath the asset it holds.

You earn: whatever your product charges.

4. Launch an institutional product

You issue a fund or a real-world asset. This path turns demand for a companion product into new subscriptions, and it currently runs as a joint design exercise around one existing product rather than a self-serve flow.

The structure: a companion market whose reserve is your asset, issued through primary subscription. When an investor buys the companion product, capital enters through subscription, new fund units are created, and those units are held as the market’s reserve. The capital is new, not recycled from existing holders. The fund’s mandate is unchanged.

Investors in the companion product get exposure to the underlying asset, plus a demand-sensitive premium above a floor denominated in that same asset. The demand-sensitive risk lives in the companion market, outside your fund.

You bring: an existing digitally represented fund or asset interest, and the distribution you already have.

Mayflower provides: a companion market whose reserve is your asset, issued through primary subscription so new capital can land in your fund.

Your investors get: exposure to the underlying asset, plus a demand-sensitive premium above a floor denominated in that asset.

You earn: your ordinary fee, while the demand-sensitive risk stays outside your fund.

Choosing an entry point

The four paths sort by what you already have.

• An asset and an audience, but no market: launch a market.
• A token and a treasury: back a treasury.
• A product idea and no desire to run market infrastructure: build on a listed market.
• A fund with a mandate and existing distribution: launch an institutional product.

What the four have in common

All four are compositions of the same property set, running on the machinery that runs Mayflower Reserve:

• A market that acts as its own counterparty, so there is no liquidity bootstrap problem to solve before day one.
• A floor that can rise and cannot fall, denominated in the market’s reserve asset, that stays attached to the asset wherever it is held.
• Reserves, positions, and floors readable onchain by any contract.
• A fee schedule owned by whoever runs the market.

A fifth use case is any composition of these properties that has not been mapped yet. If your product needs a market without a bootstrap phase, a guaranteed minimum underneath an asset, or verifiable solvency it can read from a contract, it is a candidate, whether or not it resembles anything above.

The most open ground today is the listed-market path. The state is live and readable onchain, and no product has claimed the surface yet. The four entry points in this article are the compositions that have been mapped. The property set is larger than the map.

Where to start

If you are launching a market or building on a listed one, start with the documentation at mayflower.systems/get-started, and read the floor guarantee page before writing code against the floor.

If you are backing a treasury or issuing an institutional product, start with a conversation. Reach the team through mayflower.systems/contact or at [email protected].

If what you want to build is the fifth composition, chat with us.