For everyone / Before you rely on any of it
Limits and risks
Every page on this site states its own limits next to the benefit they qualify. This page gathers them, for a reader who wants the limits before anything else is allowed to be persuasive.
Read this first
One team runs the computer that decides everything, and you are trusting them to be honest; the design lets anyone catch them lying but does not stop them. The coin, PKL, gets a share of what the chain earns, and if the chain earns little, so does the coin: there is no guaranteed return anywhere. More PKL is being unlocked for the first few years than is being destroyed, so "burn" does not mean "getting scarcer" yet. And every number on this site is a model with assumptions, not a measurement.
Four things qualify everything else. The chain is run by one sequencer, and correctness is checked rather than enforced. The fee-share paid to stakers is whatever the chain actually earned after costs, with no floor and no emissions. The buyback reduces total supply, not circulating supply during the vesting years, and offsets a small fraction of the unlocks rather than reversing them. And the quantitative results in the whitepaper rest on stated assumptions, which a reader who disagrees with should expect to move the results.
Ordering, liveness and price publication are a single sequencer's; there are no fraud or validity proofs and no forced inclusion; the messenger is a trusted key. Revenue sharing is economically rather than physically enforced: an unregistered application pays nothing and forfeits support, and spread-based and off-chain revenue are undetectable. The buyback is denominated in a fixed currency against unlocks denominated in PKL, so no claim about circulating supply can be made without a price assumption the paper declines to make. Governance cannot prevent bribery or vote markets. Every modelled figure depends on the inputs listed below.
What you are trusting
- One sequencer orders every transaction and can reorder or censor. There is no forced-inclusion path from Ethereum. If it stops, the chain halts for new execution.
- No proofs. Correctness is checked by re-execution; a replica that detects a divergence halts, and nothing on-chain arbitrates it.
- The same sequencer publishes the prices. A dishonest or compromised sequencer can publish a false price, and every application consuming the feeds inherits that assumption. Without the upstream credential, all 19 real-world feeds stop.
- The bridge messenger is a trusted key that can delay, though not forge or replay.
The trust model page states all of this in full and names the three properties that would have to hold before Pickle could describe itself as anything more.
What the money mechanisms do not promise
- Staking has no floor. When the chain earns little, stakers earn little. Interfaces display realised historical distributions only, never a projected rate, and there are no PKL emissions anywhere.
- The buyback is not a price floor. A buyback in a fixed currency retires more PKL when the price is lower; that is arithmetic. It reduces total supply and not circulating supply during vesting, and the free first bracket means a majority of applications contribute nothing to it.
- Revenue sharing is not enforced by the chain. An application can decline to register and keep everything; it then forfeits ecosystem support, and that is the whole of the consequence.
- Exposure is not the asset. A position against a real-world price feed is a claim on a margin system, not a share, with no shareholder rights and nothing to redeem.
- Governance has a stated limit. Bribery and vote markets cannot be prevented; disclosure and timelocks give the community time to react, and that is the honest extent of the defence.
- Insiders hold 25 percent of PKL, published as the upper bound rather than presented as modest.
Model assumptions, and what they are worth
| Input | Value |
|---|---|
| L1 settlement | one aggregated commitment per windowinstrument chosen from measured prices |
| Activity | three levels: Low, Mid, High250,000 and 10,000,000 transactions per day at the ends |
| Average fee | $0.002 to $0.004 per transactionacross the three levels |
| Total chain cost | $1.42M to $2.86M per yearacross the three levels |
| Aggregate application take | $0.4M to $12M per yearmodelled as a distribution of application sizes, never as one figure |
| PKL price | none assumeda deliberate omission, so no result depends on one |
Every quantitative result in the whitepaper rests on inputs like these. They are assumptions, not findings. Two are worth singling out. Settlement cost: posting one Ethereum transaction per sealed block would cost, at modelled parameters, $34M to $344M per year; aggregating to one commitment per 60 second scheduling target brings that to $1.0M to $2.9M per year, roughly a hundredfold reduction, and a 12 second window would cost more than gross gas revenue at every modelled activity level. And the application-size distribution: the ecosystem share is computed per application and summed, never by applying the brackets to an aggregate, and the same total collects more from a concentrated ecosystem than from a fragmented one.
There is no PKL price assumption anywhere in it, so the buyback cannot be expressed as a percentage of each year's float increase; both sides are published for a reader who wants to do that arithmetic at a price of their choosing. For the same reason the paper states the size and lock terms of the private and community rounds but not their prices.
What to be careful about
Three rules that cover almost all of it
- No contract address on this site is real, because this site publishes none. Read addresses from the explorer or the first-party interfaces, never from a message. A call to an address where nothing is deployed succeeds and takes your ETH.
- Nothing about PKL is a projected return. Anything quoting a yield, a price target or a "burn will make it scarcer" claim is contradicting the whitepaper.
- The migration is a continuity allocation, not compensation, computed from a published snapshot with a published root. Anything asking you to pay to claim it is not it.