# What Makes ZAP Fair

Fairness in token distribution is hard to achieve. Most traditional mechanisms fail in predictable ways: first-come-first-served rewards bots, sealed bids favor insiders, fixed-price sales are gamed by whales. ZAP was designed from the ground up to eliminate these failure modes.

Here is every design decision in ZAP that works in your favor — and why.

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### 1. Tokens drip out over time — no single-block sweeps

In a typical instant sale, a single large transaction can buy the entire supply in one block before anyone else has a chance to react. ZAP prevents this by releasing tokens gradually on a fixed schedule throughout the auction's duration.

No matter how much capital someone brings, they can only accumulate tokens as fast as the emission schedule unlocks them. A wallet that arrives at block 1 with $10 million cannot instantly clear the whole supply.

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### 2. Everyone pays the same clearing price — block by block

At any given block, every active bidder pays the exact same clearing price. There are no priority queues, no tiered pricing, no early-bird discounts. If the clearing price at block 500 is $2, every bid active at block 500 pays $2 for the tokens it earned that block.

Because the clearing price can rise over the course of the auction (as demand grows), the effective price you pay is the time-weighted average of the clearing price across all the blocks your bid was active. But at every individual moment, the price is identical for all participants — no one gets a better deal just because they have more capital or showed up earlier.

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### 3. Your maximum price is a ceiling, not what you'll pay

When you submit a bid, you set the highest price you are willing to pay. This is used only to determine whether your bid stays active as the clearing price moves — it is not what you spend.

You pay the clearing price at each block your bid is active, which is derived from the aggregate demand of all participants at that moment. No individual controls this number. Stating a high maximum simply means your bid stays in the game longer as the price rises — it never causes you to overpay relative to anyone else.

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### 4. Bids cannot be cancelled

Once a bid is submitted, it is locked until the auction ends (or until the bidder is outbid). You cannot cancel a bid to manipulate the apparent demand level and then resubmit at a lower price.

This prevents a common attack vector in on-chain auctions where sophisticated players submit bids to inflate prices, watch others react, then pull their bids and re-enter at a lower level. In ZAP, what you put in stays in.

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### 5. Partial fills at the margin — no all-or-nothing

In many auction designs, the bidder sitting right at the clearing price boundary gets either everything or nothing — an arbitrary outcome that depends on tie-breaking logic. ZAP handles this equitably:

Bids at exactly the clearing price receive a **pro-rata share** of the remaining supply at that price level. If five bids are tied at the clearing price and the remaining supply can only fill three of them fully, each of the five receives 60% of what a full fill would have been. No one walks away empty-handed due to a rounding coin flip.

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### 6. Late bids are normalized to compete fairly

Tokens are released over time, which means a bid placed in the first hour of a 72-hour auction is competing for the full supply, while a bid placed in the final hour is competing for what remains. To prevent this from being structurally unfair, ZAP normalizes the effective weight of each bid relative to when it was placed.

A late bid's influence on the clearing price is scaled up so that it competes proportionally for the remaining supply — not at a disadvantage compared to bids placed at the start. Your actual spend is still based on your real bid amount, never the inflated demand weight.

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### 7. The floor price can never be undercut

Every auction has a floor price set at deployment — the absolute minimum clearing price. This protects token buyers from acquiring a position in a launch that saw almost no competition and cleared at a negligibly low price.

Once that floor is set, the clearing price can only stay at it or rise above it. It can never fall below — even if demand collapses late in the auction.

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### 8. Outbid doesn't mean total loss

If the clearing price rises above your stated maximum, your bid stops competing for new token allocations. But you keep every token your bid had already accumulated up to that point. You are not stripped of past earnings just because you were priced out.

When the auction ends, exiting your bid will settle those earned tokens and refund any unspent currency.

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### 9. The soft cap protects you from dead launches

ZAP only distributes tokens and collects funds if the auction meets its minimum funding target (the soft cap). If a launch attracts very little genuine interest, the contract declares the auction failed and returns every bidder's funds in full.

This means you can participate without worrying that your funds will end up locked in a launch with almost no community backing. Either the auction meets its minimum threshold — or you get everything back.

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### 10. The contract is autonomous and immutable during the auction

Once the auction starts, no one can change the rules, access your funds, or interfere with outcomes. The smart contract runs on its own, enforcing every rule exactly as written. All tokens are locked in the contract for the full duration — nothing moves until the auction reaches its conclusion.

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### 11. All rules are visible before you bid

Every parameter of the auction — start block, end block, floor price, tick spacing, emission schedule, soft cap — is set at deployment and visible on-chain. There are no hidden fees, no secret reserves, no last-minute rule changes.

You can verify everything you need to know before you commit a single unit of funding currency.

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### 12. Protected against MEV and transaction reordering

In many on-chain sales, the order transactions are included in a block matters enormously. Block producers can reorder, front-run, or sandwich transactions to extract value — a practice known as **MEV (Maximal Extractable Value)**. A bot that sees your transaction in the mempool can jump ahead of you, buy tokens at a lower price, and sell them back to you at a higher one.

ZAP is structurally immune to this. Because all bids at the same block are subject to the same clearing price, **the order transactions land within a block does not matter**. Whether your bid is the first or the last transaction included in a given block, you pay the same price as everyone else in that block — no one can extract value by reordering around you.

There is no "better slot" to be in. Front-running a ZAP bid gains nothing.

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> That's ZAP. A system where the rules are fixed, the price is fair, and every participant — regardless of size or timing — competes on equal terms.

> Start from the beginning: [Welcome to ZAP](https://zealous-auctions.gitbook.io/zealous-auctions-docs/welcome-to-zealous-auctions)
