How to use shard

Five steps from an empty wallet to a token that trades on Rhea. Everything happens on chain and every step needs a wallet signature.

Network: NEAR mainnet. Factory shardpad.near.

1. Connect a wallet

Press Connect wallet in the top right and pick Meteor, HOT or MyNearWallet. shard never holds your keys or your funds. The wallet only gets permission to show your account; every transaction that moves NEAR asks you to approve it.

You need a little NEAR for the launch cost and gas. A launch without an image costs about 0.18 NEAR, and any amount you attach above the quoted cost comes straight back to you in the same transaction.

2. Create a token

Open Create and fill in four things:

• Name, up to 64 characters. This is what people see first.
• Ticker, 2 to 10 characters, lowercase letters, digits, - or _. It becomes the token account, for example pepe.shardpad.near, and the symbol PEPE. Tickers are first come, first served. The page checks availability while you type.
• Image, optional. It is stored on chain at 256 pixels, so it costs storage; the cost line updates when you add one.
• Pair asset: wNEAR, USDC or ZEC. The pool trades your token against this asset.
• Description, website and X, all optional. They are stored in the factory record (a few thousandths of a NEAR of storage) and shown on the token page.
• Creator first buy, optional, wNEAR pairs only: pick 0.5% to 5% of the supply. The budget is part of the same approval as the launch; the factory holds it and swaps it the moment the pool is live, and whatever is unused comes back to you.

The cost shown is the real network cost, quoted live by the factory: the token account, the pool, the locked position and a few registrations. There is no platform fee on top.

Sign once. In that single transaction the factory creates the account, deploys the token code, mints the whole supply of 1,000,000,000 tokens, opens the Rhea pool and locks 100% of the supply into a single-sided range that starts at roughly a $5,000 market cap. Nothing is kept by you or by shard.

3. First buy (optional)

Two ways. On the Create page, pick a percentage and the budget rides along in the launch approval; the factory swaps it as soon as the pool is live. Or, after a launch on the wNEAR pair without one, the token page shows a First buy box for the creator with a live quote from the pool. Either way it is capped at 5% of the supply and whatever NEAR the swap does not use comes back to you.

Bots can trade the moment the pool is live, so the first buy is a convenience, not a guaranteed first position.

4. Trade

Every token page has a Buy and Sell panel that swaps directly on the Rhea pool, with a live quote, price impact and 1% slippage protection. You can also trade the same pool on rhea.finance or any interface that reads Rhea DCL pools.

The price starts at the launch price and can only move up from there while the pool holds the original position: buys move it up the range, sells move it back down toward the start. There is no ceiling.

5. Collect fees

Each swap pays a 1% pool fee. Rhea keeps 20% of that; the rest accrues to the locked position and is split 60% to the creator and 40% to shard. On the token page the creator sees Collect fees: one click claims what the pool has earned and pays it out. Anyone can trigger the same calls, so fees never get stuck waiting for someone.

For wNEAR pairs the fees arrive as NEAR. For USDC and ZEC pairs they arrive as that token, and your account is registered on it automatically if needed.

Portfolio

Portfolio lists the tokens you created and the ones you hold, with the fees you can collect right now.

If something stops halfway

• Ticker taken. Someone launched it first. Pick another one; the page tells you before you sign.
• Launch parked. Very rarely a launch stops after the account is created, for example if the network is congested. The token page then shows a Resume launch button that anyone can press. Your deposit is not lost.
• Transaction rejected by the wallet. Nothing happened on chain and nothing was charged.

Questions or something that looks wrong: message @shardpad_ on X.