Overview
PLEDGE is crowdfunding with an early refund bonus, on Solana. A creator opens a campaign with a goal, a deadline and a bonus they lock up front. If the goal is met by the deadline, the creator is paid and the work gets built. If it is missed, every backer is refunded in full, and every pledge made in the first half of the campaign also earns the bonus rate on top.
That is the whole product. No campaign sells, mints or distributes a token. Campaigns raise USDC or SOL for real work: an open-source feature, a bounty, an event, a shared tool.
Why a bonus on failure
Most crowdfunds fail for a boring reason: everyone waits for everyone else. A plain refund removes the risk of losing money but gives nobody a reason to go first. The refund bonus does. If the campaign fails, the people who backed it early are paid for having tried.
The idea is Alex Tabarrok's dominant assurance contract (1998). In 2021 Timothy Cason, Alex Tabarrok and Robertas Zubrickas tested a version with a 20% bonus paid only on early contributions, with 280 people at Purdue's Vernon Smith Experimental Economics Laboratory:
| Treatment | Campaigns funded |
|---|---|
| No bonus | 74 of 170 (43.5%) |
| 20% bonus on every contribution | 133 of 220 (60.5%) |
| 20% bonus on contributions in the first half only | 154 of 230 (67.0%) |
Source: Cason, Tabarrok and Zubrickas, "Early refund bonuses increase successful crowdfunding", Games and Economic Behavior 129 (2021) 78 to 95, doi.org/10.1016/j.geb.2021.05.006.
PLEDGE did not invent the mechanism. What it adds is the part that kept the idea in the lab: someone had to be trusted to hold the bonus and pay it. On PLEDGE the bonus sits in a vault the program controls from the moment the campaign opens.
The rules in one table
| Rule | Value |
|---|---|
| Currencies | USDC or SOL (wrapped), one per campaign |
| Campaign length | 1 to 90 days |
| Bonus rate | 1% to 50%, picked by the creator |
| Bonus window | the first half of the campaign, fixed by the program |
| Bonus budget | the creator's deposit; it covers deposit / rate of early pledges |
| Withdrawals before the deadline | none |
| Who settles | anyone, once the deadline has passed |
| Fee | 2% of a successful raise, 0 if the creator locked PLEDGE; failed campaigns pay nothing |
| Where the fee goes | all of it buys PLEDGE on the open market and burns it |
Status
Pre-launch. The program (programs/pledge, Anchor 0.31.1) passes 35 tests and a 28-transaction run on a local validator. It is not deployed to devnet or mainnet yet, and there is no PLEDGE token address to show.