AltStreet

Reference Mark Methodology

Why spot prices aren't enough

Tokenized equities trade in young, shallow onchain pools. A single small swap can move spot price by whole percentage points, and a screenshot of a DEX quote captures whatever that last swap did. A citable reference price has to be unmoveable by one trade. That is what the AltStreet Mark is built for.

The pipeline

  1. Every 15 minutes, we sample each tracked pool: a 15-minute time-weighted average price (TWAP), the instantaneous spot price, in-range liquidity, and the Chainlink price of the underlying equity where a feed exists.
  2. Daily at 21:05 UTC, we compute one reference mark per token: the median TWAP of all qualifying samples inside the 19:00–21:00 UTC fixing window.
  3. Marks publish with their evidence inline: samples used, samples excluded and why, and any caveat flags.

Two TWAP trust models — labeled, never mixed

Not all TWAPs carry the same guarantees, so every sample states which method produced it:

  • onchain_oracle — read directly from a Uniswap V3 pool's observation oracle (observe()). The chain itself computed the time-weighting; manipulating it requires holding a price across the full window against arbitrage.
  • sampled — a synthetic TWAP built from our own 15-minute spot series, used on venues without an onchain observation oracle: Orca Whirlpools on Solana, and Uniswap v4 pools (v4 removed the built-in oracle; it exists only where a pool opts into an oracle hook). Weaker trust model, honestly labeled.

Why the fixing window, and why median

A fixed 19:00–21:00 UTC window overlaps late US equity trading hours, when the underlying reference is freshest, and makes every day's mark comparable to every other day's. A rolling "latest price" would be easier to game and impossible to cite.

The median — not the mean — of the window's samples means a single manipulated or turbulent sample cannot drag the mark. Moving the median requires moving most of the window, which means holding a distorted price on a public AMM for an hour against arbitrage.

Liquidity gates and flags

Every sample is checked against per-token thresholds. Two flags are disqualifying — flagged samples never enter a mark or a spread:

  • LOW_LIQUIDITY— the pool's in-range liquidity is below its configured floor. A drained pool can show any price; it gets to show it somewhere else.
  • QUOTE_DEPEG— the stablecoin quote asset is off its dollar peg. A "5% premium" that is really a depegged USDC is not information about the equity.

Two flags are caveats — they ride along on the data rather than excluding it, because a real anomaly is information:

  • SPOT_TWAP_DIVERGENCE — spot has moved more than 2% off the TWAP: turbulence or an attempted push, happening now.
  • EXTREME_PREMIUM — the token trades more than 10% away from its underlying. Verify before citing; the premium itself may be the story.

A caveat flag present on the majority of a mark's samples is promoted onto the mark itself.

When no mark is published

If too few qualifying samples exist in the fixing window — an RPC outage, a drained pool, a depegged quote — the day's mark is withheld, and the gap is visible in the history. A withheld number costs a chart point; a bad number costs the credibility the whole dataset is built on.

Premium vs underlying

Where Chainlink publishes a feed for the underlying equity (Chainlink is Robinhood Chain's official oracle provider), each mark reports the median premium/discount of the token versus that feed. Feeds are checked against their heartbeat — a stale feed omits the premium rather than poisoning it.

Private-company tokens (SPACEX, OPENAI) have no consensus underlying, so no premium is reported. The AltStreet Mark is derived solely from onchain venue prices — which makes it a reference in its own right rather than a derivative of one.

Cross-venue spreads

Symbols tracked on multiple venues (Robinhood Chain, Solana xStocks, Base) get a live pairwise spread matrix. Integrity rules:

  • A venue more than 30 minutes stale never enters a spread — no phantom arbitrage against a dead feed.
  • Liquidity-gated or depegged venues never enter a spread — no "37% arb" against a drained pool.
  • The published headline pair always states which venue is rich; flipping direction recomputes the ratio rather than negating it.

Executable depth and net spreads

A mid-price spread means nothing if the pools can't absorb a real trade. Depth is probed at $1,000 / $10,000 / $50,000 on both sides of every tracked pool:

  • quoter_exact — on Uniswap V3 venues, the swap is actually simulated through the pool's quoter contract, so the effective price at size is exact.
  • liquidity_estimate — on Orca Whirlpools, a constant-liquidity, fee-adjusted estimate from in-range liquidity. One estimate leg downgrades the whole executable number to estimate-grade, and it says so.

Sizes a pool cannot absorb are absent, never extrapolated — absence is itself the depth signal.

The executable spread for the widest venue pair is buy-on-cheap / sell-on-rich at matched size, net of price impact, pool fees, and gas — before venue-access, bridging, and hedging costs. That scope is stated on every number: a defensible partial figure beats a fake all-in one.

What the token legally represents

A tokenized stock is not the stock. Each tracked token carries a curated structure record: issuer, legal form (many are tokenized debt securities conveying economic exposure only), backing, holder rights, jurisdictional restrictions, and redemption terms — every entry sourced to issuer documents and review-dated. Unsourced entries cannot ship: the daemon refuses to boot on them.

For private-reference tokens, secondary-market indications from venues like Forge, Hiive, or EquityZen are recorded with a mandatory ask / bid / completed-trade distinction and their structure context (SPV wrapping, fees, share class). Any comparison is published as an implied exposure premium/discount— never as "the price of SpaceX" — because the token and the indication are different instruments.

Access

Daily marks, 30 days of history, and this methodology are free — they are the citation layer. The intraday TWAP series, full history, the spread screener, alert rules, and CSV export are part of the Pro and API plans.