Pricing & allocation

An acquisition costs roughly the average value of the position you might receive, plus a small acquisition surcharge (currently 2.5%). That surcharge is dynamically divided between depositor fee income and an FWA allowance for the successful purchaser; the protocol's own cut is configured separately. Because the lightly-backed positions are the ones you almost always receive, the price tracks them, while the rare highest-backed positions barely move it¹.

• Pools of cheap positions stay cheap to acquire from, even with a few richly-backed positions in them, since those are selected so rarely they barely move the price. You get frequent, low-cost acquisitions and a high-backed position to chase at once.
• The price is honest. You pay about what an acquisition is worth, plus the set surcharge, with no hidden markup.

You're quoted the pool acquisition fee plus a VRF service fee. The separate FWAVRFService uses that service fee to keep FWA's dedicated Chainlink subscription covered; it never draws from listing backing or depositor earnings. Any transaction overpayment returns immediately, and request-time limits²make the purchase revert if the pool moves beyond the purchaser's bounds before it is mined.

Randomness comes from Chainlink VRF³. Your acquisition fee stays escrowed until the request resolves. Requests settle in the order they were created. New deposits made while requests are open wait in a first-in-first-out staging line, so later deposits and callback timing cannot alter an existing draw. If a request cannot finish inside its callback, an automated processor normally advances the next ready or expired request; anyone can call the same onchain processor.

When an acquisition can't settle cleanly:

• Empty pool. If every position left before your request reaches the head, the escrowed pool fee becomes a pull-based refund credit.
• Price drift. If another acquisition shifted the price beyond your snapshotted bounds, the escrowed pool fee becomes a pull-based refund credit instead of settling at a stale price.
• Late or missing word. The deadline is inclusive: a word at the deadline is valid. Strictly afterward, anyone can expire the next unresolved request and release later ready requests. The escrowed pool fee becomes a pull credit; the VRF service fee is nonrefundable because it paid for callback coverage.