If you're asking this, good — you should ask it of every token sale. Here's what actually stands behind the guarantee.
It's a contract, not a promise
The price guarantee isn't marketing copy. It's a repurchase right written into the Token Sale Terms & Conditions — a binding agreement with Ethos Token Ltd, a registered BVI company owned by the Ethos Foundation (Cayman Islands, registration IC-434955), with named directors. If we didn't honor redemptions, that's breach of contract by an identifiable legal entity, enforceable in court. You are not trusting a Discord handle.
The money is governed by written policy, not goodwill
Sale proceeds are held under a board-approved Treasury and Wallet Policy — a formal corporate policy adopted by resolution, not an internal habit. What it requires:
- No commingling. Ethos Token Ltd (the sale entity) and the Ethos Foundation each maintain separate treasuries, wallet inventories, and signer sets. Sale proceeds sit in the Issuer's own wallets, never mixed with anyone else's assets.
- Cold storage first. The substantial majority of proceeds must be held in cold storage or with a regulated custodian, with only limited working balances in operational wallets.
- No single point of control. Material wallets are multi-signature; no single individual — founder included — can move funds unilaterally. Personal wallets are prohibited from holding or routing proceeds, and the development company (Ethos Labs) is excluded from custody entirely.
- Changes require resolutions. Adding or removing signers, changing thresholds, or altering custody arrangements requires formal director approval — no quiet unilateral changes.
And the liability side is bounded and known from the day the auction closes: at most 90% of what was raised. We are not promising to pay out more than came in.
How the reserves are held
Our intent is to hold redemption reserves conservatively: in stablecoins and tokenized real-world assets backed by short-term government bonds — T-bill-type instruments that earn modest, low-risk yield. Deliberately *not* in high-yield onchain strategies. The reserves backing your guarantee exist to be there when you redeem, not to chase returns — a treasury that gambles with its redemption backing isn't a guarantee, it's a bet.