Buy & Sell $FLOW

Daily limit, fee structure, and the on-chain flow for buying and selling through FlowProtocol.

Every buy and sell of $FLOW is an on-chain transaction routed through the FlowProtocol contract. There is no order book and no DEX pair — FlowProtocol is the only counterparty.

Pre-flight: activation

Before you can buy $FLOW, your address must be activated on the phenomenal tree. Activation costs 10 USDT and is a one-time call:

// Approve USDT first
await usdt.approve(flowProtocol.address, parseUnits("10", 18));

// Activate with a referrer (or 0x0 if no referrer)
await flowProtocol.activate(referrerAddress);

After activate, you have 30 days of tree active status — meaning you can earn from descendants buying or extending. To stay active beyond 30 days, call extendTree.

You can buy $FLOW even after your tree active status expires, but you stop accruing tree marketing rewards until you re-extend.

Daily buy limit

Each user can deposit at most:

dailyLimit = max(50 USDT, pool_USDT * 0.001)

per rolling 24-hour window. With a $1M pool, the limit is $1000/day per address. The limit refills based on sells in the prior 48h — so if a sell happens, available capacity for buys reopens proportionally.

The limit is enforced inside FlowProtocol.buy(...). A buy that would exceed your remaining capacity reverts with DailyLimitExceeded.

The limit exists to keep the closed system fair. If a whale could deposit unlimited USDT in a single transaction, they could front-run all later buyers and lock the protocol’s growth into their own income limit.

Buy flow

// Approve
const amount = parseUnits("100", 18); // 100 USDT
await usdt.approve(flowProtocol.address, amount);

// Buy
const tx = await flowProtocol.buy(amount);
const receipt = await tx.wait();

What happens in the contract:

Step	Effect
Pull 100 USDT from caller	balance moves to FlowProtocol
Compute flowOut = (100 * 0.80) / current_price	80% of USDT sized at current price
Mint flowOut to caller	total supply rises
pool += 90 USDT	pool grows by 100 - 10 (10 went to tree)
Distribute 10 USDT to phenomenal tree ancestors	per-level payout, see Phenomenal tree
Caller’s income limit += 200 USDT	(100 * 2 for 1:2 multiplier)
Mint 20 GWT to caller	(1:1 of 20 USDT total fee)

Sell flow

const flowAmount = parseUnits("500", 18); // 500 FLOW
const tx = await flowProtocol.sell(flowAmount);

What happens in the contract:

Step	Effect
Compute value = flowAmount * current_price	e.g. $200
Apply sell fee 10%	$20 fee, $180 to caller
Of fee: $10 retained in pool, $10 to treasury	pool keeps growing slightly
Burn flowAmount $FLOW from caller	total supply drops
Mint 2 GWT to caller	(1:1 of $20 fee, in dollar terms)
Burn income limit	see Income limit for the <= vs > cases

Why the price keeps rising

After the buy: pool += 90, supply += 80/price. Ratio rises. After the sell: pool -= 180, supply -= flowAmount. The 5% retained in pool means the ratio still ratchets up — sells extract less than they put in proportionally.

This is the closed-system invariant. See Closed system for the formal statement.

Slippage and reverts

Buys and sells do not take a minOut parameter — the price at execution is the price at the block of execution, full stop. If the pool moves between you submitting and the block being mined, your effective price moves. For large trades, this is usually negligible because daily limits cap individual trade size.

Common revert reasons:

Error	Meaning
NotActivated	Caller has not called activate() yet
DailyLimitExceeded	Buy would exceed dailyLimit for this 24h window
InsufficientBalance	Sell amount exceeds caller’s $FLOW balance
IncomeLimitExhausted	(Edge case) caller’s income limit cannot absorb a 1:1 burn

Reading state

const price = await flowProtocol.currentPrice();             // pool / supply
const myDailyRemaining = await flowProtocol.dailyRemaining(me);
const myIncomeLimit = await flowProtocol.incomeLimit(me);
const myTreeActiveUntil = await flowProtocol.treeActiveUntil(me);
const myGwtClaimable = await flowProtocol.claimableGWT(me);

Or read via the API:

curl https://api.agentflow.website/me/flow-onchain \
  -H "Cookie: af_session=..."

See FLOW Onchain API.