How OpenBell works, step by step

Connect a Solana wallet

Use the Connect wallet button in the top bar. Phantom, Solflare and any standard Solana wallet work.

You need USDC to buy and a little SOL to pay network fees. Nothing else is required. There is no sign-up, no account and no deposit into OpenBell itself.

Pick a market

Open Markets and choose a stock. Each tokenized stock has one book quoted in USDC, no matter which issuer minted the token, so xStocks, Ondo and Backpack versions all settle in the same place.

The market page shows the last official price, how old it is, and whether the US market is open right now.

Rest a bid

Enter the amount of USDC you want to spend and place the order. Your USDC moves into the book's escrow and sits there. It is still yours and still visible.

Sellers do the mirror image: they rest an ask by depositing shares rather than USDC.

There is no price field. That is the point: everyone in a round trades at the same print.

Wait for the next print

When the market publishes a new price, the book settles a round at exactly that number. Buyers pay the print plus a small premium; sellers receive the print plus that same premium.

The smaller side of the book fills completely and the larger side fills pro-rata, so nobody jumps the queue by being faster. Anything left over stays resting for the next print.

Outside US market hours there is no print, so orders simply wait. The market page tells you when the next one is expected.

Your shares arrive on their own

You do not come back and claim. Once the round is recorded, delivery sends shares to buyers and USDC to sellers, straight into the wallet that placed the order.

Changing your mind

You can cancel once a newer price has printed since you placed the order, usually seconds during market hours. Cancelling returns everything still resting.

This one rule stops somebody watching a price tick in and pulling their order a moment before it settles. If the price feed goes quiet, you can always leave after 72 hours regardless.

If you do not want to wait

Some markets offer Fill now: the house vault takes the other side immediately at the last print plus a spread. It refuses prices older than two minutes, and any single trade is capped at a fifth of the vault, so it cannot be used to pick off a stale number.

Get $BELL

$BELL trades like any Solana token. Note that it carries a 2% transfer fee at the token level, so a buy or sell anywhere withholds 2%. Moving it into and out of staking is exempt, so participating is never taxed.

Those withheld fees are collected and spent buying $BELL back for stakers, which is the token's second revenue stream alongside its share of trading premium.

Stake it

Open Stake, enter an amount and confirm. Your balance is recorded against your wallet and starts earning from the next distribution onwards.

There is no lock-up. You can unstake at any time, and you keep whatever has already accrued.

What staking gets you

A share of the reward pool. A quarter of the protocol's cut of every premium is used to buy back $BELL and hand it to stakers, split across every staked balance.

Boost on your vault deposits. A vault position earns at 1x with nothing staked, rising to 2.5x when your staked $BELL matches your deposit at the protocol's reference ratio.

Priority at the print. At every round, bids from stakers fill before regular bids. Queue position is the one advantage money alone cannot buy.

Where the money comes from

Every premium splits on-chain the moment a round settles: 59% to the seller, 15% to the app that routed the order, 1% to whoever landed the settlement transaction, and 25% to the treasury.

That treasury share then splits 60% to vault depositors, 25% to $BELL stakers and 15% to running the protocol. Nothing is discretionary. You can watch every figure on the treasury page.

Check what is waiting

The staking dashboard shows your staked balance, what you have accrued and what is currently sitting in the reward pool waiting to be split.

Rewards are paid in USDC until there is a deep enough $BELL market to buy from; after that, in $BELL.

Claim

Press Claim and confirm the transaction. The amount lands in your wallet immediately. There is no vesting, queue or waiting period.

Nothing expires. Leaving rewards unclaimed for months costs you nothing except the yield you would have got from redeploying them.

Vault rewards work the same way

If you have deposited USDC into a backstop vault, your share of the fill-now spread and of the treasury's vault allocation accrues against your position and is claimed from the vault page.

Your boost multiplier is applied at the moment rewards are calculated, so staking more $BELL raises what you accrue from that point on, not retroactively.

Unstaking

Unstake from the same page. Your $BELL returns to your wallet without the 2% transfer fee, and any rewards accrued up to that moment remain claimable.