What it is
Royalties do not distribute themselves. Something has to convert the accumulated ETH into the assets holders chose and credit each position. In Goat Street that something is called the Bell, and anyone can ring it. There is no keeper role, no privileged operator, and no schedule anyone has to trust. Ringing the Bell is a single public function call, open to any address, and the caller is paid nothing for it. If the team disappeared tomorrow, holders could keep the protocol paying by ringing it themselves.What happens when it rings
1
The pot is measured
Everything not already owed to a holder becomes the pot for this round.
2
The pot is split by asset
Weight is totalled per chosen asset, and each asset’s slice is sized by its share of that total.
The weights are read once, up front, so nothing reached from inside a swap can move the split
underneath it.
3
Each slice converts
One swap per asset, each bounded by a floor derived from Chainlink marks. Weight that chose
nothing takes its share directly in ETH.
4
Credit accrues
Each position’s entitlement is recorded. Nothing is pushed to anyone, and no holder list is ever
walked.
Why it is open to everyone
No liveness dependency
A protocol whose payouts depend on one bot is a protocol that stops paying when that bot does.
Anyone being able to ring the Bell removes that failure mode entirely.
No trusted schedule
Holders do not have to believe a stated cadence. They can check the pot on-chain and ring the
Bell themselves the moment it is worth doing.
Constant cost
A round costs the same at sixty holders as at six thousand.
Nothing to extract
The caller sets no prices and receives no reward. Their only influence is a slippage bound they
may set tighter than the protocol’s own floor, never looser.
What bounds the caller
Ringing the Bell is open, but it is not unconstrained.Rounds that do not fully fill
A slice can fail to convert for ordinary reasons — no route at that size, a feed that has gone stale, an equity paused for a corporate action. When that happens its ETH is credited to that asset’s own holders, as ETH, immediately and permanently. It is not returned to the general pot, and it is not held over for a later round. That distinction matters: returning it to the pot would re-split it across every other asset, quietly moving value from the holders it belonged to onto everyone else. Instead it stays with the holders it was sized for, and only the denomination changes.Delivery is separate and equally open: pushing a position’s credited rewards into its own wallet
can be done by anyone, for any NFT. See Rewards.