Risk Disclosure Statement

Last Updated: August 4, 2026

This statement describes the principal risks of using the Candle Platform. It is incorporated into the Terms of Service.

It is not exhaustive. It cannot be — the risks of trading newly created digital assets are open-ended, and new ones appear faster than any document can catalogue them.

1. Total loss

Tokens launched on Candle are newly created digital assets. They typically have:

no operating history, revenues, assets, or business;
no intrinsic value and no claim on anything;
no assurance that any market will exist for them, now or later;
no protection if the person who launched them stops caring, disappears, or was never sincere.

Many tokens launched on any launchpad go to zero. Assume that is the base case rather than the exception.

Candle does not vet, endorse, or guarantee any token. Appearing on Candle — including being featured, ranked, trending, or surfaced by a heat score — means nothing about a token’s merits, safety, or legitimacy.

2. No regulatory protection

Digital assets are not deposits, and they are not insured by the FDIC, the SIPC, the FSCS, or any equivalent scheme anywhere.
Candle is not currently registered as a bank, broker-dealer, national securities exchange, alternative trading system, futures commission merchant, money services business, or investment adviser. Registration status is not a legal conclusion that registration is unnecessary, and classifications can change with product facts and law.
Do not assume that any investor-protection, compensation, insurance, or ombudsman regime covers a loss. Whether a statutory remedy applies depends on the facts and law.
Regulatory treatment of digital assets varies by country and changes. A token, feature, or the platform itself may become restricted or unavailable where you live, with little or no notice.

3. Bonding curve risk

Candle’s launches use bonding curves. Understand what that means before you buy.

Price rises as supply sells and falls as it is sold back. Early buyers pay less. This is a mechanical property of the curve, not a signal about value.
Graduation is not guaranteed. A curve that never reaches its raise target does not migrate to a DEX pool. While curve trading remains enabled, tokens on an ungraduated curve may be tradeable only against that curve, at the price the contract calculates.
Migration can create an interruption. When a launch reaches its graduation condition, curve trading may stop before DEX liquidity is available. Migration can be delayed or fail, and chain-specific recovery mechanisms may not restore immediate trading or prevent loss.
Graduation is not success. Migrating to a liquidity pool does not mean a token will hold value or find buyers.
You are trading against a curve, not a market. There is no order book, no market maker obligation, and no assurance of liquidity at any price.
Exclusive launches are gated, not vetted. The Believer NFT gate restricts who can buy early. It says nothing about whether the token is any good.

See Bonding Curve for how the curves are parameterised.

4. Smart contract risk

The Candle Platform depends on smart contracts — Candle’s own, and third parties’.

Smart contracts may contain bugs, vulnerabilities, or economic design flaws that result in partial or total loss of funds.
Audits reduce risk; they do not eliminate it. An audited contract can still be exploited.
Contracts are largely immutable once deployed. A discovered flaw may not be fixable.
Contract behaviour under extreme market or network conditions may differ from its behaviour in normal conditions.

5. Blockchain and network risk

Transactions are irreversible. Candle cannot cancel, reverse, or refund a confirmed transaction. There is no chargeback.
Mistakes are permanent. A wrong address, a wrong amount, or a wrong chain generally means the funds are gone.
Networks may suffer congestion, outages, forks, reorganizations, censorship, or attack. Transactions may fail, hang, or execute at a price different from what was displayed.
Gas costs vary and can spike, particularly when demand is highest — which is exactly when you may want to exit.
Validator, sequencer, or RPC failures may prevent you transacting at all.
Robinhood Chain (Hood) is a newer network with a shorter operating history and a smaller validator set than Solana or Ethereum, and correspondingly less battle-tested infrastructure.

6. Cross-chain and bridge risk

Paying from another chain routes through third-party bridge infrastructure.

Bridges are among the most frequently exploited components in crypto. A bridge failure can mean total loss of funds in transit.
A cross-chain purchase has two legs. The bridge leg may succeed while the destination-chain buy fails — leaving you holding the bridged asset on a chain you may not have intended to hold assets on. Candle surfaces this where it can detect it, but cannot guarantee completion or recovery.
Bridged transactions can be delayed indefinitely by conditions on either chain or by the bridge operator.
Candle does not operate the bridge and cannot recover funds it holds or loses.

7. Wallet and custody risk

Candle never holds your assets. You do.
Candle cannot recover your keys. If you lose access to your wallet or your sign-in, you lose access to what is in it. Permanently.
Embedded wallets are provided by Privy. A failure, compromise, or discontinuation of Privy’s infrastructure could affect your ability to access assets held in an embedded wallet.
Zero-prompt signing. For embedded wallets, transactions may execute on a single click with no separate confirmation step. A misclick is a real, irreversible transaction. See section 4(c) of the Terms of Service.
Malware, phishing, drainer sites, and compromised devices are the most common cause of loss in practice. Candle cannot protect you from them.

8. Market risk

Extreme volatility. Prices can move by very large percentages in minutes.
Illiquidity. You may be unable to sell at any acceptable price, or at all.
Slippage. The price you receive can differ substantially from the price quoted, particularly in thin markets or fast conditions.
MEV, front-running, and sandwich attacks may cause you to receive a materially worse price than expected.
Concentration. New tokens frequently have highly concentrated holdings. A single holder can move or destroy the price.
Displayed data may be wrong. Prices, market caps, holder counts, liquidity figures, and curve progress come from third-party sources and on-chain snapshots, and may be inaccurate or stale.

9. Fraud and counterparty risk

Anyone can launch a token. Some launches are frauds. Rug pulls, honeypots, and impersonation happen on every launchpad.
Token metadata — name, symbol, image, description, links — is supplied by whoever launched it and is not verified by Candle.
Social media promotion of tokens is frequently paid, coordinated, or automated, whether or not that is disclosed.
Candle has conflicts of interest. Candle earns fees on trades, receives fees from liquidity pools created at graduation, and Candle, its affiliates, and its personnel may hold, buy, or sell tokens — including tokens launched on the Platform. See section 22 of the Terms of Service.

10. Staking risk

Staking rewards are not yield. They are discretionary distributions of allocations from third-party token launches. They are not interest, not a return on investment, and not promised.
Rewards consist of tokens from launches that graduate. Those tokens may be worthless, illiquid, or both.
The current standard-unstake setting is 7 days, but the on-chain pool setting is administratively configurable. Your $CNDL is not accessible during the applicable period, and you cannot sell into a falling market while waiting.
Instant unstaking costs 20% of the amount unstaked.
Staking is exposed to the smart contract risk in section 4.

See Token & Staking Terms.

11. $CNDL risk

$CNDL does not contractually confer equity, a debt claim, or a right to Candle revenue or assets. Legal classification—including whether an activity involving it is subject to securities, commodities, or payments law—depends on the facts and applicable law.
Holding $CNDL gives you no ownership of Candle, no voting rights over the company, and no entitlement to profits.
Its value may fall to zero.
Token allocations, including the Foundation allocation, may be released, sold, or otherwise affect the market.

12. Platform and operational risk

Candle may modify, suspend, restrict, or discontinue any feature, any chain, or the whole Platform, at any time.
Candle may delist a token from its interface. This does not remove the token from the blockchain, or from your wallet.
Access may be suspended or terminated for eligibility, sanctions, fraud, or legal reasons.
Candle depends on third-party providers for authentication, data, hosting, routing, and video. Any of them can fail.
Candle is an early-stage company. It may cease operations.

13. Tax

You are solely responsible for determining and paying taxes on your activity — including trading, staking rewards, airdrops, giveaways, NFT mints, and tips received. Tax treatment of digital assets is complex, varies by jurisdiction, and changes. Candle does not provide tax advice and generally does not report on your behalf.

Consult a qualified tax adviser.

14. Privacy

Blockchain activity is public and permanent. Your wallet address, trades, launches, and holdings are visible to anyone, and can often be linked to your identity through analysis. Your Wallet IQ score may appear on public leaderboards.

Candle cannot delete on-chain data. See Blockchain Data and the Limits of Deletion.

15. Before you transact

Never commit funds you cannot afford to lose entirely.
Do your own research. Do not rely on Candle’s interface, ranking, or featuring.
Check what you are signing, and on which chain.
Assume any promise of guaranteed returns is a fraud.
Understand that with a bonding curve, being early is a mechanical price advantage — not information.
If you do not understand a feature, do not use it until you do.

Questions about this statement: legal@candle.tv