Desk history
How the desk works
A seller lists, a buyer accepts. Listing an offer moves the seller's side into the PrimeOTC contract on Base: the coin for a sale, the ETH, USDC or DGUY for a buy order. Whoever accepts sends the other side, and the contract pays both people in that same transaction. If anything in it fails, all of it is undone, so there is never a moment when one person has paid and the other has not.
Nobody holds a lever. The contract has no owner, no admin key, no pause and no upgrade, and Prime takes no fee. Tokens leave it two ways only: to a buyer who paid the listed price, or back to the person who listed them. The price, the size and the expiry of an offer are fixed when it is listed and cannot be edited; a new price is a new offer.
Which coins. The contract accepts any token and keeps no list, so nobody decides what may trade. This page shows offers only for coins in the Prime directory, and every listing prints the coin's contract address, so a token copying a real coin's name or ticker is never passed off as it. Check the address against the coin's own page before you trade.
Part fills. A seller can allow an offer to be taken in parts. Each part is priced from what is left of the offer and rounded in the seller's favour, so the seller always receives exactly the total they asked for. Every offer, every part and anything left over is priced at no less than 0.002 ETH, 5 USDC or 5,000 DGUY, which keeps the book free of dust.
What it does not do. It checks amounts, not value: an offer can be priced anywhere, far from the market, which is why every listing shows the market price beside it. The amounts are the ones each coin reports for itself, so trade only coins you trust. It refuses coins that take a fee on every transfer, and if a coin switches such a fee on later, fills of it stop while the seller can still cancel. A coin whose balances change by themselves, or whose owner can freeze addresses, can trap the offers made in it; USDC is one Circle can freeze. Automated reviews by LeftClaw found two serious issues in an earlier version of the contract (job 1064), both fixed. Five reviews of the fixed versions (job 1081, job 1082, job 1091, job 1093 and job 1117) found nothing of high or medium severity. The small changes the first four suggested were made after them, and the last suggested none. Nothing here is advice.