How to read alpha
Every number on the board, what it means, and what the instrument deliberately keeps off it. If something needs explaining it is explained here, so the board itself can stay a board.
01 Start here
Alpha is for liquidity providers on Robinhood Chain. It answers one question: where is volume moving right now, early enough that you can still add liquidity into it.
Fees are paid out of volume, not out of price. A pool that trades heavily pays you whether the price went up or down. That is why nothing here predicts price, and why every number on the board is a volume number.
The loop
| catch | Open flow and leave it running. A pool crossing $100k in five minutes lands on the board. |
| provide | Press add lp on its card. That opens the pool on Delta. |
| collect | You are paid from the traffic passing through while it passes, whichever way the price went. |
02 flow, the five minute window
Reads the whole chain every 30 seconds and asks one narrow question: did anything just move more than $100,000 in the last five minutes? That is the event. A pool that crosses lands on the board with its numbers and a link straight to Delta.
The seismograph
Above the cards runs a 20 minute trace of total 5m volume across the chain, so you can tell whether everything is waking up or one pool is doing all the work.
Drag along the trace and it reports what it saw at that moment instead of now. On a phone, tap and drag sideways; the reading stays up for eight seconds after you lift, then hands itself back to live.
The pen runs amber and reads calibrating until it genuinely holds twenty minutes of history. It will not draw a confident line over three points.
03 Reading a card
The big number is 5 minute volume. Everything under it is there to tell you whether that number is worth acting on.
| field | what it means |
|---|---|
| turn | 5m volume divided by liquidity, as a percent. How many times the pool traded its own depth in five minutes.High turn on thin liquidity is the classic setup: lots of traffic, few providers to share the fees with. It is also where slippage and volatility live. |
| accel | Current 5m volume against the same pool 4.5 minutes ago. x2.0 means it doubled.Blank until the board has enough history to compare against. Above x2 is still building, below x0.35 is fading. |
| on radar | How long this pool has held its place on the board.Thirty seconds is a fresh event. Several minutes is a sustained run. |
| 5m | Price change over the same five minutes.Deliberately secondary. Volume is the signal; this is context. |
| mcap | Market capitalisation. |
| liq | Liquidity in the pool. Your fee share is your stake measured against this number. |
| top10 | Share of supply held by the ten largest wallets.High concentration means a small number of people can end the move whenever they choose. |
| flow | Buy versus sell split for the window, with raw counts beside it. Green for buys, red for sells. |
| wash | Only appears when the volume looks self dealt rather than genuine demand. |
The small chart on each card is that pool's own 5m volume across the window. It needs three readings before it draws, so a card that just arrived shows a flat line rather than a trend invented from two points.
A card that stops qualifying dims for a few cycles before it falls off, so the board never flickers something in and out on one quiet window.
The safety read
Volume alone can point straight at a pool nobody should provide into. Liquidity that is not locked can leave overnight. Supply parked in a few wallets can come back through your position in a single trade.
So a card carries a row of flags underneath when there is something to say, and underneath that, always, a line naming which checks ran. Amber is caution. Red is the kind that costs you the position.
| flag | what it means for a provider |
|---|---|
| unlocked | The share of liquidity that is not locked. If most of it can be pulled, it can be pulled while you are asleep.Only shown when the lock status is actually known. Unknown is not the same as unlocked, and it is not reported as one. |
| dev | Share of supply held by the team. Amber from 3%, red from 5%. |
| bundled | Share of supply bought in one bundle at launch, concentrated in a way the holder count hides. Amber from 8%, red from 15%. |
| snipers | How much of the float the earliest wallets are holding - not how many of them there are. Fifty wallets sitting on dust cannot hurt you; three holding a third of the supply can. Amber from 10%, red from 25%. |
| top10 | Share held by the ten largest wallets. Amber from 35%, red from 50%. |
What is not checked, and why we say so
This list used to be longer. It carried honeypot, buy tax, sell tax, rug risk and "not renounced" as well. Every one of those was dead: the upstream data returns a flat zero for all of them on Robinhood Chain, so the check could never fire no matter what the pool was. Running the identical request against Solana returns real tax and rug values, which is how we know it is the chain and not a quiet market. Two more were alive but tuned to numbers this chain never produces - the bundled flag wanted 30% when the highest pool on the board sits at 17%.
A check that cannot fire is worse than no check at all. It reads as we looked and it was fine when nobody looked. So the dead ones are gone, the thresholds above are set off the spread this chain actually produces, and every card prints the line checked: lock, dev, bundle, snipers, concentration whether or not it has flags. The absence of a flag now says only what it can honestly say.
Flags are not a verdict. Plenty of live pools carry one and trade fine. They tell you what to look at before you commit, not what to conclude. And the checks that do run cover holdings and liquidity, not the contract itself - nothing here replaces reading it.
04 early, the first hour
flow ranks by size, which buries anything new: a pool three minutes old turning over twice its own liquidity still loses to a mature pool doing a fraction of its own. early takes the last sixty minutes only, newest first, with the reason each pool is where it is printed on its row.
The riskiest pools on the chain, by design. About one in ten is still there an hour later. Somewhere to look first, not a list to buy.
A pool becomes visible when it first carries real volume, a median of about four minutes after it opens - not when the contract is deployed. It catches the first buying. It does not front-run it.
Getting in
early is for $ALPHA holders, and it is the only part of this site that is.
| hold | $30 of $ALPHA, any wallet. Priced in dollars, so the token count moves with the price and the cost of entry does not. |
| connect | One signature. Free, proves the wallet is yours, cannot move funds. |
| then | Verified on our server, and good for twelve hours so a price wobble cannot lock you out mid-read. |
05 grid, the map
Every token paired against the Delta hub is a node. Drag to orbit, scroll to zoom, click a node to hold it. Clicking a held node opens its pair.
| encoding | reads as |
|---|---|
| height | 24 hour volume. The tallest tower is where the fees are. |
| size | Liquidity. A wide, short node is deep but quiet. |
| colour | The 24 hour price move. Green up, red down, grey flat. |
| distance | Age. Oldest pools sit near the hub, newest at the rim. |
| centre | Delta itself. Every faint line running out from it marks a token paired against it. |
New pairs arrive on their own. The map re-reads the chain every 30 seconds and anything newly quoted in Delta appears at the rim without you doing anything.
06 What it hides, and why
This matters more than the feature list. A board that shows you everything is not filtering anything.
| excluded | reason |
|---|---|
| stablecoins | WETH, ETH, USDG, USDC, USDT. Enormous volume, almost none of it opportunity.That flow is arbitrage: bots holding two numbers level. Add liquidity expecting free fees and you find out what impermanent loss is. |
| tokenized stocks | NVDA, COIN, TSLA, MU, SPY, AAPL. Same reason. |
| under $200k mcap | A floor. Below it a large five minute number is usually churn rather than demand. |
When the chain is quiet the board says so rather than inventing something. A flat board is a real reading. An instrument that always has something exciting to show you is not measuring anything.
07 Alerts
Three toggles in the flow header, covering three different situations.
| toggle | behaviour |
|---|---|
| sound | Audible pings while the tab is in front of you. Different tones for arriving, re-crossing after a quiet spell, and dropping off.For when flow is open on a second screen. |
| alerts | System notifications, and only while the tab is hidden. If the board is already in front of you a popup is just noise.Your browser asks permission the first time you switch this on, never on page load. Several pools crossing at once collapse into one summary. |
| telegram | Sends to a bot you own. Fires whether or not the tab is in front, because the point is that it reaches a different device. Setup is in the next section. |
All three need the tab open. Close the browser and nothing reaches you, Telegram included. Telegram wins when you leave flow running on a desktop and want the ping on your phone while you are away from it. Alerts that survive a closed browser need a server watching the chain, which alpha does not do yet.
08 Telegram setup
Alerts go through a bot you own. There is no account to make and no credential of yours reaches us: the token lives in your browser and the message is posted straight to Telegram's API.
| step | what to do |
|---|---|
| 1 | In Telegram, open @BotFather and send /newbot. Give it any name. It replies with a token that looks like 123456789:AAE... |
| 2 | On flow, press telegram off, paste the token, press connect. It checks the token and shows you the bot's username. |
| 3 | Let the bot hear from you once.A bot cannot message anyone who has never contacted it first. That is Telegram's rule, not ours. |
| 4 | Back on flow, press detect. It lists every chat the bot has heard from. Pick one, then send test to confirm it arrives. |
Sending to a group
Add the bot to the group, then send /start@yourbot in it. Press detect and the group appears in the list beside your private chat, so the two are never confused.
A group id is negative, like -1001234567890. A private one is positive. If you are typing an id by hand rather than picking it, that minus sign is the usual thing to get wrong.
Bots join groups with privacy mode on, so yours will not see ordinary chatter. It only needs to hear /start@yourbot once. Alpha only ever sends to the group, it never reads it.
Sending to one topic
In a group with topics turned on, send /start@yourbot inside the topic you want. Detect picks up the topic alongside the group, and the row will say topic 42 or similar.
Leave the topic field empty and alerts land in the group's General thread instead.
forget wipes the token and chat id from this browser. Nothing of yours is kept anywhere else, so that is the whole cleanup.
If it does not work
| unauthorized | The token is wrong or was revoked. Ask BotFather for it again with /mybots. |
| nothing yet | Detect found no message. Send /start to the bot first, then press detect again. |
| chat not found | The chat id is wrong. Clear it and use detect rather than typing it. |
09 Honest limits
- flow sees the whole chain. grid sees the Delta family. They read different sources, so grid can look quiet while flow is busy. That is the map being narrower, not the chain being wrong.
- Nothing here is a prediction. Alpha measures what is happening and reports it quickly. It does not know what happens next.
- No memory. The 20 minute window lives in the page. Reload and it starts again.
- Alerts need the tab open. All three of them.
- Not financial advice. High turnover on thin liquidity is exactly where both the fees and the risk are.