Summary: Royco Protocol is best understood as a generalized price-discovery layer for user behavior, not just a campaign frontend. Its Incentivized Action Markets (IAMs) let incentive providers and action providers negotiate the price of getting some onchain action done—depositing, locking, voting, minting, or executing a recipe of transactions—and then settle that bargain atomically when offers cross. The useful mechanism lens is that Royco tries to turn liquidity mining, growth campaigns, and some forms of vote-buying into a more legible market for acquiring user actions. That matters because the protocol is not merely distributing rewards; it is productizing demand curves for user behavior.
What it does:
Lets anyone create an Incentivized Action Market around either an ERC-4626 vault deposit flow or an arbitrary Weiroll-defined transaction recipe
Allows Incentive Providers to post token or points incentives and Action Providers to post minimum acceptable reward terms for completing the targeted action
Programmatically executes the action and incentive allocation when the two sides’ onchain intents satisfy each other
Supports “Collateralized Intents” for vault-based markets, letting users express multiple conditional offers against assets already deployed in ERC-4626 vaults
Supports non-transferable Royco points programs that emit award events instead of maintaining token balances, making points a controlled incentive asset rather than a freely tradable token
Ships factory and market-hub contracts for wrapped vaults, recipe markets, points campaigns, and Weiroll wallets across Ethereum, Arbitrum, and Base
Key claims:
The introduction docs say Royco Protocol allows anyone to create a market for any onchain action and frames the core primitive as an Incentivized Action Market where incentive providers and action providers make offers and counter-offers until the action is executed and incentives are atomically allocated
The how-it-works docs split the system into Vault IAMs and Recipe IAMs, making clear that Royco is trying to generalize beyond deposit mining into arbitrary transaction bundles and behavioral targets
The same docs say vault actions enable “Collateralized Intents,” meaning users can place multiple conditional offers backed by assets already sitting in ERC-4626 vaults, which is one of Royco’s strongest claims to capital-efficiency versus isolated campaign systems
The applications docs explicitly list supply, lockups, voting, NFT mints, and even community actions as target behaviors, which shows the protocol is aiming to become a general market for incentive-priced onchain actions rather than a narrow DeFi rewards module
The points-campaign docs say Royco points contracts are non-transferable, expose no balances, and only emit award events callable by approved Royco contracts, which is analytically important because Royco is standardizing offchain-indexed points as a first-class incentive rail while resisting direct tokenization
The GitHub README documents WrappedVaultFactory, VaultMarketHub, WeirollWallet, RecipeMarketHub, and deterministic deployment addresses on Ethereum, Arbitrum, and Base, reinforcing that this is infrastructure for third-party builders, not just a single app surface
Royco’s official public site now foregrounds Royco Dawn, a separate senior/junior risk-tranching product, while the docs and IAM repository still describe the older action-market protocol. That split is useful to track because it suggests the Royco brand is evolving from a pure incentive-pricing rail toward a broader umbrella of liquidity-formation products
Whitepaper: No canonical standalone Royco Protocol whitepaper surfaced in this pass. The strongest primary materials were the official IAM docs, the launch post, the points-campaign docs, the applications page, and the protocol GitHub README; see ../whitepapers/royco-protocol-primary-sources-2026-05-09.md.