One sealed post, two endings

Most crowdfunding asks you to put money behind something and wait. openmog asks something stranger: back this post, and if it never opens, the people who bonded it pay you for having shown up. That reads like a sales line until you run the numbers, so here they are: one post, both endings, every side of the table.

The post is a crowdfunded sealed post: the payoff is marked, an image, a clip, an audio track, the paragraph that gives it away, and the rest stays public as the tease under a live panel showing what has been backed, what has been bonded and how long is left. How sealed posts work is the map; the other mode, pay to reveal, has no crowd in it.

What are the terms?

A creator seals a post with three settings:

• Goal: $100
• Ends: 3 days
• Bonus: 25%

The third setting is off by default. With it off a crowdfund is plain all-or-nothing: reach the goal and the post opens, miss it and every hold is released, nothing more. This post switches it on, because the bonus is where the story is.

Those three fix a fourth automatically. The bond pool is capped at the bonus percentage times the goal, so this post accepts exactly $25 of bonds and not a dollar more. A sealed post never takes on more bonding than the bonus it could owe.

Early on, two people who follow this creator decide to stand behind the post and fill the pool. One stakes $15, the other $10. Neither is buying access; a bond does not open anything and comes with no copy of what is inside. They are putting their own money on one claim: this post will hit its goal before the clock runs out.

The post could be anonymous, too. Sealing and anonymity are independent settings, and the overview covers how the money side still reaches the real creator.

Why is nothing charged yet?

Backing a sealed post does not move money. Neither does bonding one. Both place a hold: an authorization that reserves the amount on your card without charging it. openmog captures a hold only at the moment the outcome is decided, and only from the side the outcome says should pay. So while the clock runs, all of this money is promised rather than spent, which is what makes the two endings below different from each other instead of one being a refund story.

What happens if the post unseals?

Twenty backers put up $5 each, the full $100, before the deadline. The moment the last dollar lands, everything settles at once.

• The post opens for everyone. Not just for the people who paid. What was marked joins the public post, in the feed and in search.
• The backers are charged. Each $5 stake is one card payment of $5.75, the all-in price that was on the confirm button, so the twenty cards pay $115.00 to land the $100 goal. They wanted the post to exist in the open, and now it does.
• The bonders are credited what they staked. Their holds are released, so nothing is ever charged to their cards. The $15 bonder is credited $15; the $10 bonder is credited $10.
• openmog takes $15.00. The platform fee is 10% of each payment with a 75 cent minimum, and it lives inside the price the backers confirmed: 75 cents of each $5.75. Nothing is added after a backer authorizes, and nothing is deducted from what the creator set.
• The creator is credited $75.00: the $100 goal in full, minus the $25 the pool earned.

Three of those deserve a second look.

A bonder on a post that unseals earns exactly what they staked, every time. Not a share of a pot that swings with how many others turned up, and not a rate that needs a footnote. That is forced by the cap rather than promised by us, and the bonder’s post proves it.

The creator pays for the bonding that showed up, not the rate they advertised. If only $8 of the $25 pool had ever been filled, the creator would keep $92.00 instead of $75.00, and the sole bonder would still be credited their $8. An unfilled pool is not a bill.

The fee counts payments, not campaigns. Twenty $5 backers are twenty card payments of $5.75 each; one patron backing the whole $100 is a single payment of $111.12. Each payment carries its own fee because each one costs a fixed amount to collect, which is why the 75 cent minimum is per payment rather than per post. Either way the creator’s $75.00 does not move.

One wrinkle: cards die. If a backer’s card fails at capture, that stake is dropped and the post returns to live at the true total with its clock still running. Nobody unseals a post with money that was never there.

What happens if the post stays sealed?

Now rewind. Say backing stops at $60 when the clock runs out. The money runs the other way.

• The post stays sealed. What was marked stays hidden and the tease stays up.
• No backer is charged. Every backing hold is released untouched. A released hold can sit on a statement as pending for a few days; that is the bank unwinding an authorization, not a charge.
• Every backer is credited 25% of what they backed. Three backers at $30, $20 and $10 are credited $7.50, $5 and $2.50. That is the same 25% the post advertised on the day they backed it, and it holds here because the pool was full. The next section is about what happens when it is not.
• The bonders pay that, plus the cost of moving it. The bonuses come to $15 in total, and each bond is charged the all-in amount that covers its share: $10.00 from the $15 bonder, $6.75 from the $10 bonder, $16.75 across the pool, of which $1.75 is openmog’s fee on the two payments. The remainder of each hold is released. The charges carry their own collection cost, which is exactly why the backers above receive the full $7.50, $5 and $2.50.

That last line is where openmog parts company with the textbook version of this mechanism, in which a losing bond is forfeited whole. Here a bond is a ceiling, not a fee paid in advance: you are charged only the all-in cost of your share of the bonuses, never more than the hold you placed. The two bonders in this example staked $25 between them, were wrong, and paid $16.75 of it.

Credits from either ending land in your balance as pending and become withdrawable seven days later, and withdrawals start at $50. The wait is a dispute buffer.

Run the example one last time from a single seat. Back $10 of this post and you have two futures. In one, the post opens, your card is charged $11.12, the all-in price of the $10 you put toward the goal, and you got the thing you wanted. In the other, the post stays shut, you are charged nothing, and, if bonders showed up, as much as $2.50 lands in your balance: the full $2.50 whenever their pool covers the bonuses, and a share of the pool when it cannot. In either future, the number you saw on the confirm button is the most that can ever leave your card.

What if nobody bonds the post?

Then there is no bonus, and a backer who was counting on one should know that before they back rather than after. This is the single most important qualification in this post, so it gets said plainly: the bonus is paid by the bonders, not by openmog. It is not a guarantee the platform funds out of its own pocket, and it cannot be larger than the pool that people actually filled.

That gives three cases; the example above is the first.

• Full pool. Everyone gets exactly the advertised percentage. That is not luck; it is forced. A post that fell short raised less than its goal, so the bonuses it owes at the advertised rate are always smaller than a pool sized at that same rate on the goal. The pool covers them with room to spare, and the cost of collecting them rides each bonder’s charge, which is why the three backers above each got their clean 25%.
• Partly-filled pool. Still the full advertised percentage, right up until the pool runs out. What decides it is the pool measured against the money actually raised, not against the goal, so a half-filled $12.50 pool on this post, held by one bonder, pays every backer the full 25% at any raise up to $50. Past that the bonuses the rate promises outgrow the pool, and the backers share what it holds instead: about 20.8% at $60 raised, about 12.6% at $99. Whatever the pool does not owe is simply never charged to the bonder.
• Empty pool. No bonus at all. Your hold is released, you are charged nothing, and nothing is credited. You are exactly where you started.

On a young network the third case is the common one. The stake sheet prices your position before you confirm it, and on an unbonded post it reads If it seals → $0, with the sub-line bonus grows as bonders join. Treat that as a reading of the totals at the moment you look, not a receipt: bonders can still join, and a backing can be dropped when its card fails at capture.

Why is every payout capped?

You may have noticed that both endings ran through the same rule: nobody collected more than the rate the post advertised, measured against their own stake. That is deliberate, and it is the fix for an exploit that a plain pro-rata split leaves wide open. The full argument is the second half of the mechanism post, because it is a claim about the design rather than about this example.

Next: where the mechanism came from and the two things openmog changed about it, or the same story from the riskiest seat at the table in why anyone bonds a post. The FAQ carries the money answers in one place, or skip the theory and look at what is sealed right now.