The Salutary Whitepaper
The Salutary Whitepaper
This whitepaper covers several topics. In here you’ll find a meticulously literal and unorthodox deconstruction of equities and how they’ve evolved over time; a takeaway based upon this novel analysis; a description of how Salutary uses these observations to create its framework; and how it’s applied to crypto and its partners.
We want to emphasize that even though Salutary is taking core financial primitives and applying them to crypto, we are not a service only for crypto-native companies. We work for small and medium-size business, intellectual property, essentially any asset with an owner is a candidate. A car dealership could use us just as well as a DeFi project. In fact, some of our partners are media companies and individual pieces of IP. Salutary aims to be a sincerely useful, functional application of crypto for all business types and regular people.
Terms:
DeFi (decentralized finance) is the infrastructure that crypto runs on. It encompasses blockchains and applications that exist natively atop these blockchains.
Crypto means a digital asset that exists onchain and can be transacted with in DeFi. I will use “crypto” and “DeFi” interchangeably.
Table of Contents:
Introduction
The financial history and observations that inform Salutary
Why Salutary works and the problem it solves
Benefits, mechanics, and enforcement
Risks, execution, financial auditing, monetization
Salutary’s token, additional documents, contact info
Introduction
Crypto is speedrunning financial history, and Salutary is accelerating that journey. Our north star is aligning tokens with business fundamentals, where genuine value creation drives rewards. This fosters healthy, sustainable behavior; “salutary” is a fancy word for “healthy”.
When you partner with Salutary you cease being a crypto “project” and become a crypto business. It’s a coming-of-age moment, like a token bar mitzvah or a coin Quinceañera. Crypto’s memecoin nihilism (and the mental gymnastics that excuse it) actively sabotage building real, sustainable companies. We will decisively end this immature cycle by providing a framework where building the best business lets you reap the greatest rewards. Change incentives → change behaviors → change outcomes. Salutary marks DeFi's transition into adulthood.
We are not reinventing the wheel. Salutary is an old, new idea. Its solution is both profound and obvious. It’s focused on aligning company and token around fundamentals and value creation. It’s inspired by proprietary research and historical insights that respect the lessons and empirical evidence of our financial forefathers.
There is such a thing as financial physics, economic natural law: immutable principles governing how value flows, concentrates, and compounds. Distributed ledgers don’t void these laws. Salutary does not deny this reality because a crypto asset resides on a blockchain. Crypto is finance; the rules of finance still apply, no matter what database you stick the asset on.
If we’re “speedrunning financial history” there’s much to be learned by actually observing history; the details change, but the patterns of human behaviors endure. Many of crypto’s problems have already been litigated with clear answers. Sometimes the future is visible by simply looking to the past.
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Salutary builds on fundamental financial concepts that need to be deconstructed to be properly understood. I have passed CFA tests, worked in finance, and am quite familiar with what stocks purport to be. I am a finance guy who found crypto, not a crypto guy who learned about finance. The observations that follow may seem heretical to academic orthodoxy, but they're grounded in market reality.
From a retail lens, stock with no book value or dividend is functionally similar to a DeFi governance token.
Book value is relevant because stock is a junior claim on assets in bankruptcy. There’s little if anything left for shareholders if the company is liquidated with no tangible book value.
There’s nothing being paid out if the board decides against a dividend. It’s up to them to choose to pay one, they don’t have to.
Half of the Nasdaq doesn’t pay a dividend. No startup does. The best-performing equities often provide zero payouts or claims on company assets, and investors don’t expect them to.
What is your “equity” equity in? You’re modeling cashflows, yet shareholders never touch a cent. The academic theory does not align with market practice.
Share buybacks deserve special mention: reducing share count does not create value; it concentrates value that already exists.
We are asking “why is this asset valuable in the first place?”. Buybacks are not by themselves a form of value accrual, a simple illustration: a worthless asset is still worthless even if you shrink its supply.
This is effectively what DeFi token buybacks do: they borrow stock abstractions for assets with no stock characteristics and no intrinsic worth… “Here are 100 units of vapor, we’ll now reduce the supply to 70 units, returning value to vapor holders. It works for the stock people, so it must work for the token people?”.
Reducing quantity alone cannot manufacture intrinsic value; it merely redistributes whatever value already exists. Something must already have innate value for a scarcity-inducing action to increase its worth.
Stocks possess intrinsic value legally tied to the underlying company, which is why buybacks are great for them. However, the token is not a stock.
See here for deeper analysis on this topic on the Salutary website.
The question that must always be answered: what does the asset actually do?
A quick history of how dividends evolved
From the Dutch East India Co. era (1602) through the 1900s, investors largely viewed stocks like junk bonds.
Stock was issued to finance specific and often large endeavors (voyages, factories, etc.)
The dividend payout was the reason you owned it. If it doesn’t pay a dividend, what does the stock do? Crypto parallel: if you can’t stake it for yield… what does the token do?
The yield was the largest for stocks in the capital stack, but also the most uncertain (thus the junk bond analogy).
Investors gradually became increasingly okay with companies paying out less of their retained earnings, with management decrementing their dividends and allocating it towards growth. This was due to incremental reinvestment in the business becoming more feasible, making those earnings more valuable and useful to the company. Advances in technology made it possible.
Increased access to utilities like electricity then and cloud computing now meant every dollar you earned could be reinvested more effectively.
You no longer needed to raise enormous upfront capital to fund a voyage or open a new factory. Technology allowed growth to be financed in a persistent stream of reinvestment rather than big chunks of investment.
Retained earnings went further for companies, so they reduced their dividend payouts. And investors didn’t mind!
You can do two things with capital: reinvest it into the business, or distribute it to shareholders. Companies that are growing do the former, those that aren’t do the latter. Walmart should pay a dividend, Cloudflare should not. Where do crypto businesses sit on this spectrum? There is no difference between ‘staking for yield’ and dividends.
Like water down a hill, capital eventually flows to its most productive uses. Growing companies reinvest earnings into their business, because that is the most productive thing to do with it. Investors are empirically quite okay with it.
No startup pays a dividend. Growth companies don’t pay dividends. DeFi’s infatuation with “real yield” isn’t genuine, it’s a heuristic. View it in the context of speedrunning financial history: shareholders used to think the same thing about their stocks.
“Real yield” is simply a heuristic for avoiding scams. A company paying out earnings demonstrates it’s a real business, however it encumbers its growth to do so. Dividends are effectively costly signaling for growth companies.
Crypto investors are here for capital gains, not bond yields. They want 100x, not 5%. Stability and parabolic expansion do not sustainably reside in a single asset. To want 100x and 5% concurrently is a contradiction of competing realities, like a marathon-running bodybuilder. Simultaneously desiring reliability and volatility. It’s a dichotomy. There’s a reason such an asset doesn’t exist in TradFi.
Real wealth is achieved via capital gains, not dividends: from appreciation, not distribution. If you know a HNW person, ask him how got rich. Just as investors of yesteryear also used to understand the dividend as the stock’s “utility”, crypto is currently in the same phase of speedrunning financial history.
Salutary will bring us out of it
Deeper analysis on the history and psychology of dividends and intrinsic worth can be found here on the Salutary website.
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I am not dismissing DCF valuation concepts. The cashflows do indeed matter and they are being estimated as far out into the future as we can and being discounted back to today. What I’m digging at is deeper: what is the true connective tissue that binds the stock to those cash flows at all? What makes that business asset concretely connected to the underlying business?
Genesis doesn't determine destiny. As financial instruments evolve over centuries, our mental models should evolve alongside them, yet academic dogma clings to outdated perceptions. Stocks have changed dramatically since 1602, yet the official answer for what they are remains the same.
In almost every substantive way, governance tokens and tech stocks are the same…. except one…
If you’re a private equity firm or Carl Icahn there is a difference to you between a governance token and a tech stock…
If you acquire enough of the stock, you can take over the company.
The credible threat of acquisition is what moves the needle for a stock that never pays you a penny and only lets you vote. Its value is basically memetic in all ways but one. The rubber hits the road when a certain threshold of stock grants you legal control of the productive assets.
This is the demonstrable value-accrual mechanism when dividends and book value have been all but discarded. Strip away theoretical overlays, and this is what remains: the ability to forcibly acquire the company’s operations fuses the stock to the business. Markets have done away with tangible assets and distributions of cashflows and yet the equity remains coveted? This is why.
Equity that grants control at a certain threshold is both a necessary and sufficient condition for the stock to collectively track the revenues, margins, and cashflows of the underlying company.
Your equity is not equity… unless you own enough of it.
This is what Salutary understands, and will credibly enforce.
This seems like an intense theory that contravenes textbooks and financial theory. Let’s assess the pragmatics.
Is Nvidia worth $3.5 trillion because investors expect the sum of all cashflows discounted back to today to be paid out to them? Because the stock exerts no literal “claim” justifying that valuation. Go email a company’s investor relations and request “one cashflow please”. Try to redeem your stock for company assets. There is no “right” rooted in praxis, it’s all theory. Stocks have evolved substantially over hundreds of years, and nobody has updated their priors.
Anyone reading this whitepaper will be long dead before a $3.5T market cap gets paid out to shareholders, if it ever will. The current orthodoxy of what stocks are is what’s deeply theoretical, not Salutary’s. Conversely, my observations are rooted in what the stock does today, in real life, and the claims it can authoritatively exert; this is how a practitioner thinks, not a theorist.
Management does not have to pay you a dividend. They don’t have to give you anything with your “equity”. Dividends and buybacks are sweeteners done to attract investment when growth is fading. Is this why Amazon is worth over $2T? Dividend hopes?
It's the academic explanation of what stock value accrual is that’s so abstract it’s disorienting. Salutary understands these assets in an elegantly simple way: means to control company resources.
Some of you reading may disagree with me. That’s fine. Thoughtful people can have honest differences of opinion. This is something that needs to be tested; you won’t be able to disprove it with official textbook answers or abstractions, and I won’t be able to prove it with logic and history lessons. It needs to be taken to market and put in the crucible. Let’s go into The Arena. That’s how we’ll know.
This is all you need to agree with:
If one asset allows you to acquire another asset, will the acquiring asset’s price track the acquiree? When is this not the case? If it doesn’t, that’s an arbitrage opportunity.
If there is $1 on the ground selling for 70 cents, will PE-type firms step in and scoop it up? If you think arbitrage opportunities get competed away, then I believe you think Salutary will work. To support Salutary you don’t have to align with me on equities, but only agree that dollar bills don’t trade for 70 cents for very long. PE and activist investors basically exist to bridge valuation disconnects like this.
Institutional-grade mechanisms for onchain assets will yield institutional-style activity. Salutary at scale should lead to Barbarians at the Gate 2.0., private equity for crypto, and more hedge funds with hardware wallets.
DeFi has a distinct lack of adults in the room because institutional capital cannot own our coins; these guys require enforceable rights for anything to enter their portfolio. Nth-order effects of the Salutary concept proliferating will usher in activist investors who only own assets with enforceable teeth. Salutary appeals to sophisticated managers who understand the laws of finance have not been undone because our databases are decentralized.
An asset must do something to be worth something, that worth is measured in its metaphorical “weight”, and everything eventually gets put on the valuation scale. Salutary allows your token to gain mass. Build for Weight.
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At a predefined percentage of token ownership, Salutary enforces and oversees the transfer of the issuing company’s treasury, bank accounts, technical infrastructure, IP, and any other onchain and offchain resources. We enable M&A through token accumulation.
Salutary aligns founder and tokenholder incentives for fundamentals by allowing the token to forcibly control the business.
The business is valuable because it produces cashflows, the token is valuable because it controls the business. The value of a token is what it does, Salutary tokens… do things.
If fundamentals are what get rewarded, fundamentals are what you build for; this is how Salutary changes behaviors by creating healthy (salutary!) incentives. Token roadmap distractions… gone. Paying out your revenue? Please don’t, you should be reinvesting in growth, not acting like a tobacco company.
While it’s still both officially and technically not equity, with the means to effect enforceable control, the company’s intrinsic value becomes relevant to tokenholders.
How Will Salutary Scale?
Only a handful of partners adopting our standard will elucidate the validity and efficacy of enforceable control. We won’t need to share esoteric financial essays to scale adoption, earnings reports and charts can tell the story.
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This Does Not Turn the Token into Equity
NOTE: Salutary tokens are “change of control” instruments that facilitate the transfer of the company under certain ownership percentages. They are technically a governance vehicle; a deeply serious, legally enforceable one.
There are no promises of profit, cashflow claims, price performance, or dividends that accompany them. Neither Salutary nor its partners guarantee any correlation between token price and business performance. Pricing is determined by market forces and may not reflect business intrinsic value.
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“Why would founders want Salutary for their token?”
From experience over many calls with investors and partners, we’ve found much confusion is addressed by simply swapping the word “token” for “stock” and then asking the same question.
What are the motivations for issuing stock? Why provide an accountable asset that’s an extension of the business? What is the rationale for founders to raise capital and in exchange issue an asset tied to the company they own?
The answer is obvious, and it’s no different for Salutary.
Investable assets require accountability; accountability requires enforceability. Salutary imbues accountability through enforceable control.
We turn your token into a completely different asset, one that has the mechanical ability to reflect the success of your business. You will adopt us because the greatest wealth creator in human history has been building a valuable company and issuing an accountable instrument that controls it, and this is what you aspire to.
With Salutary, you can keep ALL your revenue and reinvest it in growth (what you should be doing). Salutary saves partners substantial money by not having to pay a yield to justify their token’s existence.
Right now, crypto companies have two products: the business and the token.
The token is a separate product because it demands separate focus, time, and most importantly resources be poured into it to justify its existence. It distracts from your business, rather than enhances it.
With Salutary, you only have one product: the business and a token that’s an extension of it.
If you want fundamentals-aligned incentives and value capture, you will need a mechanism that facilitates it; that is what Salutary embeds. We transform coins from speculative trading beans into M&A instruments that can express operating success. If you’re curious how we legally accomplish this, please continue reading.
Salutary is a major positive for tokenholders. We enshrine concrete control abilities, a coin that formerly had no enforceable rights now does.
The token’s “utility” needs no byzantine cartwheeling tokenomics.
The team now has clear incentives to not dump. Sell too much of your token and you may get acquired.
“Show me the incentives and I’ll show you the outcome”: tokenholders will prioritize key business metrics because that produces the best outcome. No more financialized games. Fundamentals > Pumpamentals
Interests are in harmony between tokenholder and business on what matters: creating value. A mutual emphasis on what’s healthy (salutary!) for success.
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Salutary works for any asset that has an owner. All assets and businesses, from intellectual property to online stores to car dealerships, can benefit from the Salutary model and monetize themselves in a unique way previously only available to large companies. This is an instance where crypto infrastructure can sincerely help regular, working people.
Small and medium-size business owners: Salutary is not only for crypto companies, we want to hear from you! Reach out here.
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A Salutary acquisition will be transparent, legal, and enforceable.
Onchain ownership is public. If you sell or mint too many tokens, you can easily see what that could do for someone seeking control.
We can be a la carte in respect to percentage of the token required for acquisition. The control threshold is up to the owner, 51% isn't a magic number.
It’s the potential of credible takeover that keeps the token tethered to the business. Salutary inspires market confidence and credibility as a third-party enforcer of M&A processes; we act as connective legal tissue between company and token.
Important: most companies don’t get acquired and their stock is still a derivative of the business. The stock doesn’t have to exercise a takeover to be valuable, but it must have the ability to. So long as it controls the business, it trades as an expression of that business.
Nuclear weapons can elicit behaviors without ever being used, but participants must believe they will detonate if needed. It’s the credibility of expected action and their existence that creates the desired behavior. You rarely need to use them, but they must work when called upon. The market must trust that if a valid acquisition event occurs, it will happen.
M&A must be facilitated via a third party and withstand legal scrutiny if challenged. Companies cannot be expected to honor major events they oppose, and we must assume all acquisitions are potentially hostile in nature. The enforcement and oversight need to be independent to be credibly imposed. These are not acquisition suggestions, they are legal acquisition events.
Value through accountability; accountability through enforcement.
As the originator of this M&A token logic, there is no one better suited to bring this to market than Salutary.
All Salutary M&A events are governed by Singapore law and enforceable globally through SIAC arbitration and the New York Convention. We use the same framework as corporations to enforce cross-border agreements. Without judicial enforceability, it's merely an acquisition suggestion.
Accountability means enforceability, and enforcement means you have to do it. “Have to do it” is not an onchain construct, it is a physical one. Related documents: Salutary’s Global Enforcement Framework and If It Happened Onchain, Did It Happen In Real Life? (the game theory of Salutary).
A note on compliance: businesses partner with Salutary because they want to partake in this value-creating framework. The voluntary opt-in nature of Salutary acts as self-selection for clients that should embrace our process, as they are explicitly endorsing it when partnering. We are not forcing this on them, they are welcoming it.
“Massive changes never come from inside the system, and at the moment when the establishment says changes are impossible is precisely when something is brewing on the outside.”
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Onchain token vote must occur for a takeover/merger to be reviewed. If legally compliant it will be certified and processed by Salutary.
Salutary cannot unilaterally force transfer without a valid, non-fraudulent token vote. We must follow the law, because deals this size must be legally compliant.
Example: a flashloan hack that results in illegitimate token accumulation and takeover vote would not proceed. Our events are intended to pass judicial scrutiny and withstand legal challenge.
You have no hack/technical risk with Salutary, because we’ll be overseeing and approving all M&A actions. It is not an automated process.
If a fund legally accumulates enough of your token and effects an M&A vote consistent with Salutary rules, then it will be certified. Documents explaining this process are linked at the end.
If there is any foul play, Salutary will reject the acquisition. No transfer of the company will occur if any dubious actions are taken.
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What happens when PE acquires a company? Same answer. There’s new management in town. Maybe everyone quits. Maybe they totally change how things operate. It’s up to them, it’s their company now. We make sure it all gets transferred over compliantly.
If leadership changed, they will likely implement changes. It’s their prerogative. We do not tell partners how to run their business.
I’ve seen early-stage startups take investor money and shortly after totally pivot what the business was initially predicated on. Management caprice is not a new risk, with or without M&A.
Salutary will make for some spicy marketing and excitement on social media when called to action. Visibility is the essence of marketing and this all should be rather salient, invigorating stuff for participants in the ol’ capital markets.
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Salutary is effecting a change in stewardship, not ownership. Securities facilitate ownership changes and Salutary is not transferring ownership, as a legal matter. This process is elaborated on in documents at the end of the whitepaper.
Salutary follows the letter of the law as it pertains to international rules surrounding contracts and asset transfers. We deploy well-known legal structures and cross-border enforcement treaties to accomplish our M&A events. We adhere to the same enforcement mechanisms as any cross-border corporate transaction.
Any risks or shortcomings here are not Salutary specific, they are part of the nature of global enforcement. There is nothing novel in respect to how Salutary upholds its contracts.
We do not issue acquisition suggestions, these are legally binding acquisition events. We take enforcement extremely seriously. Tokens won’t express fundamentals if they provide “meh, only if I feel like it” M&A transactions.
We do not think crypto’s path towards greater adoption comes from getting your grandma onchain, we think it comes from getting Thoma Bravo onchain; we implant enforceable rights that turn your token into an institutional-grade asset they could own.
An institutionally legible asset has the potential to attract institutional-tier capital… PE firms aren’t onchain because they don’t know how to use Metamask; it’s because the tokens are not credible instruments. We are changing that.
There is greater risk of securities designation if you pay a dividend (“fee switch”) than partnering with Salutary. There is no reward without risk; the risk must be contextualized. Compared to what? Salutary is the cleanest, most-direct method to capture and create value while maintaining compliance.
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The Deloitte of DeFi
Confidence in company fundamentals requires transparency. This means finances must be presented in a standardized, verifiable way. This is an obvious statement in the business world, but a novel one for DeFi. In crypto, when we hear the word “audit” we only think “code”; an audit also applies to financials. A business cannot enforce its own M&A and it cannot audit its own balance sheet. We are the Deloitte of DeFi.
Salutary’s mission is to give companies the same transparency and credibility that top-tier public companies enjoy, without burying you in red tape or unnecessary requirements. Our in-house financial-reporting framework and auditing follow core GAAP principles (accounting guidelines in the US), adapted for token-based businesses. Learn more here: Salutary Financial Reporting Framework.
A company doesn’t hire a Big 4 auditor because it wants the audit, it hires one because it instills public confidence in the company’s financials and signals that the auditor is willing to vouch for them with its reputation. It inspires trust and mandates integrity. Salutary provides the same signal to the market when you partner with us. Future services we provide will leverage our pedigree in this way.
"The world is changed by your example, not your opinion."
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NOTE: financial transparency supports informed token ownership decisions; it does not guarantee token price correlation. The market determines this.
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Our payment is in our partners’ tokens. We hold them in our treasury.
Incentives are aligned through this structure. If we win, you win. If you win, we win.
We fundamentally transform the token’s asset class; same ticker, entirely different instrument. This is a substantial service.
We also provide professional financial auditing (docs on this at the end).
The amount of token Salutary receives will vary both by the company’s maturity and as Salutary gains credibility.
Salutary does not intend to sell your token to monetize or generate cashflows. We hold it in our treasury while partnered.
Discussions with partners suggest this allocation will be around 95 – 220 basis points of the token’s fully diluted supply. We are open to dialogue on this.
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We issue the Salutary token against our treasury, which holds our partners’ tokens.
Our token is tantamount to an index of all our partners’ tokens. A Salutary index.
The Salutary token may be a Reg D offering. This is still under review.
It is not a change of control vehicle. All the tokens in our treasury are Salutary partner tokens, and our token is a derivative of this.
Similar to how ETFs maintain their peg, Salutary may have a qualified participant setup that allows redemptions so our token is consistent with our treasury’s NAV.
Salutary’s token will be deployed in DeFi lending strategies to fund operations. No revenues are distributed to tokenholders.
The bigger our treasury, the more yield we generate, the more profitable we become.
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Salutary should appeal to serious, sincere, long-term-minded owners and those seeking to create legitimate companies, because we only benefit people who fit this description.
Our valence is one of putting out a high-integrity light and attracting the best moths. Partnering with Salutary is a strong signal you have a telescopic, value-minded approach to your business. It is a mark of prestige, indicator of intent, and display of transparency that you’ve opted into our framework. It shows you are being the change you want to see in the world, and you want an asset that embodies that.
If this describes you, we'd love to work with you. It doesn't matter if you're a brand-new startup, multi-location enterprise, small business, DeFi bluechip, etc.. Salutary can elegantly overlay onto any new or preexisting business and/or asset. Contact us to discuss by clicking here.
With Salutary, everyone wins by behaving honestly and creating the most value. Healthy incentives = healthy behaviors.
Healthy. Sustainable. Salutary. Build for Weight.
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RISK DISCLOSURES & DISCLAIMERS
Salutary tokens are "change-of-control" governance instruments that may, at predefined thresholds, facilitate an enforceable transfer of business assets. They do not confer any rights to profit participation, dividends, revenue shares, or any guarantee of market valuations. Neither Salutary nor its partners makes any representation that token price will correlate with business performance. Market pricing is determined by independent actors and may not reflect intrinsic value.
Enforcement of acquisition events remains subject to applicable law, commercial feasibility, and jurisdictional constraints. Salutary reserves sole discretion in selecting enforcement methodology based on cost-effectiveness and legal practicability. No guarantee of successful enforcement exists in all jurisdictions. If enforcement actions prove unlawful, expose the company or its principals to disproportionate risk, or become economically impracticable, Salutary reserves sole discretion to suspend, modify, or decline proceedings.
All disputes must be resolved by individual SIAC arbitration seated in Singapore; class or representative actions are waived. All disputes arising under this Framework are subject to individual arbitration under SIAC Rules in Singapore. Class, collective, or representative actions are expressly waived.
This information is for educational purposes and is not an offer of securities nor is it legal or tax advice. Tokenholders should consult their own advisors regarding the implications of any acquisition event.
Any protections described herein are contractual governance mechanisms, not guarantees of economic outcome. They are designed to create procedural fairness and transparent processes, not to ensure any particular market result or token valuation.
Salutary documentation may contain forward-looking statements regarding potential acquisition scenarios and enforcement mechanisms. Actual results may differ materially due to factors beyond Salutary's control.
This document is proprietary to Salutary Pte. Ltd. and subject to the terms of the Master Services & Enforcement Agreement.
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For the financial philosophy and game theory behind Salutary, visit the Philosophical and Analytical Origins of Salutary page on our website.
Salutary documentation found here.