Selling Back

Maya holds eTSLA, fully backed and tracking Tesla's price - now let's close her loop and turn it back into USDC.

Selling is the mirror image of buying. When Maya bought, she paid USDC and the protocol minted fresh eTSLA into her wallet. To sell, she hands the eTSLA back and the protocol redeems it - burning the token and paying her USDC. Same machinery, run in reverse.

The instant path: redeem by RFQ

The fast way out is the same one Maya used to get in. She asks the Market Maker for a price, and it sends back a firm quote - a sell price it commits to for a few seconds. This is the RFQ flow we walked through when she bought, just with the direction flipped.

   Maya                         Market Maker            OwnMarket
    │  "what will you pay         │                          │
    │   for 10 eTSLA?"  ─────────▶│                          │
    │                            (prices off the Oracle      │
    │   ◀──── firm sell quote ────  mid, signs it, 15s TTL)   │
    │                                                         │
    │  submit signed quote ──────────────────────────────────▶│
    │                                              burns 10 eTSLA,
    │                                              maker pays USDC
    │   ◀──────────── USDC lands, eTSLA gone ──────────────────│

Maya submits the signed quote, and in that single transaction the protocol checks the maker's signature, burns her 10 eTSLA, and moves the agreed USDC from the maker straight to her wallet. No waiting, no order to track - the receipt of the transaction is her confirmation. The Market Maker, now holding the position Maya let go of, unwinds its hedge on the outside venue, exactly as Chapter 6 described.

That's the everyday case, and it's what almost every seller uses.

The patient path: a resting redeem order

Sometimes Maya doesn't want today's price. Maybe she'd only sell if Tesla climbs back to a level she likes. For that, she can place a resting redeem order - a standing instruction that says "sell my eTSLA, but only at this price or better."

When she places it, the protocol takes her eTSLA into escrow - held safely by the contract, not spent - and the order sits open with a built-in expiry. A maker can come along and fill it (all at once or in pieces) whenever it can offer a price that meets her floor. If it never does, the order simply expires and her eTSLA comes back. She can also cancel it herself at any time and get her tokens back immediately.

Resting orders are the exception, not the rule. Most people take the instant RFQ price. But the option matters, because it leads to the real reassurance in this chapter.

The safety net: you can't be trapped

Here's the worry a careful reader should have: what if I place a redeem order, my price is reached, and the Market Maker just... doesn't fill it? A maker that goes dark shouldn't be able to lock up your tokens.

Own's answer is a recourse path called force-execute. If a resting redeem order has waited past a protocol-wide claim threshold (six hours by default) and still hasn't been filled, Maya can settle it herself - no maker required.

Force-execute doesn't trust a maker's quote, because there's no maker involved. Instead it uses signed prices from the Oracle, verified right there in the transaction. Two prices do two jobs. One is the asset's own price - eTSLA's - which only has to prove that at some point after Maya placed her order, Tesla actually reached the floor she asked for. (It doesn't need to be the latest tick - the whole point is that this path exists precisely when the system's normal price-keeping may have gone quiet.) The other is the price of the collateral backing the vault, and that one must be current, because real collateral is about to leave the building. If both check out, the protocol pays Maya directly out of a collateral vault - the very same backing we met last chapter - and burns her escrowed eTSLA. She walks away with her money even if the dealer never picked up the phone.

A few honest details. Force-execute is a backstop for redeems only - it's the seller who could otherwise be stuck, so it's the seller who gets the escape hatch. It pulls collateral straight from a named vault, and it pays Maya at her order's limit price - the floor she set - converted into collateral at that current collateral valuation. And it's deliberately gated: the wait must have elapsed, the proven price must clear her floor, and the asset must not be paused or frozen. Within those rules, no honest seller is ever trapped.

A note for LPs: exits take a beat

One more closing-the-loop detail, this time for the Liquidity Providers who supply the collateral. Last chapter we noted that LPs can't yank their money out on a whim - exits go through a request-and-wait queue. Here's how that queue actually works. When an LP wants to pull money out of the collateral vault, the exit doesn't settle the instant they ask. They file a withdrawal request, wait out a short period, and then anyone can finalize it - at which point their shares are burned and collateral is paid out.

This asynchronous withdrawal - async meaning the request and the payout happen as two separate steps, not in one click - is a feature, not friction. It lets the vault check that money leaving doesn't tip the system past the utilization cap we met last chapter while trades are still live against that collateral. (One nuance: if a vault is ever wound down in an emergency, that wait is dropped and its LPs can exit immediately - the safety logic is there to protect a healthy pool, not to trap people in a failing one.)

What just happened

• Selling is minting in reverse: Maya hands back eTSLA, the protocol burns it and pays USDC.
• The everyday path is RFQ - a firm quote from the Market Maker, submitted onchain, settled instantly in one transaction.
• A resting redeem order lets her wait for a target price; her eTSLA sits in escrow and she can cancel anytime.
• If a maker never fills a reached redeem order, force-execute lets her settle herself after the claim threshold, using signed Oracle prices and the collateral vault - so she's never trapped.
• LP withdrawals settle asynchronously (request, brief wait, finalize) so exits respect the system's safety limits.