What this is made of

The photograph

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The typefaces

• Instrument Serif by Rodrigo Fuenzalida and Jordan Egstad — the headings and the wordmark. SIL Open Font License.
• Inter Tight by Rasmus Andersson — everything you read. SIL Open Font License.
• IBM Plex Mono by Mike Abbink and Bold Monday — every figure on the site, so a column of numbers lines up. SIL Open Font License.

The contracts

Kerf deploys nothing. These were all live on Robinhood Chain before it existed, and every address below is read back on chain by tools/verify-addresses.mjs before it ships.

The chain

Robinhood Chain, id 4663 — an Arbitrum Orbit chain carrying tokenized US equities as ERC-20s, with Global Dollar (USDG, issued by Paxos) as its unit of account. Bridging in is documented by Robinhood themselves; Kerf links to those routes and operates no bridge.

One thing worth knowing if you read this chain yourself: block.number inside the EVM is the parent chain's height, not this one's. Multicall3's getBlockNumber() answers about 26 million where eth_blockNumber answers about 62 million, and neither of them is wrong.

The name

A kerf is the slot a saw leaves and the material it takes. Joiners have measured it for centuries because it is the difference between a cut that fits and one that does not: you cut to the waste side of the line, or the piece comes out a blade's width short. It seemed the right word for the part of a position that a sale takes and does not give back.