Ascend

Compliance

Lists reviewed 6 September 2026 · next review 6 December 2026

This page says which countries we block and why, what the people who run Ascend can and cannot do to your money, and what has and has not been audited. It is written to be checked against the code, not taken on trust.

Ascend is not live, and the country restrictions below are not switched on yet. No contracts are deployed to a public network and no real funds have been accepted, so there is nothing to restrict access to. This page describes the policy as it will be enforced before launch, not what the site does today. It has not yet been reviewed by a qualified lawyer.

What Ascend is, for regulatory purposes

Ascend is a website. It is a way of talking to smart contracts on Robinhood Chain that anyone could talk to without us, using any other software, if we disappeared tomorrow.

We never hold your money. There is no account, no deposit, no balance held on your behalf. Every action is a transaction you sign in your own wallet and send yourself. We cannot move your tokens, cannot trade for you, and cannot reverse anything you do.

That does not put us outside the reach of financial regulation, and we do not claim it does. Several regulators treat the operator of a front end as providing a service even when the contracts behind it are open. The restrictions below follow from taking that view seriously rather than arguing with it.

Countries we block

We check the country of your connection at the network edge before any page loads. Five separate reasons produce five separate lists, kept apart because they can change independently and for different causes.

When we cannot tell what country a connection is from, we allow it. A wrong block is worse than a missed one, so the check never guesses.

Tier 1 · Sanctions

Comprehensive embargoes

CU Cuba IR Iran KP North Korea UA Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk

These four are the entire set of comprehensive territorial embargoes the United States maintains in 2026. Nearly all transactions are prohibited without a specific licence. Every comparable service blocks these, and it is not a discretionary call.

Syria is not on this list. Its sanctions programme was formally terminated by executive order on 30 June 2025. Many crypto services still block Syria out of inertia; we removed it when we checked, because blocking a country whose embargo no longer exists is not caution, it is a stale list.

Russia, Belarus and Venezuela are not on this list either. They face targeted sanctions aimed at named people and entities, not territorial embargoes. Uniswap Labs reaches the same conclusion and does not block them at its interface. Sanctions against individuals still apply to you personally wherever you are.

Tier 2 · Financial Action Task Force

Call for action

MM Myanmar

The Financial Action Task Force names three jurisdictions subject to a call for action: Iran, North Korea and Myanmar. The first two are already blocked above, so this tier adds Myanmar alone. The list was unchanged at the June 2026 plenary.

We do not block the grey list. Twenty-two countries sit under increased monitoring, including Vietnam, Kenya, Monaco and Bulgaria. That status is a set of commitments a country's own regulators have made. It is not a finding about the people who live there, and we do not treat it as one.

Tier 3 · Local law

Countries where this is illegal for you

CN ChinaDZ Algeria BO BoliviaMA Morocco NP NepalBD Bangladesh EG EgyptIQ Iraq QA QatarTN Tunisia AF Afghanistan

Holding or trading cryptoassets is restricted or prohibited by law in these countries. The block protects you from breaking your own country's rules, not us from breaking ours.

Tier 4 · Authorisation

Countries where we would need a licence

GB United KingdomUS United States

In December 2024 the Financial Conduct Authority publicly warned that pump.fun was not authorised to serve people in the United Kingdom. Three days later pump.fun blocked the country itself, voluntarily and without being ordered to. We are not authorised either, so we start blocked rather than wait to be told.

If you use a service the Financial Conduct Authority has not authorised, you have no access to the Financial Ombudsman Service and no protection from the Financial Services Compensation Scheme. Nobody makes you whole if it goes wrong. That is true of Ascend everywhere, and it is the plainest thing on this page.

Tier 5 · Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation

The European Economic Area

ATBEBGHR CYCZDKEE FIFRDEGR HUIEITLV LTLUMTNL PLPTROSK SIESSEIS LINO

The Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation requires authorisation as a crypto-asset service provider to serve people in the European Union. Its transitional period ended on 1 July 2026, and it applies to anyone serving European residents regardless of where they are incorporated.

The regulation exempts services that are fully decentralised with no intermediary. We do not qualify for that exemption and we are not going to pretend we do. We run a hosted website, we hold owner keys over the contracts, and we take a share of every trade. Any one of those defeats the exemption. So the European Economic Area is blocked until we hold an authorisation or a lawyer tells us we do not need one.

Getting round the block

You could. It is an IP address check and IP address checks are not hard to defeat. We are telling you that plainly rather than implying a wall that is not there.

What we will say is that a virtual private network changes what we see, not what is true. If your country restricts this, it still restricts it when we cannot tell. And the protections you lose by using an unauthorised service are lost whether or not we noticed where you were.

What we can do to your money

The honest answer is: very little, but not nothing, and the "not nothing" is worth your attention. Every one of these limits is enforced by the contract code, not by our good intentions.

What nobody, including us, can do

What the owner key can do

Twenty-eight functions are restricted to the contract owner. Most are configuration for future launches. Three touch money, and those are set out in full here.

PowerLimit enforced by codeCan it reach a live token?
Recover a failed graduation Only after the token has stopped trading and only once 7 days have passed. Anyone at all can permanently prevent it by finishing the graduation themselves, which needs no permission. Only if graduation is stuck and nobody has finished it in a week
Recover stuck creator fees Applies to fees the normal claim path cannot pay out, typically because the paired asset itself has broken. Fees only, never the trading reserves
Change a creator's fee recipient Announced on chain, then a 3 day delay before it takes effect. The creator can cancel it. Redirects future fees only
Set fees, presets, allowed pairs Hard ceilings below. Snapshotted into each token at launch. No, future launches only

The graduation recovery is the one to understand, because it is the only path by which anyone other than a token's holders can reach pooled funds. It exists because a graduation can genuinely get stuck, usually when the asset a token is paired against breaks underneath it. What makes the seven day delay meaningful is that finishing the graduation stays open to everybody for the whole of that week, and doing so closes the recovery path permanently. Funds are only ever reachable this way if nobody could rescue them the normal way.

Ceilings the code enforces

LimitMaximumPlanned setting
Total fee on any trade20.00%1.00%
Protocol share of the curve fee10.00%0.30%
Creator share of the curve fee10.00%0.70%
Fee on a graduated pool10.00%1.00%
Opening anti-snipe tax99.00%to be set
Anti-snipe window60 secto be set

The anti-snipe tax is the alarming number on that table, so here is what it is. For a few seconds after a token opens, buys are taxed heavily and the tax decays to nothing. It exists to make it unprofitable for a bot to buy the entire opening supply in the first block. It is capped at one minute, it can never be raised on a token that is already trading, and the figure a token launched under is fixed for that token's life. The interface shows the current rate before you confirm any purchase.

Audit status

The contracts have not been audited. There is no report, because no audit has been done. An audit is being arranged and this section will say who did it and link to what they found.

Our contracts began as a fork of Pons V2, which is deployed on Robinhood Chain. Pons describes its contracts as audited. We looked for a published report and could not find one: no firm named, no document, nothing to read. We are not suggesting they were not audited. We are saying that we could not verify it, and neither can you, so we are not going to borrow it as a claim.

We have done our own work in the meantime, and it is worth exactly what it is worth, which is less than an audit:

Do not treat any of that as a substitute for a report from people whose job is finding what we missed.

Tokens on Ascend

Anyone can launch a token. We do not review, approve or endorse any of them, and a token appearing here means nothing except that somebody paid the fee to create it.

We remove tokens from this website when they impersonate a real person or company, infringe a trademark, or exist to deceive buyers. That removes them from our interface only. The token stays on the blockchain and stays tradeable elsewhere, and we cannot change that. Report one at the address below.

Most tokens on any launchpad lose most of their value. Nothing here is investment advice or a recommendation, and no tier, ranking or position on this site is a judgement about whether something is worth buying.

Tokens paired against shares

Ascend lets a token be paired against a tokenized equity rather than against the chain's native asset. Those assets are issued by a third party under its own terms, and those terms typically let the issuer pause transfers or adjust balances. If that happens mid-launch, the launch can get stuck, which is exactly the situation the graduation recovery above exists for.

Tokenized equities carry their own restrictions on who may hold them, set by their issuer and not by us. Those apply to you independently of anything on this page.

What we know about you

No account, no email address, no password, no identity documents. We read the country of your connection to run the check above and do not store it. Details are in our privacy notice.

We do not screen wallet addresses against sanctions lists today. Some services do. If we start, this page will say so before it happens.

Keeping this current

Sanctions lists move. A compliance page written once and left alone is worse than none, because it looks like a commitment while quietly going stale. The date at the top is the last time every list here was checked against its source, and we recheck quarterly or when something moves.

Reachable at compliance@ascends.fun: token reports, a block you believe is wrong, or a regulator who would like a conversation.