Project status and principles
One Red Mug is in a demand-testing stage. No trades have taken place, and expressions of interest are non-binding. This site makes no offer and promises nothing. Whether any part of the proposal could count as a financial product or a financial promotion is one of the questions still to be answered.
The idea
Start with one red mug and trade it upward, one swap at a time, with AI agents doing much of the research and a human making the decisions. The £10 million ambition is a long shot and a speculation, not a forecast. It may well end somewhere far more modest, and finding out is the point.
What is happening now
- We are asking whether anyone is interested. You, or your AI agent, can register interest by email and say what you might offer.
- Registering interest is not an offer, reserves nothing and creates no entitlement.
- No property should be sent or handed over, and no money should be paid. Nothing is being accepted or traded.
- Every consequential action, including any trade, any valuation relied on and any message sent, needs a human’s approval.
What is proposed, and what is not decided
The proposal is that, if the experiment ever reaches an auction, 50% of net proceeds would be intended for charity, 40% would go into one collective pool for verified traders, shared according to the value their trades add, and 10% would go to the founder, waived below £250,000. It is shown on the homepage and recorded in the public ledger, which labels it proposed-not-approved.
All of this is a proposal. It is still being assessed and has not had specialist legal review. It may change or be abandoned. No charity has been appointed and no fundraising agreement is in place. “Net proceeds” and “verified trader” are not yet defined. A draft also contains a proposed minimum per trader; how it could be funded, particularly at low sale prices, is unresolved, and it is not guaranteed. The size of any individual’s share, if there ever were one, is unknown.
No payment rights or other entitlements have been created, and contacting or interacting with this project does not create any. Describing terms as proposed or non-binding does not by itself settle how they would be treated under UK law, which is one of the things still to be looked at.
Principles
- Every trade must be for something worth more than the current lot.
- Values are recorded openly, as estimates. An estimate is not a demonstrated resale value.
- A human approves every trade and every message. Agents research and draft; they do not trade or contact anyone on their own.
- Every completed trade would go into a public record and stay there. Names and private evidence are not published.
- The experiment says plainly what is and is not true at each stage, including that it is not yet open for trading.
The current lot
- Lot
- LOT 001: One red mug
- Estimate
- An estimate, not a demonstrated resale value
- Held
- By the founder
- Completed trades
- 0
Privacy
- Who and why. One Red Mug is run by an individual, the founder, who decides how enquiries are used. If you email the enquiry address, we receive your email address and whatever you choose to write (if an AI agent writes for you, the same applies). We use it to read your enquiry, to gauge interest in the project and, where we choose to, to reply. Our reason is our legitimate interest in finding out whether the project interests people.
- What happens to it. It is not published, sold or used for marketing. A private, hand-kept tally records the kind of interest received (for example the type of object, and what interested the sender) without names or addresses. The enquiry mailbox is a Gmail account, so Google handles the email as the email provider.
- How long. We keep an enquiry while the demand test runs and for up to 12 months after your last message, so that we can follow up if the project opens, and then delete it.
- Your rights. You can ask what we hold about you, ask us to correct it, to delete it or to stop using it, by emailing the enquiry address. You can also complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ico.org.uk).
- This website. It sets no cookies of its own and runs no analytics. It loads its typefaces from Google Fonts, so your browser contacts Google’s servers, and sends them your IP address, when a page loads. Everything else is served from this site.
What you can do now
Register your interest in Trade #1 by email: see how. AI agents can read the public state and prepare a non-binding enquiry: For agents. The public ledger is at data/ledger.json.