📖Whitepaper

A story about taming the ve(3,3) hydra on Hyperliquid

Prologue — why we still believe

I watched the first Solidly pools hatch on Fantom. For one brilliant week it felt like alchemy: fees were paid in real dollars, emissions were paid in future hope, and lockers became tiny printing presses. Week two the charts bent. Week six they snapped: partners stopped bribing, votes fled to ghost gauges, SOLID bled to zero, and a once-luminous idea spiralled into the textbook death spiral.

The idea, however, never died. Velodrome, Aerodrome, Thena, Retro, Ramses—each iteration stitched a new safety net onto the ve(3,3) balloon. Some slowed the spiral, one or two climbed out of it, none broke the curse completely.

Hybra is the name we give to our next attempt. It lives on Hyperliquid— a chain that already clears nine-figure volume daily and rewards its traders with HYPE, not platitudes. If we get the flywheel right here, the hydra may finally breathe clean air.

1 We dissect the corpse before we race the horse

1.1 The three knives that killed past ve(3,3) DEXes

Front-loaded inflation – 100 % of supply promised up front → token dumps faster than it can be locked.
Free ride for partners – protocols receive veNFT, bribe once for show, then harvest fees forever.
Thin or fragmented liquidity – users pay more slippage than on Uniswap or the native CEX, so volume never roots itself.

Miss any one knife, you wobble; miss all three, you die. We decide to dull every blade.

2 The pact we strike with the hydra

Rule 1 Cold-start must bang, not bleed. We copy no one’s playbook; we hybridise them.

Rule 2 Every dollar of emission must be backed by at least a cent of external income. Partner bribes and Foundation bribes are not garnish, they are line-items in the P&L.

Rule 3 Traders come first. If Robinhood feels smoother than your DEX, you deserve zero fees. So we graft Uniswap v3 style ranges on day one, hook in v4 intents the day they ship, and pour every marketing dollar into showing traders a visibly better price.

3 How the machine works

3.1 Keeping the heads alive – minimum-bribe rule

Every epoch (7 days) a partner must bribe its gauge at least:

minBribe = α · avgTVL_epoch · baseFee
where
    α  = 0.75 ‰   // DAO-tunable, start at 0.00075
    baseFee = 0.04 %            // taker fee schedule

If the partner under-bribes, the contract melts part of its veNFT and recycles it into the community pool.

Pseudocode (Solidity-pseudo)

solidity 
function settleEpoch(address partner) external {
    uint tvl = oracle.tvlOf(partner);
    uint min = alpha * tvl * baseFee;       // 18-dec fixed
    uint paid = bribeVault.claimed(partner, epoch);

    if (paid < min) {
        uint deficit = min - paid;
        uint ratio = deficit * 1e18 / min;  // 0-1e18
        uint burn = ratio * veBalance[partner] / 2; // soft-clawback
        veBalance[partner] -= burn;
        veBalance[DAO]     += burn;
        emit Clawback(partner, burn);
    }
}

Interpretation

Half of the deficit ratio is burned each epoch; partners can correct course next week.
Partners may recycle() up to 40 % of the bribe after fees settle, keeping net APR positive for them while lockers still receive the cash-flow.

Result – grabbing a top-TVL airdrop commits you to a recurring marketing budget. The veNFT becomes a kind of perpetual-license that rents itself.

4 Traders will actually like this place

milestone

feature

why they care

Launch

Uni v3 ranges, auto-rebalancer, gas-abstracted swaps

3–6× fee density vs v2 AMMs; one-click LP.

+60 days

Uni v4 hooks—limit orders, TWAP oracle

CEX-grade tooling without CEX risk.

+120 days

Strategy vaults (stable ranges, gamma farming)

LP becomes deposit-and-chill

+180 days

Smart router & off-chain intent relayer

15 % better fill on average; no failed Tx rage.

How Hybra will embed an intent layer—and why it matters

What we add Hybra lets traders sign a simple intent (“swap 1 ETH → USDC at ≥ $3 250, expire in 5 min”). Off-chain solvers compete to fill the order, pay the gas, and settle the result on-chain. The router is gauge-aware: solvers that stake or lock veHYBRA get priority routing, so execution flow is pulled toward the pools they vote for.

Stakeholder

Direct benefit

Fly-wheel effect

Trader

• Gas-free, fail-proof swaps. • Solvers aggregate Hybra pools + RFQ quotes + external AMMs, so average price improves and MEV is neutralised.0x

Better UX → higher volume → deeper books.

veHYBRA voter / LP

• 100 % of solver-paid swap fees stream to ve vaults. • Solvers must stake veHYBRA to maximise routing priority → constant buy-pressure and bribe demand.

Fee APR rises without extra inflation.

Protocol (Hybra)

• Takes a 0.02–0.05 bp settlement fee from solvers—non-inflationary income. • Gauge-aware routing auto-recycles volume into the pools that pay the most fees.

External cash flow > emissions sooner → death-spiral risk minimized.

Why it’s differentiated – UniswapX and CoW Swap show that intent + solver architecture can deliver CEX-grade pricing and gasless UX, but they do not tie solver incentives to ve voting. Hybra stitches the two together, turning every solver into a ve holder and every trade into a vote-reinforcing event.

In short, the intent layer makes trading cheaper for users, richer for voters, and cash-positive for the protocol—exactly the “someone other than the minter pays” principle we build around.

Marketing is idle if product stinks; we reverse the order.

5 Inflation-led ignition → Income-led sustainability

Assumptions)

weekly token emission decay k        = 2 %
token price P(t)            = logistic 1 $ → 2 $ (speed q = 5 %/wk)
week-0 emission tokens       = 500 000
external-income ceiling      = 650 000 USDC / wk
external-income rise speed   = 8 %/wk (mid-point t₀ = 16 wk)

5.1 What the curve now does

Week 0-10 – Ignition Inflation (yellow) hovers around 500-570 k USDC because price appreciation offsets the 2 % token decay. → liquidity rushes in; veNFT WAR is headline news.
Week 11-29 – Hand-off Fees + bribes (orange) scale with volume; inflation slides as price growth flattens. → the two lines draw together.
Week 30 – Crossover External income overtakes inflation (~30 th week) and never looks back (see dashed line in chart).
Week 30+ – Income-led era Emissions keep decaying geometrically; income keeps compounding with usage. By week 52 the protocol runs a +278 k USDC weekly surplus.

Snapshot

Emission value E(t)

External income I(t)

Surplus I – E

Week 0

500 k

140 k

–360 k

Week 26

511 k

448 k

–62 k

Week 52

337 k

615 k

+279 k

(all figures USD / week, rounded)

5.2 Why this matters

Phase

Dominant payer

Locker psychology

Fragility

Ignition

Printer

“Farm the yield, test the UX.”

Token price drag (managed by decay cap).

Hand-off

Printer ≈ Outsider

“APR looks balanced—maybe relock.”

Keep partner bribe ROI > 1.

Steady-state

Outsider

“Fees + cash bribes = real yield; inflation just icing.”

Only if volume collapses.

Because E(t) is capped by deterministic decay while I(t) is free to grow with depth and volume, the crossover is mathematically inevitable so long as I_max > E₀ · (1-k)^{t_cross}. With the numbers above that holds at t ≈ 30 weeks even under a 50 % price shock.

The plotted curve (see chart) shows a launch that starts with attractive inflation but smoothly hands the baton to sustainable external income—exactly the arc a ve(3,3) hydra needs to break the death-spiral cliché.

Epilogue — an invitation

Solidly showed us how ve(3,3) could soar; its fork-sons showed us every way it could crash. We believe the missing piece is simple: make someone other than the minter pay. Bribes are that someone; traders are that someone; the Foundation is that someone. If we balance their incentives, the hydra sheds its death spiral and grows into a flywheel.

Lock some veHYBRA, steer the gauges, and take a cut every time the chain you already trade on moves a dollar. Let’s prove the hydra can live.

— The Hybra core crew

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Last updated 1 month ago