Overview

What is liftt.

liftt. is a ve(3,3) exchange on Robinhood Chain. Crypto pairs and tokenized equities trade in one venue; the fees they generate are paid to the people who lock the token, and those lockers decide which markets get funded next week.

The incentive loop

Four roles, one circuit. Each one pays for the next.

1. Traders swap and pay a fee to the pool they cross.
2. Liquidity providers stake their LP position in that pool's gauge. Staked liquidity gives up the trading fees and earns LIFTT emissions instead.
3. Lockers lock LIFTT and receive veLIFTT, an NFT carrying voting power.
4. Voters point veLIFTT at gauges. Their vote decides next epoch's emissions, and pays them that pool's trading fees plus any incentives on it.

The fees a trader pays end up with the voters who directed liquidity to the market that trader used. That is the whole loop.

What is different here

In the first ve(3,3) exchanges a gauge was paid purely on votes. Voting for your own quiet pool was therefore the winning strategy, and the token inflated to fund it.

liftt. caps every gauge by the fees its pool actually produced, and burns whatever was voted past that cap. The same vote that used to extract value now destroys its own reward. See gauge caps.

Built on Robinhood Chain

Getting started

Connect an EVM wallet and switch it to Robinhood Chain. The app offers to add the network if your wallet has never seen it.

Trading

Every swap crosses a pool and pays that pool a fee. The fee is not a stored constant: the pool asks its fee module at the moment of execution, so pricing policy can improve without moving a single position. See dynamic fees.

100% of protocol trading fees are routed to the voters who funded that pool's gauge, paid in the tokens the pool actually collected.

Providing liquidity

Two curves, chosen when the pool is created.

Deposit both sides, receive an LP token, then stake it in the pool's gauge to earn emissions. Fixed pool rates are capped at 3% and can only be changed by governance through the timelock.

Locking

Lock LIFTT for anywhere from one week to four years and receive a veLIFTT NFT. Voting power is linear in both amount and duration:

veLIFTT = LIFTT × lock time ÷ 4 years

Power decays every second toward zero at expiry, at which point the principal can be withdrawn. Positions can be topped up, extended, or merged, and they are transferable NFTs.

Lock end dates round down to a week boundary, so a full four-year lock reads a little under 1.0x — roughly 99.6 veLIFTT per 100 LIFTT. That is the week alignment, not a rounding error.

Voting

Epochs are 7 days. During an epoch you point your veLIFTT at any number of gauges with weights you choose. Voting again in the same epoch replaces your previous allocation rather than adding to it.

Votes cast during an epoch decide the emissions distributed when that epoch closes, and entitle you to that pool's trading fees and incentives for that epoch.

A single ballot may name at most 50 pools, so that no position can be made too expensive to re-vote.

Incentives

Anyone can add an incentive to a gauge, in any token, for the current or a future epoch. It is divided among that pool's voters for that epoch in proportion to vote weight. This is how a project pays for liquidity: instead of running its own farm, it pays the voters who direct emissions to its pool.

Emissions

One epoch of LIFTT is issued per week and handed to the Voter for distribution. The schedule decays about 1% per week, with a floor of 0.01% of supply so the protocol never stops paying liquidity entirely.

Because emissions voted past a pool's cap are burned rather than paid, realised inflation runs at or below this schedule, never above it.

Gauge caps

This is the mechanism the rest of the design turns on.

cap = WETH value of the pool's fees that epoch × capMultiple

Votes decide how emissions are split. Fees decide how much any single gauge can hold. Everything above the cap is sent to the token's burn function.

• Grace period. A new gauge is uncapped for its first 7 days, so a new market can be bootstrapped before it has fee history to be judged on.
• The multiple is a dial. Governance can widen a single pool's multiple when liquidity needs to lead demand, then tighten it as the market normalises. Every change is an explicit onchain action behind the timelock.
• Unpriced tokens give zero headroom. A pool whose fee token has no oracle price contributes no cap, so an unpriced token can never inflate a ceiling.

Dynamic fees

A pool's fee is read live on every swap and moves with the market:

fee = base + (cap − base) × volatility

Turbulence lifts the rate toward the cap so liquidity is paid for the risk it carries; calm walks it back down to win routine flow. Volatility is a stored average of realised price movement that anyone can refresh, and it decays on its own, so a pool nobody touches drifts back to its base rather than staying expensive on stale data.

Guarded by construction

• The factory refuses anything above 10% from any fee module.
• If a module reverts, returns nothing, or names a rate over the ceiling, the pool falls back to its own listed rate. A broken module cannot stop a swap.
• Fixed v2 rates stay under a 3% hard ceiling.

Tokenomics

Supply can only grow through the Minter, under the ceiling, and the minter role can be frozen permanently. If the full supply is minted at genesis, no further token can ever be created.

Governance

Every privileged action — changing a cap multiple, swapping a fee module, adjusting a pool's fixed rate, handing over governance — is queued in public on a timelock before it can run.

• The admin queues, executes, and cancels.
• A guardian can only cancel. It cannot queue and cannot execute, so a compromised admin still cannot push anything past an alert guardian.
• Changing the delay itself must go through the delay.
• Admin handover is two-step, so a mistyped address cannot orphan the protocol.

One exception by design: a price keeper may nudge oracle prices by at most 20% per update without waiting on the timelock. Without it, gauge caps would run on days-old valuations. Setting a token's first price remains a governance action.

Security and contracts

The test suite covers 64 cases across the token, the escrow, the timelock, and the full system, including the economics: that an idle pool earns nothing, that burned emissions leave circulation, that burning one gauge never enlarges another, and that a broken fee module falls back instead of reverting.

FAQ