Most of each dollar is held as stock
SPYx and QQQx, tokenized S&P 500 and Nasdaq-100 ETFs, sit in the program's vaults on Solana.
A dollar backed by hedged tokenized equities
USDq is minted on Solana against USDC, SPYx or QQQx. The stock in its reserve is paired with short index perps on Hyperliquid, and 80% of what the reserve earns goes to sUSDq.
How the hedge works
A short of the same size sits beside it
The hedge desk sells the matching index perp on trade.xyz, the equity venue on Hyperliquid: SP500 against SPYx, XYZ100 against QQQx.
Whatever the index does, the pair is worth a dollar
S&P 500+11.58%
Largest daily gain in modern trading, 2008-10-13
The stock and the short change by the same amount in opposite directions.
The short is paid to hold it
Shorts on trade.xyz collect funding every hour, near 5.5% a year at its baseline, and the ETFs pay dividends on top. Together they are the surplus sUSDq is paid from.
Where each dollar sits
The reserve keeps three sleeves at fixed shares of USDq supply. The hedge desk holds each inside its band, and a reporter signs the hedge account on chain every 60 seconds.
200 cells, each half a percent of supply
+32%
A 3x short reaches its maintenance margin only after the index rises about 32%. The desk adds margin long before, when leverage reaches 4x.
- Short leverage
- 3x · band 2x–4x
- Buffer band
- 5%–15% of supply
- Spot against short
- within 0.5% of supply
- Hedge report
- every 60 s · public on HyperCore
CCTP V2USDC out to margin
LandingUSDC back to the buffer
CCTP V2USDC out to margin
LandingUSDC back to the buffer
Permissionless mint and redeem
Four paths in and out. USDC paths run around the clock; the xStock paths follow the US equity session and take its price band from Pyth. Mints and xStock redemptions draw on an hourly capacity, and USDC redemptions are paid from the buffer.
You receiveUSDq
- Fee
- 10 bps
- Price band
- none, 1 : 1
- Open
- always
Your active stAEQUA
- This hour's capacity
- $1,000,000
- Each cell
- $5,000
- Left after this mint
- $975,000
- Full again in
- 1 min 30 s
sUSDq a year, worked example
Stake USDq for sUSDq
USDq carries no yield of its own. Every 8 hours the reserve's surplus is minted as new USDq, and 80% of it vests into sUSDq over the next 8. sUSDq is a plain SPL token, so it can serve as collateral elsewhere.
- Reserve yield
- about 4.2% of supply a year
- Distribution
- every 8 hours
- Vesting
- linear over 8 hours
- Unstake
- 7-day cooldown, then claim
Each distribution, in 200 cells
AEQUA, a fair launch
The protocol token. Every one of the 1,000,000,000 AEQUA is sold in the public launch, to everyone on the same terms; nobody holds a reserved share, the team included, and the supply can never grow.
- Burned: half of what each buyback buys
- Streamed to stAEQUA over 7 days
50/50
Each hour, the protocol's share of the surplus can buy AEQUA on the market. Half of every purchase is burned at once, and the other half streams to stAEQUA, so each buyback shrinks the supply.
What a stAEQUA position does
Mint USDq on Solana
Deposit USDC, SPYx or QQQx and receive USDq for a 10 bps fee, then stake it for sUSDq.