Mint and redeem

All four are permissionless instructions of the program: nobody approves them, and the app is one way of calling them. On the Mint tab, Mint and Redeem switch the direction, and the token menu in the field picks the asset. Each option in that menu shows whether its path is open, its band, and your balance.

1. Open the Mint tab, choose Mint, and pick USDC in the You pay field.
2. Type an amount, or press Max. The cells it would take from this hour's capacity turn to equal boxes.
3. Check You receive and the fee row, then press Mint USDq.
4. Approve in your wallet. On confirmation the USDq is in your wallet and the cells you used drop to dots.

Your USDC goes to the buffer on Solana. A USDC mint adds no market exposure, so nothing has to be hedged at that moment; the hedge desk puts the USDC to work later, as spot and margin, to bring the reserve back to its shares.

The program values your xStocks at the underlying ETF's price from Pyth Pro, less the band of the session that is open. It never uses a DEX price or the xStock's own market price.

value = raw × M × P × (1 − band)
usdq  = floor(value × (10000 − fee_bps) / 10000)

raw × M is the amount your wallet shows, so in practice you can read it as: the number of xStocks you see, times the ETF's price less the band, less the fee.

1. On the Mint tab, choose Mint and pick SPYx or QQQx. The token menu says whether the path is open and gives its band.
2. Type the amount of xStocks. Below it, ≈ $ shows their value at the Pyth price.
3. Press Mint USDq. The app fetches a signed price and checks the transaction.
4. Approve within the ten cells: the signed price is good for 10 seconds. If the window passes, the app asks again with a fresh price.
5. On confirmation, USDq is in your wallet.

An xStock deposit adds stock to the reserve at once. The hedge desk shorts the same amount of the matching perp within seconds, from margin already waiting on Hyperliquid, and the hourly capacity bounds how much any one hour can add.

The program pays USDC one for one, less the fee, from the buffer on Solana. With Redeem and USDC selected, the Mint tab's field shows the buffer itself, and the figure reads Available now: that is how much this path can pay at this moment. It has no hourly bucket.

1. On the Mint tab, choose Redeem and pick USDC in the You receive field.
2. Type the USDq amount, or press Max: the lower of your balance and the buffer.
3. Press Redeem for USDC and approve. The USDC arrives in the same transaction.

The buffer runs at 10% of supply and the desk keeps it between 5% and 15%: when it falls under the band, the desk sells spot, closes the matching short and returns the freed margin to it.

Redeeming for an xStock takes the fee first, then pays the rest at the ETF's price plus the band:

raw = floor((usdq − fee) / (M × P × (1 + band)))

The app shows You receive as the amount your wallet will show. The path follows the same hours, the same signed price and the same ten-second window as minting with xStocks, and has its own hourly bucket.

An xStock path runs when all of these hold. The token menu and the action button tell you which one doesn't, and until when.

The paths wait from Friday 17:00 to Sunday 20:00 ET, on NYSE holidays, and in the perps' daily pause. The USDC paths run through all of it, whenever the program is unpaused. Prices and sessions has the full timetable.

Each bucketed path holds up to one hour of capacity and refills continuously. What one mint uses comes back at the path's hourly rate, so half an hour after the bucket empties, half of it is back.

available = min(cap, available + cap × elapsed / 3600)

That makes five buckets: the USDC mint, and a mint and a redeem for each xStock. Redeeming for USDC draws on the buffer instead. On the Mint tab the field shows the selected path's bucket in 200 cells, so one cell is $5,000 on the USDC path and $2,500 on an xStock path, and the rows below it give the refill rate and when the bucket is full again.

Every path charges the same fee on the amount you pay in: 10 bps, or less with AEQUA staked.

Base

10 bps

From 100,000 AEQUA staked

5 bps

From 1,000,000 AEQUA staked

2 bps

out = floor(amount × (10000 − fee_bps) / 10000)
fee = amount − out

The fee is paid in USDq in the same instruction. On a mint, it is minted to the Reserve Fund against your deposit; on a redeem, it is moved there from the USDq you hand in. Once the Reserve Fund holds its target, fees go to the protocol vault, which spends everything it holds on the AEQUA buyback. The fee tier explains when a stake counts.

Governance sets a spot cap for each collateral, and the program checks it on every deposit. The cap is the lower of 20% of the xStock's on-chain supply value and 5% of its perp's open interest. USDq's supply is capped where those caps fill the spot sleeve:

supply ceiling = (spot cap SPYx + spot cap QQQx) / 0.675

Every mint path checks the ceiling. It grows as the xStocks' supply and the perps' open interest grow; the Reserve tab shows it beside supply.

Because anyone can mint and redeem at one for one less the fee, the paths themselves pull USDq's market price toward a dollar. Below $0.999, buying USDq on the market and redeeming it for USDC returns more than it costs, fee included. Above $1.001, minting with USDC and selling does.