WAVES
A reserve currency native to HyperEVM, forked from Olympus. Every token is backed by assets the protocol owns outright, and the liquidity it trades against belongs to the protocol rather than to rented liquidity providers.
WAVES is a token whose supply expands and contracts against a treasury of real reserves. It is not pegged to a dollar and it is not trying to be. The design goal is simpler: every WAVES in circulation should be backed by assets the protocol actually holds, and that backing should grow over time.
Three things happen continuously. People buy WAVES from the protocol's own liquidity position, and the HYPE they pay lands in the treasury. People bond HYPE into the treasury directly, in exchange for discounted WAVES delivered over time. And people stake WAVES, receiving newly minted tokens paid for out of the treasury's surplus.
The reserve asset is HYPE, the native asset of HyperEVM. Uniswap speaks ERC20 only, so the pool and the treasury actually hold WHYPE, the wrapped form, with eighteen decimals; routers wrap on the way in, so a buyer never has to hold it directly. Everything here is priced in HYPE rather than dollars, because the pool, the backing and the bond quotes are then all denominated in the same asset and nothing in the protocol needs an oracle to agree with itself.
The consequence is worth stating plainly: HYPE is not a stablecoin. Backing per token is a quantity of HYPE, and its value in any other currency moves with the HYPE price. This site shows no dollar figures anywhere, because the protocol has no way to know one.
There is one asset, held in three forms. You can move between them at any time, at no cost beyond gas.
Moving between forms is free and reversible. The only thing that changes is whether the growth shows up in your balance or in the value of each unit.
The index is the conversion rate. It starts at 1.0 and only ever goes up. If the index reads 3.4, then one gWAVES is worth 3.4 WAVES, and someone who staked at launch now holds 3.4× the tokens they started with.
There is no presale, no team allocation and no vesting cliff. The entire genesis supply of 10 WAVES is minted once, into a single Uniswap V3 position on Project X, and the minting key is handed to the treasury in the same batch. From that moment the treasury is the only contract on Earth that can create WAVES, and it can only do so against reserves it already holds.
That position is single-sided. All of it sits in a price band running from 12.5 HYPE up to 625 HYPE, and it contains only WAVES. Not a single HYPE is required to open the market. In practice it is a ladder of sell orders. Buyers walk up it, and every token sold is paid for in HYPE that accumulates inside the position, which the protocol owns.
The position never holds HYPE to begin with, so there is nothing for it to buy WAVES with, and nothing below the launch price for the protocol to sell into. That HYPE appears only as a consequence of people buying, and once it is there it works as a bid.
10 tokens at 12.5 HYPE opens the market at 125 HYPE of valuation. Supply is not the lever it looks like: for a single-sided launch the cost to double the price depends on the starting valuation and the width of the band, and the supply cancels out of it entirely.
The consequence worth understanding: because there is no protocol liquidity below the launch price, the protocol never sells into a decline. And because the supply is fixed at genesis while every unit of proceeds is retained, if the whole ladder were bought out the backing per token would end up roughly equal to the average price it sold at.
Stake WAVES and you receive sWAVES. Every 8 hours, three times a day, the protocol closes an epoch, mints the epoch's reward, and spreads it across every staker in proportion to what they hold. Nobody has to claim anything; balances simply grow.
A rebase does not move tokens between accounts. Internally, balances are stored in a fixed private unit and a rebase only changes the divisor used to display them. That is why a supply increase for a hundred thousand holders costs the same gas as one.
On APY. The figure shown on this site is the current per-epoch reward rate compounded across a year. It is a projection of today's policy setting, not a promise, and it changes whenever the reward rate changes. A high number reflects a high emission rate, which is dilution for anyone not staking and only a real gain for stakers if backing keeps up.
Rewards are minted strictly out of excess reserves: treasury value beyond what is needed to back circulating supply. If the treasury cannot cover a reward, the protocol pays what it can and carries on. Staking, unstaking and bond redemption never stop working because a reward was underfunded.
This is the question worth asking of any protocol paying a four-digit APY, so here is the answer without any decoration.
Three sources in, one sink out. Nothing here produces yield anywhere else and sends it back: the value that pays stakers is the value newcomers bring, plus trading fees.
Value enters in exactly three ways: someone buys WAVES from the protocol's liquidity position, someone bonds HYPE into the treasury, or someone trades in the pool and pays the 2% fee, of which the protocol keeps six sevenths and the venue takes the rest. That is the entire list. Nothing here lends, farms, or earns a return anywhere else and sends it back.
Staking rewards are not paid out of that revenue. They are newly minted tokens. The treasury must hold one HYPE of reserves per token in circulation before it will create more, which is what stops emissions from running ahead of the money that has actually arrived, but the tokens themselves are new supply, not income.
So what does staking actually do for you? Take a hundred people holding one token each:
Staking does not make you money. It stops you losing your share. That is worth saying plainly, because the headline APY invites the opposite reading. The reward for staking is defensive: it keeps you level while the supply expands around you.
You are actually better off only when backing per token rises, and that happens for one reason: money coming in faster than the protocol is emitting. Which is why the dashboard puts backing and premium next to the APY instead of underneath it.
A bond sells WAVES below market price in exchange for HYPE, delivered over a vesting term rather than immediately. You take on time risk; the protocol gets reserves it owns permanently.
The price is not fixed. It is set by debt: every purchase raises outstanding bond debt and pushes the price up, while time decays that debt and pulls it back down. A market nobody is buying gets cheaper until somebody does. Each market also carries a hard price floor set when it opens, so a quiet market cannot decay toward giving tokens away.
Your payout is staked the moment you buy, and the note is denominated in gWAVES. You therefore keep earning rebases for the entire vesting period instead of waiting idle. When it matures, claiming delivers sWAVES, already staked and still compounding.
Nobody sets the discount. Each purchase pushes the price up, time pulls it back down, and the floor stops it going anywhere silly. The gap between this line and the market price is what a bond is worth at any moment.
One structural guarantee: a bond can never mint more WAVES than the reserve value it brings in. The contract rejects the purchase otherwise.
The treasury values every reserve asset in WAVES units, where one unit represents one HYPE of backing. Excess reserves is what remains after setting aside enough to back every circulating token 1:1, and it is the only budget staking rewards can be paid from.
Backing per token, treasury value divided by supply, is the number to watch. It is the honest measure of what stands behind each token, and it is almost always far below the market price. The ratio between the two is shown on this site as the premium. A premium of 20× means the market is paying twenty times what the treasury currently holds per token.
Trading fees from the protocol's Uniswap position are swept into the treasury as reserves, which means the protocol earns from its own volume.
There are four roles, all readable on chain from a single authority contract.
Treasury permission changes run through a timelock. Granting a new minter or a new depositor sits in a public queue for two days before it can execute, so holders can see it coming. Revoking a permission is instant. Taking power away is never delayed.
Staking and unstaking cannot be paused by anyone. That is deliberate: whatever else goes wrong, the exit stays open. What can be stopped, instantly, is emissions (the reward rate), any bond market, and minting altogether.
Governance is a single key, not a multisig. Whoever holds it can point the minting role at another contract and can move the Uniswap position out of the protocol's liquidity contract. There is no code that prevents this, and no timelock in front of it. If you are sizing a position here, size it against that fact rather than against the contracts.
This section is deliberately blunt. Read it before putting money in.
No. Your sWAVES balance grows on its own, three times a day. There is nothing to claim and no transaction to send.
That is a rebase. It is the mechanism working as designed.
sWAVES in your wallet, because the growth is visible. gWAVES if you need to deposit it somewhere that cannot handle a moving balance, or if you want to vote. They are worth the same at any moment.
The epoch simply stays open until someone does, and rewards are not lost. Anyone can trigger it and the protocol pays a small bounty to whoever does, so in practice it happens on time.
No. The only address able to mint is the treasury contract, and it can only mint against reserves it already holds. You can verify this by reading authority.vault() on chain.
No. There is a Foundry suite that exercises the full launch, staking, rebases, bonds and permissions against live HyperEVM state, and that is not a substitute for an audit.
Yes, instantly, and by two different roles. Staking and unstaking cannot be switched off by anyone, which is the more important half of that answer.