A Token That Eats Itself:

via Uniswap v4 Hooks

$helix, an anonymous deployment
Ethereum · 0x7b3fc11c…8c1d5ffd
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1. Introduction

Commerce on the open AMM relies almost exclusively on liquidity providers and arbitrageurs serving as trusted third parties to determine the velocity of supply. Tokens marketed as deflationary typically depend on a privileged address — a multisig, an owner-only burn function, or a centralised market maker — to retire supply on some discretionary schedule. While these designs may approximate scarcity, they suffer from the inherent weakness of the trust-based model: the very entities expected to destroy tokens are also free not to.

What is needed is a token whose contraction of supply is enforced not by any party's good behaviour but by the cryptoeconomic rails that carry the asset itself. With the v4 hook interface, the AMM can host arbitrary logic at the moment a swap is executed. We use this primitive to bind a burn instruction to every transfer of liquidity, making the destruction of supply a mechanical consequence of trade rather than a discretionary act.

2. The Hook

We define the protocol as a single Uniswap v4 pool — (ETH, $helix) — whose PoolKey is registered with a hook address satisfying the prefix bits for BEFORE_SWAP and AFTER_SWAP. On every swap() call routed through the v4 PoolManager, the hook is invoked with the swap direction and signed amount. Let q denote the gross amount of $helix involved in a given swap and let τ ∈ {τ_b, τ_s} denote the rate applied to that direction. Then the destroyed quantity for that swap is

δ = τ · q, τ_b = 0.01, τ_s = 0.05.

For a buy, the hook reduces the output owed to the swapper by δ and forwards δ to the zero address before settlement. For a sell, the hook claims δfrom the inbound $helix, internally swaps it back through the same pool against the ETH leg, and burns the resulting $helix output. The seller therefore funds their own destruction; the protocol's buyback budget grows with sell pressure rather than depleting under it.

3. Supply Dynamics

Let S(t) denote the circulating supply at time t, and let n_b(t) and n_s(t) be the running counts of buy and sell swaps respectively. Define Δ(t) = S(0) − S(t) as the cumulative destruction. Then, for any swap i of gross size q_i,

S(t_i) = S(t_i−1) − τ_i · q_i.

Because τ_i, q_i ≥ 0 and the contract has no mint function, the sequence S(t_i) is monotonically non-increasing. We invite the reader to inspect this property empirically in Figure 1.

4. Asymmetric Destruction

The five-to-one tax differential between sells and buys is the central economic claim of the design. Define the asymmetry ratio ρ(t) as the cumulative supply destroyed via sells divided by the cumulative supply destroyed via buys. Under any market regime in which sell-side volume is non-trivial, ρ(t) exceeds unity, and the marginal cost of exiting a position grows with the size of that position.

The asymmetry serves two purposes simultaneously. Mechanically, it routes a larger share of every distribution event back into supply destruction. Behaviourally, it imposes a Schelling cost on coordinated exits: an attempt to dump the token funds, in real time, a buyback of the token from the same pool, raising the marginal sale price for subsequent sellers.

5. Live Parameters

The following table is read from Ethereumstate every three seconds. All values are direct on-chain reads of the token contract and the hook's public burn counters; nothing in the table is editorial.

6. Trade Log

Each row below corresponds to a single Burned event emitted by the hook, in reverse chronological order. The token-burned column links directly to the originating transaction on the canonical block explorer.

7. Wallet Position

No wallet connected. [connect] to view balance, cumulative contribution to Δ(t), and trade count.

8. References & Deployment

$helix · Ethereum · supply is monotone in t.