How Ynchor works

Overview

There is no hardware and no hashrate. Mining is a game of where you place your HYPE, settled on-chain every round. The design follows the grid-mining model that ORE made popular on Solana, rebuilt for Elysium and paid in HYPE.

• Every YNCHOR is mined. There is no premine and no private sale. The treasury only holds YNCHOR it bought on the open market.
• Mining funds buybacks. Part of every round's HYPE buys YNCHOR on the market, and most of what's bought is burned.
• The rules are fixed in code. The contracts can't be upgraded, and the admin can't touch miners' funds or change the economics.

How a round works

1. Deploy. Pick any squares and an amount of HYPE per square (minimum 0.001). You can add more squares until the clock runs out, but each square only once per round.
2. The round closes. After 60 seconds, the round closes. The clock only starts with the first deploy, so an empty board doesn't count down.
3. One square wins. The contract picks one of the 25 squares at random. See Fairness for how.
4. Winnings are yours. Rewards are credited as soon as the round settles. Claim them whenever you like.

What happens to the HYPE

Take a round with 100 HYPE on the board, of which 4 HYPE is on the square that wins.

If nobody is on the winning square, half of the losing HYPE (after the 1%) goes to buybacks and the other half goes into the bonus pot. No round reward is minted.

Bonus pot

The bonus pot keeps growing while rounds go unwon. The next round that has miners on the winning square adds the whole bonus pot to its winners' share, split by stake like the rest of the pot. The app and the home page show the current bonus pot. Because anyone covering all 25 squares is sure to be on the winning square, a big bonus pot is an open invitation to play the next round: that's the point.

Rewards

HYPE

Winners split the losing HYPE in proportion to what they put on the winning square. Claim it at any time from the app.

YNCHOR: split or solo

Each round mints 1 YNCHOR for the winning square. Half the rounds it is split by stake among everyone on the square. In the other half, one miner on the square takes the whole YNCHOR, with odds proportional to their stake.

Motherlode

Every round also adds 0.2 YNCHOR to the Motherlode. Each round with winners has a 1 in 625 chance of releasing the entire Motherlode to the winning square. It is split by boosted stake, and stakers (a mining boost of at least 1.1x) count double in that split.

Refining

Mined YNCHOR starts out unrefined. When you claim it you pay 10%, and that 10% is shared among every miner who still holds unrefined YNCHOR. What you earn this way is refined YNCHOR, and you can claim it without any fee. Waiting to claim earns you a share of other miners' fees.

Automine

Automine repeats your squares and HYPE per square every round, for as many rounds as you choose, so you don't have to be online.

• You deposit the HYPE for all the rounds up front. Each round costs your squares × your amount, plus 0.00001 HYPE that pays the bot that runs it.
• With Reinvest HYPE winnings on, your winnings go back into the automine balance instead of your claimable HYPE.
• If you also deploy by hand in a round, automine skips the squares you already took.
• Stop anytime from the app to get the unused balance back. When the rounds run out, or the balance can't cover the next round, whatever is left moves to your claimable HYPE.

Referrals

Every wallet has an invite link in the app. When a miner joins through your link, you earn 20% of the protocol fee they pay, every round they play, for as long as they mine. They pay nothing extra.

If you keep at least half of the full-boost amount staked (matured, counting lock multipliers), your cut rises to 30%. The rate for a round is fixed when your referee first deploys in it.

• A miner's referrer is recorded on-chain with their first deploy or automine after opening your link, and it can't be changed afterwards.
• It applies from that round onwards, never to rounds played before.
• Referral earnings are paid in HYPE and show up in your claimable HYPE.

Staking

Stake YNCHOR to earn YNCHOR from buybacks and to boost your mining. 10% of every buyback goes to stakers.

Each buyback's reward is paid out gradually over 3 days, together with whatever is still being paid out. Your share depends on your staking weight while it streams, so staking right before a buyback and leaving right after earns almost nothing. When nobody is staked, the stakers' share is burned instead.

Flexible or locked

Flexible stake can be withdrawn at any time. Locked stake can't leave until its lock ends, and in exchange it weighs more:

• Locks end at the next 00:00 UTC after the lock period, so a lock can run up to a day longer than its length. The app shows the exact end.
• The extra weight stops at the exact moment a lock ends. The YNCHOR then counts as plain stake until you withdraw it or move it to flexible stake.
• You can lock new YNCHOR from your wallet or move flexible stake into a lock. Up to 8 locks per wallet.
• There is no early exit from a lock.

Mining boost

Staked YNCHOR boosts your share of the YNCHOR you mine. The boost has two parts:

• Stake: up to +1x, growing in a straight line with your matured stake (locked stake counts with its weight) until the full-boost amount shown in the app.
• Locks: up to another +1x, growing with the extra weight your locks add, until that extra reaches the full-boost amount.

Flexible stake alone tops out at 2x; with locks you can reach 3x. For example, locking the full-boost amount for 365 days gives 3x.

• Newly staked or newly locked YNCHOR starts counting for the boost after 24 hours. Moving matured flexible stake into a lock keeps it matured.
• Your boost is fixed for a round at your first deploy in it, so unstaking mid-round doesn't change that round.
• The boost applies to YNCHOR rewards only: the round reward, solo odds and the Motherlode. HYPE winnings are always shared by the HYPE you deployed.

Example: you and another miner each put 0.01 HYPE on the winning square. You have a 2x boost and they have none. On a split round you get 2/3 of the YNCHOR and they get 1/3; on a solo round your odds of taking it all are 2 in 3. You each get the same HYPE.

Seasons

The leaderboard ranks miners by the HYPE they deployed in rounds that started during the current season, together with an all-time ranking and a live feed of buybacks, burns, bonus pots and Motherlode hits. Everything on it is computed from public on-chain events, so anyone can check it.

When a season has prizes, they are paid in YNCHOR from the protocol treasury. After the season ends, the prize list is published and funded on-chain in one step, and winners claim from the app. Prizes nobody claims before the deadline are burned, never returned to the team.

Tokenomics

Buyback and burn

10% of the HYPE on losing squares buys YNCHOR on the open market. What's bought is split like this:

The treasury funds growth. Its YNCHOR goes to protocol-owned liquidity (paired with HYPE in the YNCHOR pool, where it stays) and to season prizes. It never mints YNCHOR, and every YNCHOR it holds was bought on the market by the protocol, in public.

Why it holds together

Mining YNCHOR costs miners, collectively, about 10.5% of what they deploy (the 1% fee plus the buyback share). When YNCHOR trades above that cost, mining is worth it, more HYPE goes on the board, and buybacks grow. When it trades below, fewer people mine, and fewer rounds mean less new YNCHOR. The same loop can run in reverse, and no design can force the price up: it depends on real demand.

Fairness

Before a round opens, the operator commits a hash of a secret seed on-chain. When the round closes, the winning square is computed from that seed combined with every deploy made in the round and the hash of a block produced after the close.

• Nobody, including the operator, can know the result while deploys are open.
• The operator has 5 minutes after the close to reveal the seed. If it doesn't, anyone can cancel the round and every miner gets back 100% of what they deployed. Reveal and cancel never overlap, so nobody can watch a reveal and cancel a round they would lose.
• The operator's wallet never mines. Anyone can check this on the explorer.

Admin powers

The contracts can't be upgraded. This is the complete list of what the admin key can do:

• Pause the opening of new rounds. The current round still settles, and claims, refunds and unstaking always keep working. After 30 days of pause anyone can send the bonus pot to buybacks, so it is never stuck.
• Replace the operator that closes rounds and runs buybacks.
• Change where the protocol fee and the treasury share go.
• Raise the per-round deposit cap. It can never be lowered.
• Change the DEX used for buybacks, announced on-chain and only after a 48-hour waiting period.
• Publish and fund season prizes from the treasury.

The admin can't touch any miner's HYPE or YNCHOR, block claims or refunds, mint YNCHOR, raise the max supply, or change fees, rewards or odds.

Contracts

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The source code is verified on the explorer. The contracts went through an internal adversarial review (no critical or high findings; every finding was fixed and covered by tests). An external audit is planned before the per-round cap is raised significantly.

Roadmap