$HEDGE — the asset that prices the factory.

Abstract

Most tokens are an emissions schedule with a logo: they print rewards from nothing, call it yield, and the chart goes one way. $HEDGE is the opposite trade.

Hedger is a live, fork‑tested factory for hedging instruments on Base. The flagship — the IL Eliminator (Drop 001) — lets you provide liquidity and keep full ETH upside in one transaction, hedging the impermanent loss of LPing on the way up while you still earn swap fees. Named precisely, it is a covered call — net‑long, short‑gamma, short volatility. You are paid in LP fees to sell vol; it wins only when fees + appreciation beat carry + drag. For the bulls, and the downside is amplified.

A factory that sells payoffs needs an asset that prices, underwrites, and governsthem. That is $HEDGE — the unit in which the factory's risk is discounted (fee rebate), absorbed (backstop), and allocated (governance). Its price is defended by two independent buyback engines fed by fees that already exist. It is deliberately nota dividend coupon — that's a securities‑law trap in a permissionless fair launch, and dishonest accounting besides. The token has not launched— don't ape something that doesn't exist yet; launch is gated behind audit + multisig.

Hedger, in one paragraph

Deposit one asset (WETH). In one zapIn, the protocol splits it ⅔ to a liquidity position (Uniswap v4 or Aerodrome WETH/USDC) and ⅓ to a 2× leveraged long (Index Coop ETH2x, minted atomically via FlashMint). A 50/50 LP carries ~0.5 delta to ETH; the 2× leg brings net exposure back to ~1.0× — full upside. The split is solved on‑chain from the target net delta, never hardcoded.

Name the shape exactly. An LP is short gamma. Restoring delta to ~1× does not remove impermanent loss — IL is a convexity cost, and you cannot delta‑hedge convexity. What you have built is a covered call: net‑long, short‑gamma, short‑vol, with LP fees as the option premium. It pays when realized vol stays cheap relative to fees; it bleeds in chop. A protocol this exact about its Greeks needs an exact way to price, underwrite, and govern them. That is what $HEDGE is for.

Why a token at all (the honest test)

A token is justified only if it does work the protocol genuinely can't do without it — fails the test, don't ship it. $HEDGE does three things, each mapped to a primitive, and all three are real:

Three real jobs: discount, underwrite, allocate. If a token did none of them, we wouldn't ship one. It does all three.

What $HEDGE is — and is not

Buybacks here are protocol mechanics that defend price and recycle fees — never a profit promise. Backstop staking is a written short put: active risk‑bearing for a service fee, with real risk of loss — never passive yield. That distinction is the difference between getting paid for risk and getting paid for nothing, and only one of those survives.

The drops — and how $HEDGE plugs into each

A label releases records. Hedger releases instruments. Each drop is a payoff, and each payoff creates its own reason to hold and stake $HEDGE: a fee to discount, a tail to underwrite, a tier to gate, a parameter to govern. Demand compounds with the catalogue, not with a marketing budget.

The pattern: every new drop adds a fee stream that buys back $HEDGE, a tail it can underwrite, a premium tier it can gate, and parameters it must govern. The token's demand is long the catalogue.

Utility stack (value accrual without dividends)

The dual buyback flywheel

$HEDGE is defended by two buy pressures driven by uncorrelated cashflows — and the decoupling is the whole point, not a flourish.

Why two engines is a hedge, not a bonus.A token whose only support is its own trading fees is reflexive in the wrong direction: price falls → volume falls → fee buybacks fall → price falls. Worse here specifically — the IL Eliminator underperforms in exactly the chop that kills trading volume, so a single trading‑fee engine would correlate the token's only bid with the product's worst regime. So we run a second engine off a different cashflow.

Two cashflows that don't peak and trough together; the floor doesn't depend on the source most correlated with the product's weakest moment. Neither engine emits a single new token — every buy is funded by a fee that already happened. (Price‑stability and fee‑recycling mechanics, not a return.)

Tokenomics

1,000,000,000 $HEDGE, fixed, no mint function, mint authority renounced at deploy. Fair launch via PoolFans — ~100% of supply into the curve, immediately liquid. A fair launch does not support a team/investor cap table; the levers we control are fee routing, an optional disclosed small treasury buy (published wallet, not a hidden premine), and post‑launch treasury accumulation earned transparently from fees. The treasury earns its bag the same way you do.

Fee model — turning fees on

The protocol fee is 0 bps today — TGE is when it goes live, not a day before. The headline fee is 10% of realized profit above the HODL benchmark, taken at zapOut: a high‑water‑mark fee. You pay only on alpha — never on principal, never on a position that merely matched HODL. Staked $HEDGE reduces it by tier (you're buying down your own strike). Fees route to the Treasury and split (governance‑set) across buyback, audit/bug‑bounty fund, protocol‑owned liquidity, and backstop rewards.

The no‑admin‑rug invariant holds: custodied[token] is sacred and rescue()can never touch an open position. The fee is long your alpha and flat your principal — the treasury doesn't get to mark its own homework.

Governance & progressive decentralization

1. TGE: 3/5 Safe multisig + 48h Timelock hold all parameters; token signals via gas‑free Snapshot.
2. +1 quarter: binding votes on low‑stakes params (fee split, next drop, venue whitelist).
3. +2 quarters: on‑chain governance over the timelock for fee bps, treasury splits, drop approvals.
4. Steady state: multisig retains only emergency pause; everything else under token governance.

Launch mechanism & the non‑negotiable gate

$HEDGE launches through PoolFans — the Clanker‑v4 fee‑tokenization launchpad on Base — using a fixed‑supply fair‑launch deploy with the token's trading‑fee rights tokenized to the treasury. Dry‑run/fork‑simulated first; the real broadcast is signed by the team wallet. No allocation round. No SAFT. ~100% of supply into the curve, liquid at TGE.

But the launch is gated.We ship fast — but this custodies funds, and that's a different set of rules. Hedger today is live on mainnet, pre‑audit, owned by a QA EOA. You don't write puts on a book you haven't audited. TGE comes after this gate, in order, no skipping: close adversarial hardening → external audit + publish the report → move ownership to multisig + 48h timelock → ship and re‑audit the fee module + treasury → bug bounty live ≥1 week → then fair launch. Test in prod is for frontends; this is funds.

Risk register (token‑specific)