TREMOR

Five contracts, and what each one may do

The hook never holds ETH — the skim goes from the PoolManager straight to the fund's address, so there is no balance a withdrawal could have been written against even by accident. Both wiring roles delete themselves in the transaction that uses them.

The token

Why this exists

A v4 hook is called on every swap and sees the price at both moments — a complete record of how violently a market moved, held by something that cannot lie about it. Almost every hook throws that away.

What this contract is

The token, and nothing else. One billion, minted once, eighteen decimals. No transfer fee, no rebase, no blacklist, no maximum holding, no pause.

What it cannot do

Mint — there is no function. Not disabled, not guarded, not renounced: never written. Be administered — the launcher role deletes itself in the same transaction that uses it.

Where TREMOR stands

Behind everything. It is not a claim on the epoch pots — money staked in the market belongs to whoever staked it. What TREMOR has is the floor, claimed by burning, and that is the whole of it.

How it fails

The floor is only as large as the fees collected, and fees are only as large as the volume. Nothing here creates value; it refuses to let fee income leave, which is a smaller claim. And the whole structure is unaudited by anyone but its author.

The instrument

What it measures

The tick, which is log price with the logarithm already taken. Squaring tick changes gives realized variance with no exponent, no logarithm and no fixed-point price arithmetic.

How a reading is taken

The hook hands over the tick after every swap. If 60 seconds have passed, the distance travelled is squared, truncated, and added to a running total. If they have not, nothing happens at all.

Why the grid

Because of that last line. A burst inside one interval moves the price and moves the instrument not at all. Measured on a fork: sixteen swaps inside one interval added zero readings and zero variance.

Why the cap

One violent minute would drown out a week. So a reading contributes at most 1,000². The second edge is real: the same truncation makes the instrument understate a genuine crash, and it costs whoever holds SHAKE. A 1,483-tick move was recorded as 1,000².

How an epoch closes

One at a time, never in a loop. roll() is permissionless. What is compared between epochs is variance per second, so an epoch that ran long is not credited for lasting longer.

What it refuses to do

Hold ETH. Own a token. Accept a second writer. Be re-wired. It is a pen and a roll of paper.

How it fails

The reading is sampled, not continuous, so it is not true quadratic variation and is not claimed to be. And a large enough actor can move a week’s reading — it costs fees, impact and arbitrage on every leg, all paid into the pot they are trying to win, but that is a tax on the attack, not a wall against it.

The fund

What comes in

The swap skim, taken from the PoolManager straight to this address. Nothing else, ever. The credit is refused unless the ETH is already here.

Where it goes

Two places, the only two that exist. The subsidy, paid out to everyone who took a side that epoch, win or lose. The floor, claimed pro-rata by burning.

What cannot happen

A withdrawal. A sweep to a treasury. An owner. An upgrade. Not withheld — absent.

The one invariant

balance >= subsidyPool + floorPool, enforced on the way in rather than audited afterwards.

Why the floor is neutral

Burning n for n × floor ÷ supply leaves floor ÷ supply exactly where it was. An exit never dilutes the holders who stay.

How it fails

It starts at zero and grows only with volume. A pool nobody trades has no subsidy to pay and no floor to stand on, and this contract cannot manufacture either.

The market

The trade

CALM says quieter than the strike, SHAKE says louder. Both post ETH into one pot. Nobody is levered — no margin, no liquidation, no funding rate, no bad debt, because nothing here can produce any.

When you can take it

Subscription for epoch N runs while N−1 is measured, so the strike is N−2 — final before the window opened. Using N−1 would be staking against a number nobody can see, which is a raffle.

How it settles

Symmetric in ratio, so triple and a third sit the same distance from the strike.

Why the band is three

The first design used a linear ±50% band and saturated 61.65% of epochs against realistic dispersion. A band of three saturates 7.52%. Settled by simulation before a line of Solidity was written.

What voids an epoch

One empty side. Everyone is refunded exactly what they posted and no subsidy is drawn — an epoch with one side is not a market, it is a gift to whoever showed up.

How it fails

Integer division leaves at most a few wei per epoch unclaimed — measured at 0 wei on the fork run. And the whole instrument rests on volatility clustering: if this pool’s variance were stable week to week, every epoch would settle near 50/50 and there would be nothing to trade.

R >= K :  shake = 50% + 50% · min(1, (R/K − 1) / 2)
R <  K :  shake = 50% − 50% · min(1, (K/R − 1) / 2)

           K = strike, the variance rate of epoch N−2
           R = realized, the variance rate of epoch N

The hook

Why a hook at all

It is the only thing present for every swap. Nothing outside the pool can see the tick at the moment it changes, and nothing inside has reason to misreport. That is the only reason this is a hook rather than an indexer.

What it takes

ETH on both sides, opening at 4.00% and decaying once to 1.25% over a day. The clock starts at the first swap, not at deployment.

Where it sends it

The fund, and nowhere else — straight from the PoolManager to the fund’s own address. This contract never holds the money.

What it never touches

Liquidity. Permissions are 0x20CC and the six liquidity bits are clear. Measured at +240 gas on an LP add against a hookless control.

What cannot be changed

Everything. No setter for the fee, the fund, the seismograph or anything else.

How it fails

It adds gas to every swap in the pool — measured, bounded and published. The unluckiest trade of the week pays +84,214 to roll an epoch.

Gas

The order is forced

Tremor → Seismograph → Fund → HookDeployer → MINE → TremorHook
       → Market → Seismograph.wire(hook) → Fund.wire(hook, market)
       → initialize → openTrading → seed

The hook's constructor takes the token, the fund and the seismograph, so all three must exist before a CREATE2 salt means anything. The salt is bound to the exact init-code bytes: a single changed comment moves the metadata hash, which moves the address, which loses the permission bits.

The pool opens single-sided at tick 175000 — a valuation of 25.13 ETH — seeded with TREMOR and no ETH. Tick spacing is pinned to 200; the Uniswap app defaults to 60 and reverts unless the URL parameter is edited by hand.

Risk