What is TIDE?

TIDE is a Uniswap v4 token built on one idea: the act of holding the token is the act of providing liquidity. There is nothing to deposit, no range to manage, no position to babysit. You hold TIDE, and you are already an LP earning a pro-rata share of every swap fee the pool collects.

The thesis compresses to three words:

hold = liquidity = fees

Note

TIDE currently runs on the Sepolia testnet, so no real funds are at stake yet. The contracts are immutable and the position is un-rug-able by design: a fixed 10,000 supply, no transfer tax, and no admin drain. TIDE is independent and self-reviewed, and it is not yet third-party audited; an external audit is a prerequisite before any mainnet launch. Review the trust model and size your position accordingly. See ../security/known-limitations.md.

The mechanism in one breath

The entire fixed supply of 10,000 TIDE is minted once, in the constructor, and at launch the protocol calls seed() to place all of it into a single, single-sided ETH/TIDE Uniswap v4 position that the hook contract owns itself. Nobody else’s capital is in the pool, and the position can never be re-ranged or withdrawn.

Through a DN404-style mirror, the fungible token and a tradable NFT are two faces of the same position:

• The ERC-20 is TIDE (the hook contract itself).
• The ERC-721 is Tide-LP (symbol TIDE-LP), a separate TideMirror contract reached as hook.mirror().

Every whole TIDE you hold automatically materializes one Tide-LP NFT, and each NFT is exactly 1/10000 of the pool — both a piece of fully on-chain generative art and the unit of fee accounting. The on-chain invariant is simply:

nftBalanceOf(user) == balanceOf(user) / UNIT   // UNIT = 1 ether (1e18)

Buying TIDE (ETH → TIDE) mints NFTs as you cross each whole-token threshold; selling or transferring burns them and concentrates everyone else’s fee share. Fractional TIDE — anything below a whole unit — earns nothing until it completes a full token.

Note

Some older copy and the strapline “one pool. five thousand tides.” reflect a stale 5,000-supply framing. The live supply is 10,000 TIDE, so each whole token is a 1/10,000 share. See ../deployment/addresses.md for the deployed numbers.

Why this is not classic LPing

A traditional concentrated-liquidity LP deposits two assets, picks a price range, and then actively manages it: re-ranging as price moves, eating impermanent loss, and — in leveraged or lending-adjacent contexts — risking liquidation. TIDE removes that entire surface. The protocol owns the liquidity; you just hold the token that represents a slice of it.

	Classic Uniswap LP	TIDE
To start earning	Deposit two assets into a position	Hold TIDE — nothing to deposit
Range management	Pick and actively re-range a tick band	None — one fixed protocol-owned range
Impermanent loss	Yours to manage and absorb	No range to manage; you exit only by selling TIDE
Liquidation risk	Possible in leveraged/lending setups	None — there is no debt or collateral
Position object	An LP NFT you must maintain	A Tide-LP NFT that auto-mints/burns with your balance
Fee accrual	Pro-rata to your active liquidity	Pro-rata per Tide-LP NFT (1/10,000 each)
Who owns the liquidity	You	The protocol (the hook contract)
How you exit	Withdraw your position	Sell TIDE back into the same pool

The trade-off is honest: because you never deposit the underlying, you also cannot withdraw it. Your only exit is selling TIDE into the same single pool, and first buyers walk the price up a curve that can never be re-ranged. The price is the curve — there is no oracle backstop. See ../security/known-limitations.md.

How fees reach you

Every swap against the pool pays a fee that splits into two streams — ETH (currency0) and TIDE (currency1). Anyone can permissionlessly call pokeFees() to harvest accrued fees into per-share accumulators; each live NFT then accrues its 1/10000 slice. When you claim, the protocol converts your ETH leg by buying TIDE back in the pool and pays you in TIDE, which then vests linearly. So every claim creates buy pressure on the token. The mechanics chapters cover each step:

• Hold = LP (DN404) — the share model.
• Degressive launch fee — the trustless 25% → 10% → 5% anti-sniper schedule.
• Claim = in-pool buyback — why claims pay in TIDE.
• 72-hour linear vesting — how claimed gains unlock.
• The forfeited-vesting lottery — what happens to unvested TIDE on exit.
• Treasury & buyback-burn — “the dev holds the button, not the cashbox.”

Who TIDE is for

• DeFi traders and degens who want LP-style yield without impermanent loss, ranges, or liquidations.
• Uniswap v4 / hooks / DN404 enthusiasts who appreciate the mechanism itself.
• Long-term holders drawn to the reflexive buyback-on-claim and the “exits enrich those who stay” flywheel.
• Fair-launch / anti-sniper communities (the trustless degressive fee) and security-conscious users (no transfer tax, verifiable no-rug).
• On-chain NFT collectors — each Tide-LP NFT is generative on-chain art and the unit of fee accounting.

The no-rug promise, briefly

The fixed supply is minted once and can never inflate. The only privileged role is the constructor-set owner, whose only real power is a single one-shot seed() call — after seeding, no one (not even the dev) can move the liquidity, redirect fees, pause, or upgrade. The single value sink, the Treasury, has no withdrawal function; its only outward action is buyback-and-burn. The full argument is in ../security/trust-model.md.

Where to go next

• How it works — the end-to-end flow from buy to claim, in order.
• Quickstart — get TIDE and watch fees accrue.
• Architecture overview — the four contracts and how they fit together.