Docs pages
$HOURGLASS
$HOURGLASS is the Hourglass protocol's token.
| Ticker | $HOURGLASS |
| Supply | 1,000,000,000, fixed |
| Launch | 100% to one public launch on equal terms |
| Allocations | none: no presale, team, investor, airdrop or reserved tokens, and no vesting |
| Fees | every fee the protocol keeps buys $HOURGLASS on the market and burns it |
Where the fees come from
The market charges three fees, all in USDC, all on value that has actually changed hands:
| Fee | Paid by | On | Rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Trade fee | Buyer | the filled notional of each bid | 0.5% |
| Delivery fee | Seller | the escrow released for certified hours | 2.5% |
| Pledge fee | Lender | the advance | 0.5% |
The protocol keeps all of them; none is shared with lenders, liquidity providers or agents. They collect in the fee vault, an account of the market program, and the program lets them out one way only: the buyback.
The buyback
Every five minutes the service's worker checks the fee vault. When it holds at least 100 USDC, the worker sends one transaction made of three market-program instructions:
claim_buybackmoves up to 1,000 USDC from the fee vault into a buyback account that only the program can sign for, and records the least $HOURGLASS the swap must return: Jupiter's quote, less 1%.buyback_swapswaps exactly that USDC for $HOURGLASS through Jupiter, with the program signing for the buyback account.finish_buybackchecks that all the claimed USDC was spent and that at least the minimum arrived, burns every $HOURGLASS the swap bought, and adds the amounts to the running totals.
The program refuses a claim that the same transaction doesn't follow with the swap and the burn, so USDC that leaves the fee vault can only become burned $HOURGLASS; if any step fails, the whole transaction fails and nothing moves. Only the worker's key can start a buyback, and it never holds the funds. The totals — USDC spent, $HOURGLASS burned and the last buyback — are on chain in the market's Config, and the API serves them as buyback.get.
What a delivered week adds
At an example price of 2.20 USDC per GPU-hour, one node-week is 2,956.80 USDC. Delivered in full, it pays 14.784 USDC of trade fee and 73.92 USDC of delivery fee: 88.704 USDC toward buying and burning $HOURGLASS. If a lender advanced 75% against it, the 11.088 USDC pledge fee adds to that.
Burned tokens don't come back, so every week the market delivers reduces the supply.
Claims and $HOURGLASS
$HOURGLASS is separate from claims. A claim is a node-week of one series, your position in the market; $HOURGLASS is the protocol's token. Trading on Hourglass, placing collateral or taking delivery never requires holding $HOURGLASS.