Tidewell whitepaper

Summary

Tidewell is an app on Robinhood Chain that manages liquidity positions on Uniswap for you. You choose a pair of tokens, a price range and a few rules. Tidewell then keeps the position in range as the price moves, collects the trading fees and, if you want, reinvests them.

On top of regular positions, Tidewell offers leveraged positions of up to 5x, using borrowed funds from existing lending markets on Robinhood Chain. Tidewell itself does not lend money.

Your funds always stay in a vault that belongs to you. Tidewell's automation can rebalance and reinvest, but it can never send your funds anywhere else.

The problem

On Uniswap v3 and v4, liquidity is placed in a price range. While the price is inside that range, the position earns trading fees. When the price moves outside it, the position stops earning and sits fully in one of the two tokens.

Keeping a position in range means watching prices, withdrawing, swapping and re-depositing by hand, often several times a week. Most people either do this too late or not at all. Existing tools that automate it usually offer one shared strategy per pool, with no say over the range or the rules.

Products

Liquidity

• Any pair: pick two tokens from your wallet or paste a token address, just like on Uniswap.
• Both Uniswap v3 and v4 pools are supported.
• Popular pairs with well-known tokens are shown with their fee APR. The APR of a pool is calculated from its own trading fees: the fees of the last seven days divided by its liquidity, expressed per year.
• No pool yet for your pair? Choose Uniswap v3 or v4, a fee tier (0.01%, 0.05%, 0.3% or 1%) and a starting price. Tidewell creates the pool on Uniswap and opens your position in it, in one flow. A new pool has no trading history, so its APR is unknown until people trade in it. Leverage is only available on existing pools with a lending market, and a deposit with a single token is not possible in a new pool, because there is nothing to swap against yet.
• While you set your range, a chart shows how much liquidity already sits in the pool at each price, read directly from the pool on-chain. You can see where other liquidity providers are and how much you would share the fees with.
• You set the starting range and choose a static or dynamic range strategy.
• Auto-compound can be switched on or off per position, and you choose which share of the fees is reinvested. The rest stays in your own vault, ready to claim, and is never sent to your wallet automatically.
• Deposit with both tokens, or with just one of them. With one token, Tidewell swaps the part the range needs in the same pool before opening the position.

Leveraged liquidity

Positions with borrowed funds added, on their own page with their own colour and the liquidation price shown before anything is opened, so they are never confused with regular positions. See Leveraged liquidity.

Home

The first screen of the app: protocol figures, the best pools right now, the current staking APR, the best leveraged pool, referrals and revenue, each one click away.

Dashboard

Everything you have in one place: your positions with their value, fees, range and health, your stake in The Well and its earnings, and your referral rewards. You claim fees and rewards from here, change settings or close a position.

Last 30 days

Before you open a position, Tidewell runs your range and rule over the pool's prices of the last 30 days and shows what it would have earned, how often the range would have moved, the time in range and the result after gas and swap costs. Past results are no promise for the future.

The Well (staking)

Stake TIDE without a lock to pay lower fees and to receive a share of protocol revenue. See The token.

Range strategies

Every position, regular or leveraged, has its own range settings.

Static range

The range is always set at the same distance from the price, for example −50% to +100%. When the price leaves the range, a new range with the same distances is placed around the new price.

Dynamic range

The width follows a rule you choose. Available rules: a range that narrows as the price of a token rises, a range that widens when the market becomes more volatile, and a range that stays centred on a moving average instead of the latest price.

Wait for the stock market (Stock Tokens only)

Stock Tokens trade around the clock, but the stock market behind them does not. Outside market hours, prices move on thin trading and often snap back at the open. With this rule the range is not moved while the stock market is closed, unless the price leaves the range by more than 15%. It adds no cost: it only skips moves, so it saves gas and swap fees.

Auto-compound

Earned fees are added back into the position, so it grows over time. Uniswap always pays out all earned fees of a position at once, so a partial reinvest works like this: Tidewell collects the fees into your own vault, adds the share you chose (for example 50%) back into the position, and leaves the rest in your vault as "Ready to claim". Nothing is sent to your wallet until you claim it yourself, and your claimable fees never go back into the position without you. The same happens when a range is moved: the fees collected then are split the same way.

Each rebalance costs swap fees and gas, and turns a temporary loss from price movement into a real one. Very tight ranges rebalance often and can cost more than they earn. To protect users, Tidewell will enforce a minimum range width and a minimum time between rebalances.

Leveraged liquidity

A leveraged position borrows extra tokens and adds them to the position, so it earns fees on a larger amount. Borrowing happens on existing lending markets on Robinhood Chain, mainly Morpho. Tidewell does not hold a lending pool of its own.

• Maximum leverage is 5x, and lower for volatile pairs. Each pair has its own maximum.
• A leveraged position can only be opened if its liquidation price lies outside its range, with at least 5% to spare. If not, the app suggests the highest leverage that is still safe for that range.
• Borrowable tokens depend on what the lending markets offer. Today that is mainly USDG, with WETH in smaller amounts. Other dollar stablecoins and ETH are added where a market with enough liquidity exists.
• Borrowed funds pay interest, which is subtracted from what the position earns.
• Every leveraged position shows its liquidation price. If the value of the position falls too far compared to the debt, the lending market can liquidate it, and you lose part or all of your deposit.

How your funds are held

• Your own vault. Every position lives in a separate vault that belongs to your wallet. Funds of different users are never mixed, so a problem with one token cannot affect anyone else.
• Limited automation. The rules for moving ranges and reinvesting fees live in the smart contracts. A smart contract cannot act on its own, so a keeper sends the transaction that starts each action. The keeper can only rebalance, collect fees and reinvest, and the contract checks every call against your settings and the safety limits. It has no way to withdraw or transfer your funds. Only your wallet can withdraw. If the keeper is ever offline, nothing is lost: your position simply waits, and you can trigger a due action yourself.
• Token checks. When you add a token by address, Tidewell checks for known problems, such as transfer taxes or blocked selling, and warns you or refuses the token.
• Uniswap v4 hooks. Pools without a hook are always allowed. Pools with a hook are only allowed once that hook has been reviewed, because a hook can change how a pool behaves.

Fees and costs

• Protocol fee: 1.5% of the trading fees your position earns. It is never charged on your deposit. For comparison, other automated liquidity managers take 2% to 10% of earned fees (for example Revert 2%, Arrakis v1 2.5%, Gamma 5% to 10%). Stakers in The Well pay up to half of that.
• Gas: every rebalance and compound costs gas on Robinhood Chain. This is paid from the position's own balance, so each position pays for its own activity.
• Borrowing interest: leveraged positions pay interest to the lending market.
• Discount for stakers: stakers pay a lower protocol fee, up to 50% less. See The token.

The token

TIDE launches on Pons, the launchpad on Robinhood Chain, at the same time as the app. There is no pre-sale, no points programme and no free token rewards, because rewards that are paid out in the token itself lead to constant selling. The team holds no reserved or locked allocation of TIDE: the team is paid only from the team and development share of protocol revenue.

Staking without a lock

Staking is live from launch and has no lock: you can unstake at any time. Your tier is set by two things. How much you stake picks the row. How long you have stayed staked picks the column, and it moves up on its own as time passes. Your tier gives a discount on the protocol fee, and a boost on staking rewards.

• Adding more tokens keeps your time staked, so your tier never drops when you add.
• Unstaking is instant. If you unstake part of your tokens, what stays staked keeps its time staked. Only unstaking everything starts the clock over.
• Below 10,000 TIDE or one week staked there is no discount, and rewards count at 1x.

Staking rewards

From launch, 30% of all protocol revenue is set aside for stakers, in the rewards reserve. Payouts go live soon, in ETH rather than TIDE, so stakers never need to sell the token to collect their rewards. Each staker's share is their staked amount multiplied by their tier's boost. Your earnings build up from the moment you stake and are shown in The Well, where you claim them. The Well also shows the current APR for everyone, staked or not, and your own APR once you stake. The APR is the ETH set aside for stakers over the last eight weeks, per year, against the value of all staked TIDE, so it moves with protocol revenue and with how much TIDE is staked.

Buyback and burn

35% of protocol revenue buys TIDE on the market and destroys it, so the supply goes down over time. Burns run every day. Every burn is visible on-chain and listed in the app.

Referrals

Every wallet has its own invite link, made from its address, so there is no sign-up. Someone who joins through a link pays 10% less protocol fee for their first 3 months. The person who invited them receives 20% of the protocol fee that this person pays, for as long as they use Tidewell, in ETH, claimable at any time on the Referrals page and the Dashboard.

The referral share is paid out of the protocol fee before the split below. A wallet cannot invite itself, and a link only counts for wallets that have never used Tidewell before.

Where protocol revenue goes

Protocol revenue comes from two sources: the protocol fee on positions, and the creator fees from the TIDE pool on Pons, which keep coming in after the token graduates. At launch, the TIDE token's fee wallet on Pons is set to the Tidewell revenue contract, not to a person. The keeper claims these fees into that contract automatically, and from there they are treated exactly like protocol fees. Any part paid in TIDE instead of ETH is burned directly. All protocol revenue is held and reported in ETH. In every pair, Tidewell takes its share from the side that holds ETH or a dollar stablecoin, so no swap is needed and no low-value tokens end up in the treasury. In pairs without ETH or a stablecoin, the share is swapped to ETH once it is large enough to cover the cost of the swap.

Both sources are split the same way, after referral rewards have been paid.

Transparency

The Revenue page in the app shows protocol revenue by source, every burn transaction, the treasury, the staking reserve, the safety fund and the team and development fund, each with links to the transactions on the Robinhood Chain explorer. Every payment out of the team and development fund, including the team's pay, is listed there too.

Roadmap

Risks

Using Tidewell can lose you money. Read this before depositing.

Smart contract risk

Tidewell, Uniswap and the lending markets are code. A bug can lead to loss of funds, even after an audit.

Impermanent loss

When prices move, a liquidity position can end up worth less than simply holding the two tokens. Rebalancing makes this loss permanent.

New pools

When you create a pool, you set its starting price. If that price is off from the market, traders buy the cheap side from your position until the price is right, and that difference is your loss. A new pool can also stay without trades for a long time and earn nothing.

Leverage and liquidation

Leverage increases both gains and losses. A leveraged position can be liquidated after a relatively small price move, and you can lose your entire deposit.

Lending markets

Borrowing rates change and can rise sharply. Lending markets can run out of funds to borrow or block withdrawals for a while.

Price feeds

Liquidations depend on price feeds. A wrong or delayed price can trigger a liquidation that should not happen.

Stock Tokens

Robinhood Stock Tokens are not available to residents of some countries, including the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Switzerland. Lending markets for them can pause while the stock market is closed, and prices can jump when it opens again.

Tokens you add yourself

Any token can be added by address. Tidewell's checks cannot catch every scam or broken token.

Automation downtime

If the automation stops for a while, positions are not rebalanced and may stop earning or move closer to liquidation.

The network

Robinhood Chain currently relies on a single operator to order transactions. An outage of the network affects every app on it.

The Tidewell token

The token's price can go to zero. Fee discounts and staking rewards depend on how much the protocol is used.

Regulation

Rules for crypto apps and tokens can change and can limit what Tidewell is able to offer.

Legal notice

This document describes a product in development. It is not investment advice and not an offer to buy or sell anything. Nothing in it is a promise of profit. Tidewell is built on Robinhood Chain and is not affiliated with Robinhood Markets, Inc. Only use Tidewell if it is legal where you live, and never deposit more than you can afford to lose.