How liSLVR works
liSLVR is a liquid, transferable claim on a pool of permanently locked SLVR. There are two ways in: deposit SLVR you already hold, or mine it with ETH. Either way you end up holding liSLVR, whose backing only climbs.
Mining ETH into liSLVR (the Mine tab)
Instead of depositing SLVR, you can pool ETH and mine SLVR from the SLVR grid. Your ETH joins the pool and mines from the very next round; withdraw whatever has not been mined yet at any time.
- Low variance: the pool spreads a little across all 25 squares every round, so it earns steady SLVR rather than making a jackpot-or-nothing bet.
- The pooling edge: because the pool mines every round, it wins single-winner rounds a sporadic solo miner would miss, and it only bets a round it expects to acquire SLVR below the market price.
- Jackpots: a rare round pays the pool a large ETH windfall on top. Shared across everyone in the pool, like every other win.
- What you receive: mined SLVR is auto-converted to liSLVR and staked to you the moment it is mined, so it starts earning the vault's income right away. Nothing to claim.
Mining is a wager: some rounds return nothing. You are buying SLVR at a discount on average, not a guarantee each round. Anything already mined for you is banked and yours.
Do you have to lock SLVR to earn?
Yes. SLVR sitting in a wallet earns nothing. To receive protocol revenue it has to be locked in the vote escrow, which mints a veNFT representing the position. That NFT is staked automatically, and staked positions accrue ETH.
Your share is decided by weight, which is the locked amount multiplied by a lock multiplier. A permanent lock sits at the 4x ceiling; time locks run up to four months at up to 2.5x. Revenue is then split across every staked position in proportion to weight.
Where the ETH actually comes from
The protocol collects fees (mining-round fees and trading taxes) and pushes them to the staking contract, which divides them across all staked weight. It is paid in native ETH, not a wrapped token. Nothing about it is minted or subsidised: it is revenue that already happened.
Yield is therefore variable. It depends on protocol activity and on how much total weight you are splitting it with. Past yield is an observation, not a forecast.
What the vault does with it
Anyone can trigger a harvest. What it claims is split two ways:
- Income: accrues to you per share of liSLVR held, claimable whenever you like. It keeps accruing whether or not you claim, and it follows the tokens correctly: send liSLVR away and the ETH you already earned stays yours.
- Growth: buys SLVR back from the market and adds it to the same permanent lock. Every liSLVR is then backed by more SLVR than before.
Two kinds of earning, and only one is cash
Income is spendable ETH. Rising backing is not: it means each liSLVR is a claim on more SLVR, which you realise by selling the token. Both are returns; conflating them is how people end up surprised.
How the compounding half is spent
Today the growth half of revenue does one thing: buybacks. It buys SLVR on the market and locks it, and auto-compound rides the same path. Simple, predictable, and every purchase raises backing immediately.
The vault also has an on-chain dial to route some of that revenue into mining instead, when mining acquires SLVR cheaper than buying it. It is turned off for now; if it is turned on later, the change is a published owner call, and losses would only ever cost ETH, never locked SLVR, so backing per liSLVR cannot fall either way.
Auto-compound, and what the keeper can do
You can opt in to having your claimed ETH bought back into SLVR and returned as more staked liSLVR, instead of collecting it by hand. It is off by default, you set the flag yourself, and turning it off takes effect immediately: the contract reads it at the moment of the claim, not when the keeper builds its list.
Runs are batched: everyone opted in is pooled into a single swap rather than one swap each. That is cheaper per person and gets a better price, since one larger trade eats less slippage than many dust trades.
The keeper that runs it chooses when, and the slippage floor the swap must beat. It cannot enrol you, it cannot reach your staked principal, and it cannot send the proceeds anywhere but your own position: the contract stakes them to the address that contributed the ETH. Its power is timing, not custody.
There is no redemption
This is the most important thing on the page. Deposited SLVR is locked permanently: it is burned into the lock and the position is soulbound, so it can never be transferred, sold, or unwound. Not by you, and not by the protocol.
What you hold instead is liSLVR, which is transferable. Exiting means selling it on the secondary market, at whatever price that market offers, which can be below backing. If there is no liquidity, there is no exit.
Deepening that market is on the roadmap: once the vault reaches higher TVL, a share of protocol revenue will reward liSLVR/SLVR liquidity providers. The vault already has the revenue bucket for it (up to 25% of each harvest, currently set to zero), so turning it on is a published owner call, not a new contract.
What can go wrong
- Yield falls: Protocol revenue is not guaranteed, and total staked weight can rise. Both reduce what the vault earns.
- liSLVR trades below backing: A liquid claim on an illiquid asset can trade at a discount. Backing is a floor on value only if someone will pay it.
- Mining loses: Mining rounds can lose. That applies to ETH you pool on the Mine tab, and to the vault itself if growth mining is ever turned on. Losses cost ETH, never locked SLVR, so backing per share does not fall.
- Smart contract risk: The vault is immutable and unaudited today. It holds a position that can never be moved.
- Auto-compound buys at the keeper's timing: If you opt in, you are handing over the choice of when your ETH is spent and at what floor. A bad market moment is a worse fill than you might have picked. Claiming by hand keeps that choice; it is why the feature is opt-in rather than default.
Vault contract: 0xb06a7A96d7fbfDCC64AeE0F0B185204b66E41b3B
