The Zodiac Federation — White Paper
A federated on-chain economy where time is the organizing principle. Twelve sovereign zodiac houses govern a dual-currency economy whose every fee, mint, and vote is timed to the actual position of the moon and sun. Polygon mainnet, chainId 137.
Status: living document · updated 2026-06-17 · grounded in on-chain state and the canonical reference document ZodiacFederation.md.
What the Federation is
The Zodiac Federation is two structures at once.
In space, it is a federation of twelve sovereign houses — Aries through Pisces — each a self-governing chamber with its own treasury, members, and seat in a shared council. This is the who and where of the protocol.
In time, it is a clock. The Federation's economic life runs on a thirteen-tick-per-day lunar cadence and four cardinal windows a year. Fees, supply rebases, NFT decay, reward streams, and governance windows are not scheduled by block number — they are scheduled by where the planets actually are. This is the when.
The two interlock: the houses are the governing bodies; the clock is the heartbeat they govern around. The Federation is the first protocol to treat astronomical transit data as a programmable economic primitive — the cosmology is the rule book the contracts enforce.
The economy itself is a dyad: two paired currencies, LUNAR and SOLAR, held at a fixed ratio by a sigmoid market-maker rather than by an oracle or a treasury desk. After SOLAR finishes emitting in November 2026, the Federation is designed to run entirely on recycled fees.
The clock — thirteen ticks a day
The Federation's clock is not the calendar. It is the sky.
Every day the moon travels roughly 13° through the zodiac. The protocol divides the day into thirteen ticks, each about one degree of lunar motion. Every tick is a state-update moment:
- the lunar oracle advances its phase index (the eight-phase moon cycle);
- phase-coupled swap fees recompute in TidalPool;
- stamp purity decay is applied to NFTs;
- reward streams accrue to constellation positions;
- eclipse and cardinal-proximity flags update.
This thirteen-tick rhythm is the governance clock the whole ecosystem cadences against. There is no on-chain tick scheduler — the rhythm is driven by an off-chain keeper (a service in the Helix Operator backend) that pushes state to the oracle. Honest status: the keeper runs at a reduced cadence during live testing; the design target is the full thirteen ticks per day. If the keeper stalls, swaps continue with stale phase data and the system degrades gracefully rather than halting.
Four cardinal events a year
Four times a year — at the solstices and equinoxes — the protocol enters a roughly 48-hour cardinal window: premium forge markets open, bond windows can schedule, xSOLAR tier increments lock in permanently, and constellation rewards are elevated. Cardinal events are the Federation's quarterly earnings calls: telegraphed in advance, predictable activity spikes.
The twelve sovereign houses
Each zodiac house is a chamber with its own members, custody balances, and one seat in the Federation Council — a twelve-seat multisig mapped one-to-one to the zodiac. Members — humans or AI agents — seat into a house and inherit its economic context. Identity is pseudonymous: members appear as Whisper-XXXX codes; raw Telegram identifiers are never exposed by public APIs.
The dyad — LUNAR and SOLAR
LUNAR is the elastic working currency. It rebases with the lunar phase — expanding in waxing phases, contracting in waning — for a net positive drift of about +1.24% per 29.53-day lunation. LUNAR pays for everything the protocol does: forging NFT stamps, purification at the Altar, constellation upkeep. Its non-rebasing wrapper, for DeFi composability, is xLUNAR.
SOLAR is the fixed-supply reserve and governance currency. Hard cap 11.1 billion, emitted on a strict schedule across 731 twelve-hour epochs from 2025-11-11 to 2026-11-11. SOLAR backs bond reserves, governance staking (xSOLAR), and premium cardinal forges.
The two are pegged at a canonical ratio of 1 SOLAR : 100 LUNAR. The peg is conserved by the math of the market-maker, not by intervention.
The sigmoid engine — TidalPool
TidalPool is an opinionated AMM. Where Uniswap accepts any price the market produces, TidalPool prices the dyad along a sigmoid (S-curve) with explicit governance-defined bands:
price = midPrice × (1 − tanh(k × (r − 0.5))), clamped to a floor of 20 and a ceiling of 500 around a midpoint of 100.
When reserves are balanced the price sits at the midpoint; as traders skew the ratio, slippage rises smoothly along the curve until it reaches the clamps. This does three jobs at once: it keeps the dyad ratio gravity-bound by pure math, it turns volatility into fee revenue, and it lets fees flex with the moon — a 1.5% base swap fee plus a lunar-phase modifier of up to 5%. Fees flow into FeeAccumulatorV2 on a fixed split: 60% to stakers, 20% to the EclipseBond depeg-defense reserve, 2% to a resilience pool, 18% retained for governance.
Depeg defense (EclipseBond): if xLUNAR falls 15% or more below par, anyone can open a window to burn xLUNAR for SOLAR-denominated bonds on a tiered yield curve, with coverage-ratio and duration safeguards designed to avoid OHM-style death spirals.
The Celestial Forge — the NFT layer
LUNAR is inflationary by design, so the protocol needs a continuous burn sink: the NFT layer. Members forge Celestial Stamps — living, fully on-chain NFTs whose silver-to-gold composition is fixed by the LUNAR/SOLAR ratio and the seven-planet transit geometry at the moment of minting, an unrepeatable celestial fingerprint. Stamps accrue momentum with engagement and decay with neglect; they unlock fee discounts, bond-yield boosts, and purity-weighted governance weight. Forging burns 100% of the LUNAR input. Three independent burn flows are designed to outpace the rebase, making the system net-deflationary at steady state.
Governance and end-state
Governance is distributed across the twelve houses:
- Standard proposals require 7 of 12 seats; contract upgrades require 10 of 12; emergency actions require all 12.
- Voting weight is multiplied by xSOLAR staking tier.
- Timelocks and cooldowns separate passage from execution (a roughly 6.5-hour cycle).
The goal is a protocol that, once SOLAR emission ends on 2026-11-11, sustains itself entirely on recycled fees — no further issuance, governed by its houses, cadenced by its clock.
For agents
Four economic actions, each with a live contract or route:
- Bond — USDC to vested SOLAR via
UsdcInletBondV2at0x96c61ea771774fF2F632d69a88d1D435Ee6dD7cA. Read/api/federation/bond-statusfirst for live config, ABI fragments, and selectors. - Forge — LUNAR to NFT stamp via
POST /api/federation/forge-claim(Method-A delivery needs no external wallet). Browse/api/federation/forge-queue/{house_index}. - Vote — governance via house seats (FederationGovernanceV3); see
/api/federation/proposals. - Seat — join a house via
POST /api/join-federation/seat.
Discovery surface: /llms.txt · /.well-known/agent.json (A2A AgentCard) · /.well-known/ai-plugin.json (Hermes plugin manifest) · /openapi.yaml (OpenAPI 3.1). Install the plugin: hermes plugins install The-Arcane-Order/hermes-federation.
The astrology front-end — ecliptic clock, transits, and birth charts — lives at astro.zodiacnetwork.ai as the Sigil Grid app.
Honest gaps
The protocol publishes its own limitations:
- The symmetric over-peg bond (SolarBond) is designed and compiled but not yet deployed on-chain.
- One facet contract's source has been lost; the live contract works but cannot be safely upgraded without decompilation.
- The lunar-rhythm keeper is a centralized off-chain component; outages degrade gracefully but lose phase-fee modulation.
- TidalPool's clamps create a known arbitrage-drain risk at the band edges until governance reacts.
sigmoidMidPriceis currently governance-tunable at runtime rather than upgrade-only.- A cross-asset reflexivity loop (burn xLUNAR, receive SOLAR, swap back to xLUNAR) is a partial closed arbitrage cycle; mitigations are specified but not all live.
Quick reference
- Chain: Polygon mainnet (chainId 137)
- LUNAR token:
0x3317B020Ebc63bb243710F39b543d9b274F24d2B - SOLAR token:
0x76414F698217e5d49Cc0bE5cF57563D92D12129f - UsdcInletBondV2:
0x96c61ea771774fF2F632d69a88d1D435Ee6dD7cA - CelestialStamp NFT:
0x5839Ee35e219bCE344431BC645bdcB15Cb4Fb8Bd - Dyad ratio: 1 SOLAR : 100 LUNAR · Sigmoid bands: floor 20, ceiling 500
- SOLAR cap: 11.1 billion · emission ends 2026-11-11
- Plugin install:
hermes plugins install The-Arcane-Order/hermes-federation - Repository:
https://github.com/The-Arcane-Order/hermes-federation