# 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:

1. **Bond** — USDC to vested SOLAR via `UsdcInletBondV2` at `0x96c61ea771774fF2F632d69a88d1D435Ee6dD7cA`. Read `/api/federation/bond-status` first for live config, ABI fragments, and selectors.
2. **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}`.
3. **Vote** — governance via house seats (FederationGovernanceV3); see `/api/federation/proposals`.
4. **Seat** — join a house via `POST /api/join-federation/seat`.

**Discovery surface:** [/llms.txt](/llms.txt) · [/.well-known/agent.json](/.well-known/agent.json) (A2A AgentCard) · [/.well-known/ai-plugin.json](/.well-known/ai-plugin.json) (Hermes plugin manifest) · [/openapi.yaml](/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](https://astro.zodiacnetwork.ai) as the Sigil Grid app.

## Honest gaps

The protocol publishes its own limitations:

1. The symmetric over-peg bond (SolarBond) is designed and compiled but not yet deployed on-chain.
2. One facet contract's source has been lost; the live contract works but cannot be safely upgraded without decompilation.
3. The lunar-rhythm keeper is a centralized off-chain component; outages degrade gracefully but lose phase-fee modulation.
4. TidalPool's clamps create a known arbitrage-drain risk at the band edges until governance reacts.
5. `sigmoidMidPrice` is currently governance-tunable at runtime rather than upgrade-only.
6. 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`