❔How to use aqua.network/vote

Vote for the market pairs you would like to receive AQUA SDEX & AMM rewards

The main goal of Aquarius is to incentivize liquidity provision on the Stellar network through the distribution of AQUA tokens via SDEX & AMM rewards. But how are markets chosen for incentivization?

Using our voting mechanism, AQUA holders can allocate their tokens towards voting wallets for Stellar markets. Anyone can set up voting wallets for nearly any asset on Stellar. On creation through our website, an upvote and downvote wallet is created so users can easily vote for or against incentivizing each market.

Liquidity voting is done entirely on the Stellar blockchain through on-chain operations using a similar method as governance voting. This method of voting makes all results verifiable by anyone. Votes are locked into the Stellar blockchain through claimable balances enabling transparency and immutability, with vote tampering being made obsolete.

🧐 How Liquidity Voting Works

Liquidity voting can be done easily through our website section, vote.aqua.network. This voting platform enables AQUA holders to log in with their Stellar wallets, allowing them to designate AQUA towards different voting wallets.

With claimable balances, users decide which market pairs they would like to vote for or against and how long they would like to lock in their votes.

Once a user chooses market pairs & vote durations, the voting platform creates transactions containing claimable balances. The transactions get submitted to the network, where they enter into the next available ledger, usually within 5 seconds. Once submitted, these votes can’t be tampered with or changed, and the votes stay locked due to the parameters set within the claimable balances.

🎁 Reward Distribution

For a market to be eligible for SDEX & AMM rewards, it must receive more than 1% of all votes used for liquidity voting. For example, if the community uses 1 Billion AQUA for liquidity voting, then a market would need >10 million AQUA assigned to it by voters to become eligible for rewards.

This method means there could be potentially 100 markets at a time with AQUA rewards attached to them.

Once a market becomes eligible, the amount of assigned rewards depends on where it ranks against other eligible markets. If a market got 5% of market votes, it would receive twice as much as a market with 2.5% of the votes. So to maximize rewards on your favorite markets, you need to vote for them to boost their ranking.

The max share of daily rewards a market can have is 20%. For example, 7 million AQUA are assigned to SDEX & AMM rewards daily. At the time of writing, this means a market can get a max of 1.4 million AQUA rewards assigned to it each day. Any votes above the 20% limit do not boost the rewards for a market any further.

🌐 aqua.network/vote

Now you know the basics of voting, let’s show you how the website works.

🔑 Log In

You can access the platform by navigating to vote.aqua.network.

Click Sign In, in the top right corner to sync a wallet to the platform.

As of writing, we have three methods available for users.

• WalletConnect, which we highly recommend

• Stellar Laboratory (Ledger, Trezor, Freighter, Albedo, or other tools

• Secret Key

We highly recommend downloading the LOBSTR mobile app, allowing for fast and secure sign-in via WalletConnect. You can learn more about this method in the LOBSTR medium article, LOBSTR & WalletConnect.

Stellar Laboratory uses your public key to sign in, allowing for the creation of XDR’s which users can then sign over in Stellar Laboratory. Users can use many hardware wallets like Ledger & Trezor and extensions like Freighter & albedo with Stellar Laboratory.

It is essential to keep your secret keys safe, secure, and private at all times. Always check the URL is https://vote.aqua.network before inputting any secret keys. The data is saved in your browser only for the visit duration when using the secret key sign-in method. Rest assured, we don’t hold your keys on our servers. Only use this method if you have advanced knowledge of using secret keys and are comfortable putting them on a website.

🔎 Search For Pairs

Once inside the voting platform, you can start exploring Stellar market pairs. You can use the tabs to view the most popular pairs, top voted pairs, or pairs with bribes. To add a pair to your vote, click Add To Vote.

More adventurous users can use the search bar to find specific pairs. Using this option may return pairs that haven’t been voted for before. These will show a Create Pair tab next to them. Adding these to your vote will enable others to vote for this pair. Creating pairs requires up to 5 XLM, which gets used to make new voting wallets containing trustlines for the assets in question.

🗳 Selected Pairs

As you add and create pairs, they get placed in your selected pairs modal. You can navigate to the modal anytime by clicking the “chosen pairs” bubble in the bottom right corner.

Inside the modal, you can adjust the amount of AQUA you dedicate towards voting, then break down how much you would like to allocate to each pair. After you have decided, click next to select the Vote Period.

The vote period allows you to lock in votes for various amounts of time, ranging from 1 week to 6 months.

👎 Downvotes

Next to add to vote, you will also see the 👎 symbol. Clicking this allows you to downvote a pair. If you see a market you disapprove of, you can use downvotes as a way to move it down the reward zone. Using this option will bring a market down in the rankings by taking votes off its total.

To keep track of markets upvotes & downvotes, hover the cursor over the total to see the breakdown.

🎁 Bribes

You can find bribes under certain markets. Anyone, mainly project owners, can place bribes upon markets to incentivize AQUA holders to vote for specific pairs in exchange for daily payouts. You can find over upcoming bribes and bribe creation at vote.aqua.network/bribes.

Voters can check each bribe by clicking the bubble to see how long it’s active and which Stellar assets are offered as incentives. To receive a bribe, all a user needs to do is vote for a market with a bribe attached and ensure they have trustlines enabled for the assets offered as bribes.

⏫ Boosts

Update to 25%

As part of proposal 22, any votes placed on markets paired with AQUA receive a 50% boost. This means a vote of 1 million AQUA would reflect as a 1.5 million vote.

The boost stays in effect until a market holds 5% of total votes inside liquidity voting. Once past 5%, the boost is removed from the market pair.