Aquarius voting
How ICE holders direct SDEX and AMM rewards by voting for markets — eligibility threshold, ranking, and the reward cap.
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How ICE holders direct SDEX and AMM rewards by voting for markets — eligibility threshold, ranking, and the reward cap.
Aquarius lets the AQUA-holding community vote on where liquidity incentives should flow across the Stellar order book DEX and the Aquarius AMM. Voting power comes from locking AQUA into ICE: users place ICE votes on the markets they value most, and markets that gather enough votes become eligible for Stellar DEX (SDEX) and AMM rewards.
Learn more about the two reward streams:
SDEX Rewards – distributed automatically every hour to liquidity providers on the Stellar order book.
AMM Rewards – accrued every block by liquidity providers, claimed manually.
Voting happens entirely on the Stellar blockchain, so votes are immutable and verifiable by anyone. The system is built on the claimable balance operation: voters lock ICE in claimable balances and reclaim it when they withdraw their votes.
When you select market pairs and commit ICE to them, the voting platform generates transactions containing claimable balances. They are submitted to the Stellar network and processed in the next available ledger (typically within 5 seconds). Once submitted, votes cannot be altered, and they remain locked according to the parameters of the claimable balances.
Votes, rewards, liquidity, and bribes form one circuit:
Voters direct emissions, emissions attract liquidity, liquidity generates trading fees, and a share of those fees flows back to voters as protocol bribes — while projects can join the circuit directly with external bribes.
For a market to qualify for SDEX and AMM rewards, it must receive at least 0.5% of all votes cast in liquidity voting, and both assets must be whitelisted in the Asset Registry. For example:
If 1 billion AQUA is used for liquidity voting, a market needs more than 5 million AQUA in votes to become eligible.
At the 0.5% threshold, up to 200 markets can receive AQUA rewards at the same time.
Once eligible, a market's reward share follows its ranking: a market with 5% of total votes earns twice as much as one with 2.5%.
A single market's daily reward share is capped at 10%. With 7 million AQUA allocated daily to SDEX and AMM rewards, one market can receive at most 700,000 AQUA per day. Votes beyond the cap don't increase that market's rewards — the excess is not converted into emissions and is not redistributed to other markets. As a result, the total distributed per day can be below the daily allocation.
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