EticaHub Whitepaper

Version 1.0 — Launch Edition

Abstract

EticaHub is a community-built application layer on the Etica blockchain. It introduces ETX (ticker ETX, name EticaHub, supply 100,000,000, fixed), a hub-and-spoke decentralized exchange where every pair shares ETX as its reserve asset, a research subscription and tipping layer that reads Etica's native proposal contract, and a pre-designed (but not yet deployed) proposal-gated token launchpad that, when activated, will require every new token to open both a token/ETX and a token/ETI pool — structurally funnelling demand to both assets.

This document describes what EticaHub is, what it is not, how the v1 mainnet launch works, and what we explicitly defer to later phases.

1. Independence from the Etica Protocol Core Team

EticaHub is not affiliated with, endorsed by, controlled by, or otherwise operated by the Etica Protocol core team.

The relationship is purely that of any third-party application interacting with a public blockchain:

• EticaHub is a community-built, independent project.
• EticaHub consumes Etica's public smart contracts (ETI, EGAZ, proposal contracts) in the same way any other dapp could — by reading public state and posting transactions. There is no special access, shared multisig, shared treasury, shared roadmap, or shared branding.
• ETX is EticaHub's own asset, not an Etica Protocol asset. It is a separate ERC-20 deployed by the EticaHub team for EticaHub's own governance and fee economics.
• EticaHub's treasury, upgrade authority, and all operational decisions are independent.
• Nothing in this paper, in the EticaHub UI, or in EticaHub's contracts should be interpreted as a statement, commitment, or plan of the Etica Protocol core team.

If you are evaluating EticaHub, evaluate it on its own merits as a community-built dapp. Do not assume any guarantees inherited from the Etica Protocol itself.

2. Design Goals

1. Make ETI more useful. Etica's native asset is ETI. We build tools (a DEX, a research hub, a bridge, and eventually a launchpad) whose cash flows and demand vectors grow ETI's utility as a byproduct.
2. Introduce a reward / coordination token (ETX) without diluting ETI. ETX is a separate asset for EticaHub-specific cash flow capture: swap fees, pool-creation fees, and (later) launchpad fees. It does not replace, fork, or compete with ETI.
3. Hub-and-spoke liquidity. Rather than fragment liquidity across arbitrary pairs, the DEX enforces that every pair shares a common reserve (ETX). This turns ETX into the unit of DEX-wide convertibility.
4. Fair launch, no presale, no allocation. ETX is seeded entirely via on-chain AMM pools opened by the EticaHub treasury with its own capital. There is no private round, public round, airdrop, team allocation, advisor allocation, vesting cliff, or unlock schedule for ETX supply.
5. Defer complexity. Features that require healthy base liquidity (launchpad, staking, emissions) are designed and contract-complete but deliberately not shipped in v1 so that v1 is small, auditable, and low-surface-area.

3. ETX Token

Canonical identity:

ETX is a standard ERC-20 with EIP-2612 permit support. There is no privileged mint authority, no proxy, no pause switch, no blacklist. Once deployed, the contract cannot be modified, and no additional ETX can ever be created.

Initial distribution (at genesis):

From that wallet, a small fraction is immediately used to seed the two launch pools on EticaSwap (see §5). The remainder stays in treasury.

There is no presale, no IDO, no private round, no airdrop, and no public sale of ETX. The only way to acquire ETX post-launch is to swap for it on EticaSwap against ETI or EGAZ.

4. EticaSwap: Hub-and-Spoke DEX

EticaSwap is a Uniswap V2–style automated market maker adapted to enforce a single structural invariant: every pair must include ETX on one side. Users who want to trade, e.g., ETI ↔ EGAZ route through the ETX hub in two hops.

4.1 Contracts

4.2 Fees

The pool-creation fee is charged in ETX, paid by the caller at the moment a new pair is created, and routed to feeTo (the treasury). Key properties:

• The fee is skipped when feeTo == 0x0, so the factory can bootstrap before the treasury wallet is wired. This is used during launch day: the first two pools (ETI/ETX, EGAZ/ETX) are seeded free, then treasury wiring activates the fee for all subsequent pools.
• Addresses in the trustedCreators allow-list are exempt from the fee. This exists so the future launchpad (§7) does not double-charge its creators, since the launchpad already collects its own 250 ETX + 250 ETI fee per launch.
• The fee is adjustable by the feeToSetter governance key via setPairCreationFee(uint256). It may be raised, lowered, or set to zero.
• The router transparently forwards the fee on first-time pair creation: users simply approve a slightly larger ETX budget to the router, no extra transaction is required.

4.3 Hub-and-spoke rationale

A typical AMM allows any token pair, which fragments liquidity across N² potential pairs for N assets. EticaSwap instead forces every asset to share a common quote (ETX). For N assets, this creates exactly N pools and guarantees every asset is reachable from every other asset through the ETX hub. The resulting ETX pool is, by construction, the DEX's deepest and most consequential market, aligning ETX with overall DEX health.

5. Launch Parameters (v1 Mainnet)

5.1 Economic parameters

5.2 Initial liquidity (treasury-provided)

5.3 What "fair launch" means here

• No private sale. Zero ETX sold to anyone before mainnet.
• No public sale / presale / IDO / IEO. Zero ETX sold to anyone during launch.
• No airdrop. Zero ETX distributed for free.
• No team/advisor allocation. 100% of supply is in a single treasury wallet at genesis.
• No vesting schedule. No cliff, no unlock events, no emissions. The full 100M supply exists from block 0; there are no future "unlocks."
• The only way to acquire ETX post-launch is to swap for it on EticaSwap against ETI or EGAZ, at whatever price the AMM quotes at the moment of the trade.

This structure is chosen deliberately to minimize the set of plausible securities-law narratives around ETX. ETX is launched openly, at a small FDV, and the team acquires no special allocation.

5.4 Vercel-hosted UI

The v1 launch happens via three pages on https://eticahub.com:

1. /deploy/etx — one-click MetaMask deploy of ETXToken. Mints 100M to the connected wallet.
2. /deploy/swap — three-click deploy of WEGAZ, EticaSwapFactory(etx), EticaSwapRouter(factory, wegaz).
3. /seed/pools — four-step MetaMask flow (approve ETI, approve ETX, addLiquidity ETI/ETX, addLiquidityEGAZ ETX) that opens both launch pools.

Deployment artifacts (bytecode + ABI) are committed to the repo and reproducible from source.

6. Research Hub

Etica's native proposal contract (EticaCoreProposals) tracks medical-research proposals and their authors on-chain. EticaHub exposes these proposals through a reader UI at /research/proposals (Phase 2, already shipped), and adds two auxiliary primitives:

• Tipping. Visitors can tip a proposal author directly, in ETI or EGAZ, through a hosted contract that forwards to the author address recorded on-chain.
• Subscription. A ResearchSubscription contract sells monthly subscriptions in ETI that grant access to gated content via a simple isActive(subscriber) view. Subscriptions are paid upfront, extensible, and non-transferable.

The Research Hub is live today, independent of the DEX, and does not require ETX to function. It is the first concrete revenue surface for EticaHub's treasury (subscription payments flow to treasury as ETI).

7. Launchpad (Design Preview, Deferred to v2)

A creator-gated token launchpad (ProposalTokenFactory) is designed, implemented, and unit-tested in the repo, but deliberately not deployed on mainnet as part of v1. It will be activated as v2, once the base DEX and ETX have established a reliable price and sufficient liquidity depth.

7.1 Why

A launchpad is most useful once (a) the ETX pool has real depth, (b) the ETI/ETX pool has real depth, and (c) the DEX has seen meaningful organic volume. Launching the launchpad simultaneously with ETX itself would create paper-thin pools for every proposal token and serve no one well. We ship base infrastructure first.

7.2 Design summary (for v2 reference)

7.3 Why dual-pairing (token/ETX + token/ETI)

An earlier single-hub design (ETX-only) was rejected by the community on the grounds that every launched token would concentrate demand onto ETX at ETI's expense. The dual-pairing requirement makes every launch an ETI demand sink: each launch must supply at least 50 ETI plus a 250 ETI fee, and a token/ETI pool is opened alongside the token/ETX pool. The launchpad is structurally accretive to both ETX and ETI, not a dilutive substitute for ETI.

7.4 v1 does not include

• /deploy/launchpad page
• /launch/token author-facing UI
• Any mainnet deploy of ProposalTokenFactory, ProposalToken, or ProposalTokenVesting
• Any factory.setTrustedCreator(launchpad, true) call

All of the above are deferred. When activated, a separate announcement and documentation update will precede it.

8. Bridge (Phase 3, Contracts Ready, Launch Separate)

A production-grade bridge stack (EticaBridgeVault, EticaBridgeMinter, MultisigVerifier, and a Node relayer with per-validator signers and a coordinator) exists in the repo. It is designed to move ETI/ERC-20 assets between Etica mainnet and external chains via a k-of-n multisig of independent validators.

The bridge has its own audit scope and operational requirements (validator recruitment, key custody, monitoring) that are orthogonal to the DEX launch. It is not activated as part of ETX + EticaSwap v1 and will be announced on its own timeline.

9. Governance and Treasury

9.1 Treasury wallet

The EticaHub treasury is an EOA at 0xB2B4bC9d02970A55efF64C2D84c622c87967C19D. It holds:

• Essentially all of the ETX supply at genesis (minus the amount seeded into pools).
• LP tokens for the initial ETI/ETX and EGAZ/ETX pools.
• Any future subscription revenue, swap protocol fees (after feeTo is set), and pool-creation fees.

9.2 Administrative keys

The Factory has two admin keys, both controlled by the treasury address at launch:

The feeToSetter key is intentionally low-ceremony at launch (EOA) to minimize operational risk during the first few weeks. It will be migrated to a multi-signature wallet as a follow-up, announced separately.

9.3 On-chain authority of ETX

ETX itself has no admin — no pause, no mint, no blacklist, no upgrade. Governance in the "change the token" sense is impossible because the contract has no mutable configuration. All governance discretion is exercised over the DEX and treasury, not over ETX.

10. Security

• Foundry test coverage: 57 tests across swap, research, and launchpad contracts, all passing.
• Pinned dependencies: OpenZeppelin v5.1.0 (pinned specifically to avoid Cancun-only mcopy on Etica's Paris-EVM).
• No upgradeability / no proxies: Every contract is deployed at its final implementation. There is no upgrade path that could silently change logic.
• No admin mints: ETX supply is fixed at deploy.
• No external audits at launch. v1 ships without a third-party audit. Users should size their exposure accordingly. Audits are on the roadmap (§11) and will be announced once scoped.

11. Roadmap

Timeline is indicative, not committed.

• v1 — ETX genesis (this launch): ETX deployed, EticaSwap deployed, ETI/ETX and EGAZ/ETX pools seeded, hub-and-spoke invariant active, pool-creation fee switch activated by setting feeTo. eticahub.com routes swaps through the new contracts.
• v1.1 — addresses & docs: deployed addresses wired into the repo's shared addresses module and Vercel env so the public UI auto-picks them up. Launch parameters frozen in docs/launch-parameters.md.
• v1.2 — multisig treasury migration: feeToSetter rotated from the launch EOA to a multi-sig.
• v2 — launchpad activation: ProposalTokenFactory deployed to mainnet, factory.setTrustedCreator(launchpad, true) wired, /launch/token UI shipped. Dependent on ETX establishing meaningful depth (≥ $X, TBD) and community signal.
• v3+ — bridge activation; emissions / staking (if demanded by liquidity): TBD.

12. Risks

This section is non-exhaustive. ETX and EticaHub are experimental software and exposure should be sized accordingly.

• Liquidity risk. The launch pools are intentionally small (~$6 total at NonKYC reference prices). Trades of even a few dollars will move price substantially. Depth will grow only as organic volume and LPs arrive.
• Smart-contract risk. v1 ships without a third-party audit.
• Regulatory risk. Despite the fair-launch structure (no sale, no allocation, no vesting, no promises), any token that has a market value is subject to interpretation by various regulators in various jurisdictions. ETX is not offered for sale anywhere; users who acquire it on EticaSwap do so at their own risk and on their own legal assessment.
• Chain risk. The Etica blockchain itself is an independent L1 with its own validator set, its own client software, and its own operational history. EticaHub inherits all of Etica L1's risks (consensus, liveness, RPC availability, chain reorgs).
• Team risk. EticaHub is a small community-built project. There is no institutional backer and no formal legal entity.

13. FAQ

Is ETX the same as ETI? No. ETI is Etica Protocol's native asset. ETX is EticaHub's own ERC-20, unrelated at the token level. They are connected only by the fact that EticaSwap trades them as the first-opened pool.

Is EticaHub officially endorsed by the Etica Protocol core team? No. See §1.

Can I buy ETX from the team? No. The team does not sell ETX. The only market is EticaSwap.

Why such a small FDV? Small FDV + low LP depth keeps the initial unit price small ($0.00001/ETX) and reflects that real distribution happens post-launch as volume arrives, not at genesis. We explicitly do not want to open at a large implied FDV with no capital behind it.

When does the launchpad open? Not v1. See §7 and §11. No date committed.

Where is the code? https://github.com/iamdexx/etica-hub — monorepo, MIT-licensed.

Appendix A — Canonical addresses

Etica mainnet (chain id 61803). Also mirrored in packages/shared/src/addresses.ts.

Appendix B — Chain parameters

EticaHub is an independent, community-built project. This document describes EticaHub's own design and contracts. It does not speak for, commit, or represent the Etica Protocol core team in any capacity.