Locked positions,
made workable.
A liquidity position is capital you can no longer use. Anneal casts it into Ingots — a transferable ERC-20 claim on the position and on the yield still accruing inside it — and routes execution through Flux, a private intent path for crypto and tokenised equities.
- Grade
- ANL-1
- Condition
- Annealed
- Chain
- Base
- Heat no.
- Not cast
Committing capital should not mean losing it.
Provide liquidity and you are paid for it. You also stop being able to do anything else with the money — it is inside a position, in a pool, on a chain, and the only exit is to take the position apart.
Brittle
- Tied to the pool. The position lives at specific ticks in a specific pair. It is not a balance; it is a shape.
- Hard to move. Transferring it means unwinding it, and unwinding it means paying the spread twice and realising whatever the range did to you.
- Yield trapped inside. Fees accrue where you cannot reach them without touching the position that is earning them.
- Illegible to everything else. No other contract can price it, lend against it, or take it as collateral.
Workable
- A balance, not a shape. Ingots are ERC-20. Wallets, DEXs and lenders already know what to do with them.
- Moves without unwinding. Sell the claim; the position underneath is never disturbed and keeps earning for whoever holds it next.
- Yield rides along. Fees accrue to the Crucible, so value per Ingot rises. There is no harvest step to remember.
- Composable by construction. Anything that accepts an ERC-20 accepts this, with no integration work on their side.
What annealing does to metal is exactly this. A cold-worked alloy is hard and brittle because its grain structure is locked with defects. Hold it hot and the structure reorganises — the same metal, still the same alloy, now workable.
Three surfaces, one furnace.
Each one is named for the operation it performs. The names are not decoration — if the metallurgy does not describe what the contract does, the name is wrong.
Ingots
Metal you cannot move is cast into a form you can. Your capital stays in the Crucible; the claim on it travels — transferable, priceable, and accepted anywhere an ERC-20 is.
- Value per Ingot rises as fees accrue
- Redemption in one block, no queue
- Assay splits fees from price drift
Flux
Flux is what a smith adds so a join runs clean — it lifts the oxide off and floats the impurity out. Here it takes the leakage off an order: size, direction and origin stay closed between signing and settlement.
- Intents batched and netted before routing
- Worst-case price fixed under EIP-712
- Router never custodies funds
Alloy
An alloy has properties neither metal had alone. A share that settles on-chain is the same trade — and carries the same caveat, which Alloy prints next to the quote rather than in a footnote.
- Venue clock shown beside every quote
- Simulated against the settlement table
- Issuer risk stated, not implied
From deposit to Ingot, as a heat treatment.
Five operations, in order. The curve below is plotted from the same array that writes the stage table under it, so the picture cannot drift away from its caption.
Provide liquidity.
Keep the liquidity.
-
01
Deposit into a Crucible
One side or both. A single-sided deposit is swapped into the Crucible ratio at execution, routed through Flux so the sizing is not visible before it lands.
-
02
Take delivery of Ingots
Minted pro rata against the Crucible in the same transaction. From this point the position is someone's — not necessarily yours — and it never has to be unwound for the claim to change hands.
-
03
Burn to redeem, whenever
Burning Ingots pulls your share out of the Crucible in the same block, with no keeper and no queue in the path. A stalled rebalancer costs you fee capture, not access.
Checkable, not trusted.
The interesting question about a protocol is not what it promises but what it is structurally unable to do. Three answers, and each one is a property of the code rather than a policy.
- It cannot move your deposit. No admin path withdraws from a Crucible. The rebalancer can change a range; it cannot change an owner.
- It cannot fill you worse than you signed. The intent carries a bound. Settlement outside it reverts — the router can fail, not cheat.
- It cannot be upgraded out from under you. Core contracts are non-upgradeable. A new version is a new deployment you choose to move to.
- Core contracts
- Non-upgradeable
- Admin withdrawal path
- None
- Emergency stop
- Quench
- Withdrawals during stop
- Open
- External audits complete
- 0
- Source published
- At deployment
A Quench freezes rebalancing, minting and routing. It deliberately cannot freeze redemption — a stop that traps depositors is not a safety feature.
Built against, not partnered with.
Nothing here is a relationship. These are the standards, venues and feeds the contracts are written against — the honest version of a wall of logos when you have not shipped yet.
A polycrystal, computed from — seeds. Diffusion in a real metal runs fastest along grain boundaries, and fastest of all at the triple junctions where three grains meet — so that is where the interfaces sit. The — chips are placed at junctions found in the diagram (— of them qualify), not positioned by hand near it.
One furnace, five instruments.
The claim that travels
An ERC-20 against one Crucible. Value per Ingot is the Crucible's assets divided by supply — which is also why it can fall, and the Assay says which part of any move was fees and which was the range.
Netting before routing
Opposing intents cancel inside the batch. Only the residual reaches a public venue, so the market sees the net rather than your hand.
AlloyEquities, with the caveat attached
Tokenised shares route like anything else. What you own is the issuer's obligation, and Alloy says so at the point of the trade.
CrucibleRules, not discretion
Rebalances fire on a published band with a cooldown. Both are on-chain parameters with hard bounds nobody can widen after deployment.
AssayWhat the yield is made of
Fees, incentives and price drift reported separately. A single APR number hides exactly the part a depositor most needs to see.
Common questions
What is an Ingot, exactly?
An ERC-20 token representing a pro-rata claim on one Crucible — the pooled liquidity position and every fee that has accrued inside it. It is not a wrapper around your specific ticks. Your capital is fungible with everyone else’s in that Crucible, which is what makes the claim transferable at all.
Does holding Ingots change what I earn?
No. Fees accrue to the Crucible, and the Crucible is what your Ingots are a claim on, so the value per Ingot rises as fees land. You earn by holding, not by claiming — there is no separate harvest step and no emissions schedule attached.
Can the value per Ingot fall?
Yes, and it is important that the design does not pretend otherwise. Ingot value tracks the Crucible, and a concentrated liquidity position can be worth less than the assets deposited into it after a large price move. Fees offset that; they do not cap it. The Assay panel separates the two so you can see which is which.
Do I have to supply both sides?
No. A single-sided deposit is accepted and swapped into the Crucible ratio at execution, with the swap routed through Flux so the sizing is not visible before it lands. The quote shown before you sign includes that swap.
Who decides when the range moves?
A published rule, not a discretionary manager. The Crucible rebalances when the pool price leaves a band set at deployment, and both the band and the cooldown between rebalances are on-chain parameters with hard bounds. The Protocol page lists them with their limits.
Put the position to work twice.
Read how Ingots are minted and redeemed, or go straight to the parameters and the contracts they will be deployed with.