Liquidity strategy: why pool depth is the peg's real constraint
The peg can only be as stable as the liquidity behind it. A thin pool means small trades move the price a lot, which forces frequent and larger rebases; a deep pool absorbs flow and keeps HAM near $1. This page explains where that depth comes from and why the protocol builds it the way it does.
The pool trades wHAM, not HAM
Liquidity lives in the Ramses legacy (Solidly) volatile pair WHYPE/wHAM, 0x6cCA1C5a88A391f4e55f69E7BBA13e42A813BaD5. The pool holds the non-rebasing wrapper, not HAM itself — a rebasing balance inside an AMM pair desynchronises the pair's cached reserves from its real ones at every rebase, which is exploitable. Wrapping removes the problem: wHAM balances only move on transfer, so the pair's accounting stays honest and the appreciation shows up in what a wHAM share redeems for rather than in the balance.
The practical consequence for an LP is in Provide liquidity: you are pairing WHYPE against wHAM at 24 decimals, and your LP position does not rebase.
Why not simply pay people to stake?
An early design had a single-sided pool: stake HYPE (or WHYPE), earn HAM. It was removed before launch, deliberately, and the reasoning still governs how incentives are chosen today.
A single-sided giveaway captures none of the staked asset — the protocol hands out free HAM while the staker keeps their HYPE — so every emitted token is uncovered sell pressure with no offsetting buy and no liquidity gained. On a young, thin pool that is how a peg gets driven into a negative-rebase spiral.
Anything that requires a participant to acquire wHAM to take part is the opposite: the acquisition is buy pressure, and what they deposit deepens the pool that defends the peg. That test — does this bring liquidity in, or only send tokens out? — is the one the protocol applies to any proposed incentive.
Where the treasury fits
The treasury is fed by the positive-rebase mint: each positive rebase mints a rebaseMintPerc slice, most of which is sold into the pool for WHYPE (the DAT harvest), with the remainder kept as HAM. Both accrue to the treasury.
That treasury is now substantial relative to circulating supply, and it is measurable — BackingLens reports it directly; see reading the backing mark. Holding the protocol's reserves in the treasury multisig rather than burning them keeps dry powder available to add depth where the peg needs it, at the cost of requiring you to trust the multisig not to pull it. That trust boundary is covered in Governance & security.