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Everything about WhaleHub — BLUB, how the yield is earned, security and custody, staking, vaults, ICE governance, and troubleshooting.
Last updated April 2026. If your question isn't here, ask in Telegram and we'll add it.
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WhaleHub is a yield optimization protocol on Stellar. You deposit AQUA, the protocol pools it with every other depositor's AQUA, and that combined position is used to earn the highest possible returns from the Aquarius liquidity network. Everything runs on Soroban smart contracts on Stellar mainnet.
The simplest real-world analogy is a professionally managed investment fund. You hand over capital, the fund deploys it across strategies most individuals can't efficiently access on their own, and you earn a share of the results. The difference here is that it's fully on-chain, non-custodial, and verifiable in real time.
Crypto-native analogy: WhaleHub is to Stellar what Convex is to Ethereum's Curve ecosystem. Same pattern, same purpose.
Anyone holding AQUA who wants meaningful yield without doing the manual work themselves. Managing a competitive AQUA position yourself means locking tokens for up to 3 years, voting every epoch, tracking bribe markets, and re-locking as ICE decays. WhaleHub does all of that for you at scale.
If you'd rather spend zero hours on your AQUA position and still earn an amplified rate, you're the target user.
Yes. The staking contract has been through multiple on-chain upgrades. The protocol is actively managing an ICE position, voting every epoch, and auto-compounding rewards to stakers 24 times a day.
The protocol handles everything after the deposit: ICE locking, voting, reward claiming, and compounding.
No hard minimum on the protocol side. Stellar has a small XLM reserve requirement per trustline (roughly 0.5 XLM per asset), so you'll want enough XLM in your wallet to cover network reserves plus transaction fees.
Two fee tiers depending on what you do with your AQUA:
The treasury share is reinvested to grow the ICE position and buy BLUB from the open market. Both ultimately benefit users: a bigger ICE position means a larger share of future rewards, and treasury buys create ongoing demand for BLUB. There are no separate deposit fees, withdrawal fees, or subscription fees.
BLUB is WhaleHub's liquid staking token. When you deposit AQUA, you receive BLUB at a 1:1 ratio. BLUB represents your share of the protocol's yield-generating position.
Closest precedents: stETH (Lido) on Ethereum, rETH (Rocket Pool), cvxCRV (Convex). Liquid staking tokens that you can hold, trade, or stake elsewhere while the underlying position does the work.
AQUA on its own earns nothing unless you personally lock it into ICE, vote every epoch, and manually claim rewards. BLUB is AQUA already put to work. Holding BLUB gives you access to the pooled yield WhaleHub generates without any manual management on your part.
BLUB mints 1:1 when you deposit AQUA, and that ratio stays fixed. Yield is distributed to stakers separately rather than accumulating inside the token's redemption value. This is a design choice: it keeps BLUB straightforward to account for, trade, and integrate elsewhere.
No. 90% of the AQUA you deposit is committed to ICE governance to generate the yield. There's no native redemption path, and that's by design.
This is how every productive liquid staking token works. You can't directly redeem cvxCRV for CRV — the underlying CRV is vote-locked forever. The exit is always the open market.
For BLUB, you exit via the AQUA/BLUB pool on Aquarius AMM, or via LOBSTR, or via Stellar's DEX. The peg holds because of three things working together: protocol-owned liquidity, constant treasury buying pressure, and real yield that makes BLUB worth accumulating.
Three mechanisms push the peg back toward 1:1:
Yes, identical. BLUB is fully fungible. Whether you acquired it by depositing AQUA or by buying it on the DEX, you can stake it, earn yield, and exit the same way. There is no second class of BLUB.
Yes. Unstaked BLUB is fully liquid. You can trade it, transfer it, or hold it. Yield only accrues to BLUB that's actively staked in the WhaleHub staking contract.
Three real sources, all earned from actual protocol activity:
No token emissions. No inflationary printing. Yield is earned, not manufactured.
Auto-compounding runs 24 times per day, every hour. You don't need to claim, restake, or do anything manually. Rewards get reinvested into your position before you'd even notice they arrived, which is why the effective (compounded) APY is meaningfully higher than the base APY.
Stakers receive 70% of POL yield (30% to treasury). Vault depositors receive 85% auto-compounded (15% to treasury).
No. APY is a function of total ICE in circulation, voting participation, bribe market health, and pool performance. It moves with market conditions. We publish live APY figures in the app rather than promising fixed rates, because honest DeFi yield is variable yield.
Compounding frequency. A rate that compounds 24 times a day produces materially higher returns over a year than the same rate claimed once a month. WhaleHub's automation captures this compounding advantage for every staker, regardless of position size. A solo staker would have to pay gas to claim and redeploy that often, which would eat the benefit. The pooled model makes it economical for everyone.
Yes. It comes from real economic activity: governance reward distributions, bribe market payments, and trading fees. None of it is emissions-based or dependent on new deposits to pay old ones.
No. WhaleHub is fully non-custodial. Every user deposit lives in a Soroban smart contract on Stellar mainnet. You can verify the contract address and balances on stellar.expert at any time. No team member can unilaterally move user funds.
The contract uses a split admin/manager multisig architecture. Critical operations (upgrades, parameter changes) require multiple signatures. No single key can change core logic, drain funds, or pause the protocol unilaterally.
Honest list, in order of priority:
If anyone is telling you a DeFi protocol has no risk, they're either lying or confused. We list these up front because that's how responsible DeFi operates.
WhaleHub never asks for your private keys or seed phrase. The app only requests transaction signatures through your wallet extension. Anyone asking for your seed phrase is a scammer, full stop.
On-chain activity on Stellar is public, like every public blockchain. WhaleHub doesn't collect off-chain identifying data beyond what's needed for the app to function. We don't sell user data, we don't track off-chain behavior, we don't run analytics on individual wallets.
In the app, go to the staking section, enter the amount, and confirm the transaction in your wallet. Staked BLUB starts earning yield immediately.
7 days from the time of staking. Before 7 days elapse, you can't begin the unstake process.
After the 7-day minimum has elapsed, initiate an unstake in the app. There's then a 10-day cooldown before the tokens become withdrawable. Once the cooldown completes, you claim your BLUB back to your wallet.
90% of your deposit's economic backing sits in ICE locks at maximum duration. The protocol needs predictability in how much BLUB is committed versus preparing to exit, so the cooldown prevents mass exits from destabilizing pool dynamics and voting positioning.
Real-world analogy: a notice-period savings account. You agree to give notice before withdrawing so the institution can manage liquidity on their side. The yield compensation is higher than an instant-access account because of that predictability.
Yes. If you haven't staked, BLUB is fully liquid. You can trade it on the AQUA/BLUB pool or via LOBSTR at any time. The cooldown only applies when you're exiting a staked position. If you need immediate liquidity, the market path is always open.
There's a 7-day cooldown between reward claims and a cap of 100K BLUB per claim call. For typical position sizes, this is invisible. Very large positions may spread claims across multiple transactions.
Yes. Additional stakes add to your position without resetting any existing timers on already-staked tokens. Each stake has its own 7-day minimum lock from the time it was added.
A vault is WhaleHub's auto-compounding liquidity wrapper. You deposit a token pair into an Aquarius AMM pool through WhaleHub, and instead of earning static fees and rewards that sit unclaimed, the vault automatically harvests and reinvests those earnings 24 times every day — every hour, around the clock.
The underlying pool is on Aquarius. The difference is everything that happens after your initial deposit: claiming, swapping, and redepositing runs automatically without you doing anything or paying gas.
Currently one vault: BLUB–AQUA (StableSwap pool). More vaults are coming soon — additional Stellar AMM pairs are actively being evaluated and will be added as the protocol expands.
Two separate products with different mechanics and risk profiles:
BLUB Staking: You deposit BLUB into the staking contract. You earn yield from ICE rewards, bribes, and POL fees. No impermanent loss exposure. Your principal is denominated in BLUB.
AQUA/BLUB Vault: You deposit into the AMM pool. You earn swap fees plus AQUA pool rewards, auto-compounded 24x daily. This is LP exposure, so it carries impermanent loss dynamics.
Staking is simpler with no LP exposure. Vault LPing typically produces higher headline yield in exchange for carrying pool dynamics.
Two layers: compounding mechanics and structural advantages.
Compounding math. The base APY shown on Aquarius represents what you'd earn if you claimed rewards once at the end of the year. WhaleHub reinvests those rewards 24 times per day. The same pool, the same rewards — but the reinvestment frequency multiplies your effective return significantly:
The gap widens dramatically as base rates increase. On high-APY pools, WhaleHub can more than double the effective return compared to leaving rewards unclaimed.
Why you can't just compound manually. Each compound cycle is 3-4 Stellar transactions: claim, swap, deposit. Doing this 24 times per day would cost real transaction fees and your time. WhaleHub's pooled model makes it economical for every depositor regardless of size, because the cost is shared across all vault participants.
Structural advantages:
Where 17,520 = 48 compounds per day × 365 days.
Example: A 100% base APY pool: (1 + 1.0 / 17,520)17,520 − 1 = 1.715 = 171.5%.
That extra 71.5% is not from a higher base rate. It's purely from reinvestment frequency. Same pool, same rewards, same market — only the compounding frequency changes.
When you provide liquidity to a pool, your position rebalances as the two asset prices diverge. If AQUA moves significantly against BLUB, your pool position can end up worth less than if you'd held both tokens separately. This is impermanent loss — standard LP risk across all AMMs, including WhaleHub vaults.
Real-world analogy: LPing is like being a market maker on a currency pair. You profit from trading volume (fees) but bear the risk that the exchange rate moves against your inventory.
Swap fees and AQUA rewards flow continuously to LPs. For pairs with healthy trading volume and reward distribution, fee and reward income typically more than covers impermanent loss over reasonable time horizons. That said, impermanent loss can still outweigh earnings in extreme divergence scenarios. Know the risk before you deposit.
Yes. Single-sided deposits are supported. The protocol handles the internal swap to balance the pair.
No. Vault deposits can be withdrawn at any time with no withdrawal fee and no cooldown. You receive both tokens in the current pool ratio.
No. The app only shows positions held inside WhaleHub contracts. If you want to move existing LP into the WhaleHub vault, withdraw from aqua.network first, then deposit via the WhaleHub app.
ICE is Aquarius's governance token. You acquire ICE by locking AQUA, with more ICE granted for longer locks. ICE is used to vote on which liquidity pools earn AQUA rewards each epoch, and voting power scales with your ICE holdings.
Longer locks produce more ICE per AQUA locked. A 5-year lock (the maximum on Aquarius) gives the full 10x voting multiplier. Short locks produce proportionally less ICE. WhaleHub locks at maximum duration every time, which is the entire reason our voting weight is disproportionately large for the AQUA we hold.
ICE decays over time. As the unlock date approaches, the ICE boost degrades. WhaleHub re-locks before decay matters, maintaining maximum-duration positions on a continuous basis. From the protocol's perspective, the AQUA is effectively committed indefinitely, always at peak boost.
Votes are directed to support the AQUA/BLUB pool's place in the reward zone. This is directly aligned with staker interests: more rewards flowing to the AQUA/BLUB pool means more AQUA earned by the protocol, which means more yield distributed to BLUB stakers.
The protocol's economic structure makes misaligned voting self-defeating. Voting for anything other than AQUA/BLUB pool support would reduce WhaleHub's own revenue and stakers' yield. The incentives are tightly aligned with staker outcomes by design.
Soroban, Stellar's Rust-based smart contract runtime. Contracts compile to WASM and run natively on Stellar mainnet. The staking contract has been through multiple production upgrades using Stellar's on-chain WASM upgrade mechanism with multisig authorization.
Freighter, LOBSTR, and WalletConnect. These cover the major Stellar wallet providers. Hardware wallet support is available through the wallets themselves (Ledger integration through Freighter, for example).
Stellar transactions are extremely cheap, typically a fraction of a cent per operation. This is one of the reasons Stellar works well for auto-compounding strategies that would be uneconomic on high-fee chains.
Contract upgrades require multisig authorization and are executed on-chain. Every upgrade is publicly recorded and verifiable.
Yes. BLUB is a standard Stellar asset. It can be traded on Stellar DEX, used in AMM pools on Aquarius, and integrated into other Stellar DeFi protocols.
WhaleHub is an independent third-party protocol that integrates with the Aquarius AMM and ICE governance system. Not operated by the Aquarius team.
WhaleHub is an independent project building on Stellar, pursuing SCF Build Award funding, but operated independently.
Primary liquidity is the AQUA/BLUB pool on Aquarius AMM. BLUB is also tradeable via LOBSTR (which routes through Aquarius and Stellar Classic DEX) and directly on Stellar's on-chain DEX.
Reach out on Telegram or email. Be specific about what you're proposing. Protocol integrations that benefit BLUB holders and expand Stellar DeFi composability are actively welcomed.
The app reads balance data from the Stellar network. Occasionally there can be a brief delay between a transaction confirming and the new balance appearing in the UI. Refreshing the page usually resolves it. If the issue persists after a hard refresh and cache clear, message us on Telegram with your wallet address and we'll investigate.
Most common causes, in order:
Check that BLUB has a trustline set in your wallet. Stellar requires assets to be explicitly trusted before they can be held. Once the trustline is added, BLUB should appear.
Try a hard refresh (Ctrl+Shift+R or Cmd+Shift+R). Clear browser cache for app.whalehub.io. Try a different browser. If the problem persists, message us on Telegram so we can check for any ongoing issues.
Telegram is fastest: t.me/whalehubdefi. Include:
Genuine bug reports get priority, especially from power users. We'll get back to you quickly.
Drop it in Telegram: t.me/whalehubdefi. We add new questions to this FAQ as they come up.
If it's not answered here, the team responds fast. Ask in the community and we'll add it to the FAQ.
WhaleHub is live on Stellar mainnet. Nothing in this document constitutes financial advice. Understand what you're holding before you deposit.