On February 24, 2022, Andre Cronje, widely recognized as the "godfather of DeFi", launched Solidly on Fantom. It was the first implementation of ve(3,3), a tokenomics model that combined Curve's vote-escrow mechanism with Olympus' (3,3) game theory to align the interests of liquidity providers, token holders, and protocols in a way that no DEX had done before. But the chain choice wasn't random. It was a practical necessity.
At the time, Ethereum gas fees were brutal. A simple token swap could cost $10-30. During hyped NFT mints or DeFi launches, gas could spike well past $100 per transaction. And ve(3,3) isn't a simple protocol, it involves users performing several on-chain actions: lock tokens, vote on gauge weights, claim bribes, compound rewards, and manage LP positions. That's multiple transactions per epoch, every single week. On Ethereum in 2022, the cost of participating in a ve(3,3) DEX would have priced out all but the largest whales. It simply didn't make economic sense.
So Solidly went live on Fantom, and the ve(3,3) model went on to inspire a generation of DEXes, Velodrome on Optimism, Aerodrome on Base, Thena on BNB Chain, Ramses on Arbitrum, and our own Blackhole, the leading DEX on Avalanche. All of them launched on chains where gas fees were low enough to make the model viable.
Ethereum, the undisputed home of DeFi, never got a native ve(3,3) DEX. Until now.
Ethereum hasn't stood still since 2022. A series of network upgrades has fundamentally changed the gas fee landscape:
- The Merge (September 2022) transitioned Ethereum to Proof of Stake, improving network efficiency.
- The Dencun upgrade (March 2024) introduced proto-danksharding and blob transactions, reducing L2 costs by over 95% and easing congestion on mainnet.
- The Pectra upgrade (2025) brought further optimizations to data availability and validator operations.
- Fusaka (December 2025) introduced PeerDAS for data availability, hiked gas limits to 60M (targeting 150M), and stabilized blob fees, pushing L1 fees to ~$0.01-$0.31 and L2 under $0.01.
The results speak for themselves. Gas fees that once averaged 70+ gwei in early 2024 have dropped to under 1 gwei, often sitting at 0.03-0.5 gwei in early 2026. A complex ve(3,3) transaction that would have cost $50-100 in 2022 now costs a few cents to a couple of dollars at most.
We ran extensive testing on Ethereum mainnet, simulating full ve(3,3) cycles: locking, voting, claiming, compounding, bribing, etc. The verdict was clear. The gas fee barrier that kept ve(3,3) off Ethereum no longer exists.
Yes, Ethereum is still more expensive than Avalanche, Arbitrum, or Base. But the fees are no longer a hard limitation.
Following the Fusaka upgrade, Ethereum L1 has emerged as the go-to chain for ambitious DeFi projects seeking deep liquidity and execution efficiency. Supernova's launch on Ethereum perfectly exemplifies this shift, as highlighted in Ethereum Foundation's Abbas Khan's influential X post documenting the post-Fusaka shift to Ethereum L1 and mentioning Supernova as an example.
Supernova is Ethereum's first native ve(3,3) DEX, purpose-built for the chain that houses the deepest liquidity, the most protocols, and the most active DeFi users in crypto.Supernova builds on the insights gained from our ve(3,3) DEX on Avalanche, which quickly established Blackhole as the leading DEX on the network by TVL, trading volume, and key community metrics, including token distribution, active user participation, and transaction activity soon after launch.
For those new to ve(3,3), here's the core loop:
1. Lock → Vote → Earn
Token holders lock NOVA tokens to receive veNFTs , ERC-721 positions that represent their voting power. Lock durations range from 1 week to 4 years, with longer locks granting more influence over the protocol. In addition, Supernova integrates the enhanced ve3,3 model first launched by Blackhole, enabling users to mint Supermassive veNFTs that provide special perks while simultaneously reducing circulating token supply via a burn mechanism, thereby creating deflationary pressure.
2. Protocols Compete for Liquidity
Instead of renting liquidity through unsustainable farming rewards, protocols can direct NOVA emissions to their pools by incentivizing veNFT holders with bribes. Voters earn trading fees and bribes from the pools they vote for, creating a self-sustaining marketplace for liquidity.
3. Aligned Incentives
The beauty of ve(3,3) is that every participant benefits from cooperation. Lockers who vote on liquidity gauges, earn fees and bribes. Liquidity providers get directed emissions. Protocols get efficient, sticky liquidity. And because emissions are directed by those who have locked their tokens, the people making governance decisions have long-term skin in the game.
Despite being the epicenter of DeFi, Ethereum's DEX landscape is dominated by a handful of AMMs that haven't fundamentally innovated on their liquidity incentive models in years. Liquidity is either mercenary (chasing the highest yield) or locked behind concentrated liquidity positions that require active management without having a sustainable incentive-aligned model.
Projects launching on Ethereum no longer need to spend millions on liquidity mining programs with no guarantee of retention. Through Supernova's bribe marketplace, they can efficiently direct liquidity exactly where it's needed, at a fraction of the cost.
Unlike traditional farming, where yields come from inflationary token emissions that dilute holders, Supernova's yield comes from real trading fees and protocol bribes. veNFT holders earn because they provide a genuine service by directing liquidity to where the ecosystem needs it most.
Supernova combines concentrated liquidity, volatile and stable pools with ve(3,3) governance. Liquidity providers can deploy capital efficiently while protocols can direct that capital through democratic, incentive-aligned voting.
Supernova introduces an MEV protection and redistribution layer that captures extracted profits and routes them back to the protocol’s participants.
How it works:
🌀 Eliminates harmful MEV: makes sandwich attacks and front‑running economically unviable.
💸 Recaptures lost value: internalizes arbitrage profits, which can be redistributed to LPs, users, and the protocol treasury.
🦎 Adaptive fee calculation: By dynamically calibrating fees in response to market indicators (such as volatility, trading volume, and available liquidity) this mechanism enables Supernova to remain competitive and attract higher trading volumes.
🔄 Real-Time Adjustment: The system recalibrates fees after each transaction, ensuring accurate, up-to-date alignment with current market conditions.
Being native to Ethereum mainnet means Supernova plugs directly into the richest DeFi ecosystem in existence. Lending protocols, derivatives platforms, yield aggregators, DAOs can all participate in and build on top of Supernova without bridges, without wrapped tokens, and without cross-chain complexity. All liquidity stays on Ethereum as all transactions get processed and settled on Ethereum main-net for max visibility and transparency.
Supernova isn't our first DEX. Blackhole has been live on Avalanche since July 2025, overtook incumbents on multiple metrics (TVL, Volume, Distribution, Community Engagement, Active Users, fastest growing DEX) and has processed over $25 Billion in volume serving as the liquidity backbone for the Avalanche DeFi ecosystem. We know what works, what breaks, and what needs to be different on Ethereum.
Supernova is built upon the solid foundation established by Blackhole, which has already been audited by multiple leading security firms. Upholding our commitment to safety as a top priority, Supernova has completed an additional comprehensive audit conducted by Paladin.
Beyond traditional audits, Supernova also integrates Chainalysis’ Hexagate platform for real-time threat detection and alerting, delivering continuous on-chain monitoring to further enhance our security posture.
You can explore more details and a link to the full audit report in the Security section of our whitepaper here: link
Supernova launches on Ethereum mainnet with:
- Full ve(3,3) functionality: locking, voting, bribing, and claiming
- Concentrated, volatile and stable liquidity pools
- A bribe marketplace for protocols to compete for liquidity
We’re starting with a controlled "soft launch", focusing on a select group of core pools to ensure a smooth and stable DEX rollout. As the platform matures, we’ll progressively onboard additional partners and expand our pool offerings and core DEX features.
If you’re a founder or core team member of an innovative project interested in collaborating with Supernova, join our Discord and submit a Partnership Request ticket to connect with our team.
This is the DEX that Ethereum was always meant to have. The gas fees that kept ve(3,3) away are gone. The technology is proven. The ecosystem is ready.
Supernova is here. Ethereum's liquidity layer just evolved.
Follow our socials and join our community to stay updated:
Twitter: https://x.com/SupernovaDEX
Discord: https://discord.gg/SupernovaDEX
On February 24, 2022, Andre Cronje, widely recognized as the "godfather of DeFi", launched Solidly on Fantom. It was the first implementation of ve(3,3), a tokenomics model that combined Curve's vote-escrow mechanism with Olympus' (3,3) game theory to align the interests of liquidity providers, token holders, and protocols in a way that no DEX had done before. But the chain choice wasn't random. It was a practical necessity.
At the time, Ethereum gas fees were brutal. A simple token swap could cost $10-30. During hyped NFT mints or DeFi launches, gas could spike well past $100 per transaction. And ve(3,3) isn't a simple protocol, it involves users performing several on-chain actions: lock tokens, vote on gauge weights, claim bribes, compound rewards, and manage LP positions. That's multiple transactions per epoch, every single week. On Ethereum in 2022, the cost of participating in a ve(3,3) DEX would have priced out all but the largest whales. It simply didn't make economic sense.
So Solidly went live on Fantom, and the ve(3,3) model went on to inspire a generation of DEXes, Velodrome on Optimism, Aerodrome on Base, Thena on BNB Chain, Ramses on Arbitrum, and our own Blackhole, the leading DEX on Avalanche. All of them launched on chains where gas fees were low enough to make the model viable.
Ethereum, the undisputed home of DeFi, never got a native ve(3,3) DEX. Until now.
Ethereum hasn't stood still since 2022. A series of network upgrades has fundamentally changed the gas fee landscape:
- The Merge (September 2022) transitioned Ethereum to Proof of Stake, improving network efficiency.
- The Dencun upgrade (March 2024) introduced proto-danksharding and blob transactions, reducing L2 costs by over 95% and easing congestion on mainnet.
- The Pectra upgrade (2025) brought further optimizations to data availability and validator operations.
- Fusaka (December 2025) introduced PeerDAS for data availability, hiked gas limits to 60M (targeting 150M), and stabilized blob fees, pushing L1 fees to ~$0.01-$0.31 and L2 under $0.01.
The results speak for themselves. Gas fees that once averaged 70+ gwei in early 2024 have dropped to under 1 gwei, often sitting at 0.03-0.5 gwei in early 2026. A complex ve(3,3) transaction that would have cost $50-100 in 2022 now costs a few cents to a couple of dollars at most.
We ran extensive testing on Ethereum mainnet, simulating full ve(3,3) cycles: locking, voting, claiming, compounding, bribing, etc. The verdict was clear. The gas fee barrier that kept ve(3,3) off Ethereum no longer exists.
Yes, Ethereum is still more expensive than Avalanche, Arbitrum, or Base. But the fees are no longer a hard limitation.
Following the Fusaka upgrade, Ethereum L1 has emerged as the go-to chain for ambitious DeFi projects seeking deep liquidity and execution efficiency. Supernova's launch on Ethereum perfectly exemplifies this shift, as highlighted in Ethereum Foundation's Abbas Khan's influential X post documenting the post-Fusaka shift to Ethereum L1 and mentioning Supernova as an example.
Supernova is Ethereum's first native ve(3,3) DEX, purpose-built for the chain that houses the deepest liquidity, the most protocols, and the most active DeFi users in crypto.Supernova builds on the insights gained from our ve(3,3) DEX on Avalanche, which quickly established Blackhole as the leading DEX on the network by TVL, trading volume, and key community metrics, including token distribution, active user participation, and transaction activity soon after launch.
For those new to ve(3,3), here's the core loop:
1. Lock → Vote → Earn
Token holders lock NOVA tokens to receive veNFTs , ERC-721 positions that represent their voting power. Lock durations range from 1 week to 4 years, with longer locks granting more influence over the protocol. In addition, Supernova integrates the enhanced ve3,3 model first launched by Blackhole, enabling users to mint Supermassive veNFTs that provide special perks while simultaneously reducing circulating token supply via a burn mechanism, thereby creating deflationary pressure.
2. Protocols Compete for Liquidity
Instead of renting liquidity through unsustainable farming rewards, protocols can direct NOVA emissions to their pools by incentivizing veNFT holders with bribes. Voters earn trading fees and bribes from the pools they vote for, creating a self-sustaining marketplace for liquidity.
3. Aligned Incentives
The beauty of ve(3,3) is that every participant benefits from cooperation. Lockers who vote on liquidity gauges, earn fees and bribes. Liquidity providers get directed emissions. Protocols get efficient, sticky liquidity. And because emissions are directed by those who have locked their tokens, the people making governance decisions have long-term skin in the game.
Despite being the epicenter of DeFi, Ethereum's DEX landscape is dominated by a handful of AMMs that haven't fundamentally innovated on their liquidity incentive models in years. Liquidity is either mercenary (chasing the highest yield) or locked behind concentrated liquidity positions that require active management without having a sustainable incentive-aligned model.
Projects launching on Ethereum no longer need to spend millions on liquidity mining programs with no guarantee of retention. Through Supernova's bribe marketplace, they can efficiently direct liquidity exactly where it's needed, at a fraction of the cost.
Unlike traditional farming, where yields come from inflationary token emissions that dilute holders, Supernova's yield comes from real trading fees and protocol bribes. veNFT holders earn because they provide a genuine service by directing liquidity to where the ecosystem needs it most.
Supernova combines concentrated liquidity, volatile and stable pools with ve(3,3) governance. Liquidity providers can deploy capital efficiently while protocols can direct that capital through democratic, incentive-aligned voting.
Supernova introduces an MEV protection and redistribution layer that captures extracted profits and routes them back to the protocol’s participants.
How it works:
🌀 Eliminates harmful MEV: makes sandwich attacks and front‑running economically unviable.
💸 Recaptures lost value: internalizes arbitrage profits, which can be redistributed to LPs, users, and the protocol treasury.
🦎 Adaptive fee calculation: By dynamically calibrating fees in response to market indicators (such as volatility, trading volume, and available liquidity) this mechanism enables Supernova to remain competitive and attract higher trading volumes.
🔄 Real-Time Adjustment: The system recalibrates fees after each transaction, ensuring accurate, up-to-date alignment with current market conditions.
Being native to Ethereum mainnet means Supernova plugs directly into the richest DeFi ecosystem in existence. Lending protocols, derivatives platforms, yield aggregators, DAOs can all participate in and build on top of Supernova without bridges, without wrapped tokens, and without cross-chain complexity. All liquidity stays on Ethereum as all transactions get processed and settled on Ethereum main-net for max visibility and transparency.
Supernova isn't our first DEX. Blackhole has been live on Avalanche since July 2025, overtook incumbents on multiple metrics (TVL, Volume, Distribution, Community Engagement, Active Users, fastest growing DEX) and has processed over $25 Billion in volume serving as the liquidity backbone for the Avalanche DeFi ecosystem. We know what works, what breaks, and what needs to be different on Ethereum.
Supernova is built upon the solid foundation established by Blackhole, which has already been audited by multiple leading security firms. Upholding our commitment to safety as a top priority, Supernova has completed an additional comprehensive audit conducted by Paladin.
Beyond traditional audits, Supernova also integrates Chainalysis’ Hexagate platform for real-time threat detection and alerting, delivering continuous on-chain monitoring to further enhance our security posture.
You can explore more details and a link to the full audit report in the Security section of our whitepaper here: link
Supernova launches on Ethereum mainnet with:
- Full ve(3,3) functionality: locking, voting, bribing, and claiming
- Concentrated, volatile and stable liquidity pools
- A bribe marketplace for protocols to compete for liquidity
We’re starting with a controlled "soft launch", focusing on a select group of core pools to ensure a smooth and stable DEX rollout. As the platform matures, we’ll progressively onboard additional partners and expand our pool offerings and core DEX features.
If you’re a founder or core team member of an innovative project interested in collaborating with Supernova, join our Discord and submit a Partnership Request ticket to connect with our team.
This is the DEX that Ethereum was always meant to have. The gas fees that kept ve(3,3) away are gone. The technology is proven. The ecosystem is ready.
Supernova is here. Ethereum's liquidity layer just evolved.
Follow our socials and join our community to stay updated:
Twitter: https://x.com/SupernovaDEX
Discord: https://discord.gg/SupernovaDEX
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