How Aborean Works: ABX, veABX Locking, and the Ascension Rebate

Aborean is a decentralized exchange built on Abstract, organized around a vote-escrow token model. Users lock ABX, the protocol's governance token, to receive veABX, which directs where new token emissions go and earns a share of trading fees in return — what Aborean's documentation calls a "flywheel": veABX holders vote emissions toward specific pools, deeper pools improve trade execution, more volume generates fees, and those fees return to the voters who backed the pool. Swap fees are dynamic, ranging from 0.04% in high-liquidity pools to 1% in volatile or low-liquidity pools, split between veABX voters and liquidity providers, per the same docs.

How ABX and veABX work

Locking. ABX is an ERC-20 token; locking it in Aborean's vote-escrow contract converts it into veABX, an ERC-721 NFT position, according to Aborean's tokenomics docs. Voting power scales with lock length up to a four-year maximum: veABX received equals ABX locked multiplied by lock duration divided by four years, per Aborean's locking docs. The docs give worked examples — 100 ABX locked for four years yields 100 veABX; the same 100 ABX locked for two years yields 50 veABX, for one year 25 veABX, and for six months 12.5 veABX. A lock can also be set to Auto-Max, which treats the position as a permanent four-year lock for voting-power purposes and can be toggled on or off at any time.

Voting. Abstract's epoch runs weekly, starting Thursday 00:00 UTC. Each epoch, veABX holders vote to direct that week's ABX emissions toward specific liquidity pools, and also vote on protocol parameters such as fee structures and tail-emission rates, per Aborean's voting docs and governance docs. Longer locks carry proportionally more voting weight.

Rewards. Voters earn a share of the prior epoch's trading fees plus any external incentives partner protocols deposit on a pool, distributed by voting weight on that specific gauge — Aborean's docs state the reward as total incentives multiplied by a voter's veABX divided by total veABX voting that gauge, claimable once the epoch turns over. Liquidity providers separately earn ABX emissions on top of trading fees by staking LP tokens into gauges, per Aborean's docs. Aborean also offers two automated vault types for holders who don't want to manage locks or votes directly — one auto-compounds ABX into a maximum-length veABX lock, the other auto-votes veABX toward the highest-yielding gauges and harvests rewards weekly — according to Aborean's vaults docs.

ABX emissions follow a fixed, three-phase weekly schedule, per Aborean's emissions docs:

• Growth (weeks 1–14): emissions start at 10,000,000 ABX per week and grow 3% weekly, compounding to roughly 14.76 million ABX by week 15.
• Decay (week 15 onward): emissions fall 1% per week until they drop below roughly 8.97 million ABX per week.
• Tail (once weekly emissions fall below that floor): emissions convert to a fixed percentage of total supply, starting at 0.67% annually and adjustable by governance vote within a 0.01%–1% annual range. Five percent of total emissions are reserved to fund development, audits, and infrastructure.

The Ascension rebate program

On July 22, 2026, Aborean posted on X that "the Ethereum Ascension rebate program has officially filled, with 80 million veABX tokens locked," adding a line from founder nativeaborean: "Begin the ascent." Aborean's own app now labels that page "Ascension — Ethereum veABX rebate" and marks it "Legacy" — consistent with a program that has stopped accepting new participants rather than one still running.

That program is what Aborean's blog post on the token airdrop calls the "post-snapshot locking programme": a one-time incentive for locking ABX into veABX on Abstract between Aborean's Ethereum-expansion announcement and its eventual Ethereum mainnet launch, converting into mainnet veABX once that launch happens. It ran in three tiers that filled on a first-come basis, per the same post: Tier 1 offered a 75% rebate against a pool of 15,000,000 mainnet veABX; Tier 2 offered 50% against 10,000,000; Tier 3 offered 25% against a further 10,000,000 — a combined 35,000,000 mainnet veABX set aside for the program. A snapshot taken just before mainnet launch will finalize individual allocations, the post states.

This is a different program from Aborean's original Ascendance Program on Abstract, which set aside 10% of the Abstract chain's 500,000,000-ABX supply (50,000,000 ABX) as veABX rebates distributed across seven four-week seasons at a tapering rate — 100% in Season 1, then 70%, 49%, 34.3%, 11.8%, 8.2%, and 5.7% by Season 7 — and which Aborean's docs say ended after Season 7. It's also distinct from a third program: Aborean's airdrop post describes a forward-looking Ascendance Programme that will distribute 70,000,000 veABX, 14% of the new Ethereum-native token's supply, over roughly 14 months on a seasonal decay once the Ethereum deployment goes live. That program has not started.

The Ethereum deployment

Aborean announced it is expanding to Ethereum mainnet in a May 7, 2026 blog post, describing the move as a capital expansion that leaves the existing Abstract deployment and its token unchanged while launching a separate, sovereign ABX token — also a 500,000,000 supply — on Ethereum. A June 5, 2026 follow-up post laid out what's new: a "Dynamic Reserve Engine" that holds each epoch's emissions in an epoch-scoped reserve and releases them to a gauge only once that pool's fees and bribes justify the allocation, burning whatever remains unclaimed at epoch's end; and a faster 3.5-day epoch, running twice a week rather than the weekly cadence Aborean runs on Abstract. Aborean describes the core AMM and vote-escrow contracts as carrying over largely unchanged from what it already runs.

What Aborean hasn't published yet

Several pieces of the Ethereum plan remain unannounced, by Aborean's own account. Its blog says airdrop eligibility criteria and individual allocations "will be published when the airdrop checker goes live," and that a mainnet launch date and full feature-set details "will follow shortly" as the company approaches deployment — neither has been published as of this writing, and the site's Ethereum section is not yet live. Aborean's own materials also don't identify which existing ve(3,3) codebase its Abstract contracts were originally built from; its documentation describes the design generically as "ve(3,3)" without naming a specific predecessor protocol.

Sources

• Aborean documentation — introduction, flywheel, fee structure
• Aborean documentation — ABX/veABX tokenomics and supply allocation
• Aborean documentation — lock duration and voting-power formula
• Aborean documentation — voting, epoch cycle, reward formula
• Aborean documentation — governance powers
• Aborean documentation — emissions schedule
• Aborean documentation — vaults
• Aborean documentation — original Ascendance Program (Abstract, ended after Season 7)
• Aborean app — Ascension (Ethereum veABX rebate) page, marked Legacy
• Aborean blog — "Expansion" (Ethereum mainnet announcement)
• Aborean blog — "Airdrop" (tier structure and supply allocation)
• Aborean blog — "ve(3,3) Reimagined" (Dynamic Reserve Engine, 3.5-day epochs)
• @Aborean on X — Ascension program filled, 80M veABX locked (July 22, 2026)