Peg without an oracle: the vault, not a price feed

Most stablecoin designs ask: what tells the contract the price? AQB answers: nothing has to. Redemption is a fixed ratio, not a quote.

The mechanism

• Depositing USDC mints AQB, and supply grows by exactly the deposited amount.
• Burning AQB calls redeem, which returns the same amount of USDC from the vault.
• backedSupply and collateralRatio are on-chain, public, read in one eth_call.

There is no feed to front-run, no stale price, no funding-rate equivalent. If the vault has 250 USDC, then 250 AQB is redeemable — in full, in any order.

What can break

Honesty about the edges:

1. The vault can be drained by redemption. That is the design: redeemers exit at 1:1 and the rest stays redeemable only while USDC lasts. Supply is minted against deposits, so this holds unless someone can mint unbacked — they cannot.
2. Market price can drift below 1. Nothing stops a pool trading at 0.97. That is an arbitrage invitation, not a broken peg: buy at 0.97, redeem at 1.00.
3. Base can stall. L2 sequencer downtime delays redemption, it does not change amounts.

Why not algorithmic

Algorithmic pegs fail in the direction of confidence: the moment holders doubt, the mechanism needs more confidence than exists. A fully collateralized vault fails only if the collateral asset fails — here the collateral is USDC held by the token contract itself.

Read the contract rather than this post: https://basescan.org/token/0x2C54F202B565086B6d8D2226Edb67AC3E14C39d1

Discovery for agents: https://agentqubit.pages.dev/.well-known/agent-coin.json