01 / 14 · Docs
Overview
What Bythos is and how depth-priced credit works on Elysium.
Borrow HYPE against any Elysium token. Your limit is what the order book can actually absorb.
What Bythos is
Bythos is a depth-priced credit protocol on Elysium, the Hyperliquid L2 built by Kinetiq. You deposit a token as collateral and borrow HYPE against it. Lenders supply the HYPE and earn interest.
Most lending protocols set a borrow limit as price × LTV, with the LTV chosen by a vote. Bythos replaces that with Depth Value: for a given quantity of a token, the HYPE you would actually receive selling it now into the bids, stopping at 15% below the best bid. Your borrow limit is 70% of Depth Value.
The book sets the limit, not a vote. A holder depositing a large share of supply gets a lower effective LTV automatically, because selling that much would move the price further.
How it works
- Sounding reads the market for your token and computes its Depth Value (DV) in HYPE. See Sounding.
- Each token has its own Market: an isolated HYPE vault with its own lenders, borrowers, rates and bad debt. See Markets.
- You open a Line by depositing the token. You can borrow up to 70% of the applied Depth Value of your matured collateral. See Lines.
- If your Line's health falls below 1.00, anyone can Trawl it: the collateral is sold into the venue that priced it, the debt is repaid, and a 5% penalty is split 3% to the caller and 2% to the protocol. See Trawl.
- If a Trawl cannot cover the debt, the market's Abyss Reserve, a HYPE first-loss fund, repays lenders before they take a haircut. See Abyss Reserve.
A quick example
Take an example pool holding 1,000,000 tokens and 100 HYPE, so the spot price is 0.0001 HYPE per token, and assume the 30-minute TWAP has been steady at that price.
| Position | Spot value | Depth Value | Borrow limit | Effective LTV |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20,000 tokens | 2.0 HYPE | 1.8 HYPE (capped) | 1.26 HYPE | 63% |
| 500,000 tokens | 50.0 HYPE | 7.80 HYPE | 5.46 HYPE | 10.9% |
The small position is limited by the price cap, 0.9 × the 30-minute TWAP. The large one is limited by depth: past about 84,907 tokens, selling more into this pool would push the price more than 15% below spot, so extra quantity adds nothing to Depth Value. The arithmetic is worked through in Sounding and Anti-manipulation.
Vocabulary
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Sounding | The depth oracle. sound(token, qty) returns Depth Value in HYPE. |
| Depth Value (DV) | HYPE obtainable now for a quantity, with 15% maximum slippage. |
| Market | One isolated lending market per token. Nothing is shared between Markets. |
| Line | A borrower's position. Limit 70% × DV, liquidation threshold 85% × DV. |
| Trawl | Liquidation. Sells into the venue that priced the position. |
| Abyss Reserve | A per-market HYPE first-loss fund. Always HYPE. |
Why Elysium
Elysium is the only chain where a smart contract can read the entire HyperCore order book, every level, for free, in-block, through the EL1Read precompile. It can also submit trade-only intents to HyperCore through EL1Write. Both are planned in the ArbOS upgrade, about 4 weeks after Elysium mainnet on Nov 9, 2026.
Until then, Bythos runs in Phase 0 · pool sounding, reading Elysium pools with the exact executable output of a swap. After the upgrade it moves to Phase 1 · book sounding (after ArbOS upgrade), adding the HyperCore bid book. See Phases and roadmap.
Where to start
- Read The problem with lending against new tokens for why depth matters.
- Try a sounding on any demo token at Sounding.
- Open a Line or supply HYPE on testnet in the app.
- Read Risks before you use any of it.
Official announcements: @BythosDepth