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DeFi Has an Expertise Barrier

DeFi liquidity is technically accessible, but practically unusable without deep protocol-specific knowledge. To integrate a single DeFi primitive today, an engineering team must:
  • Read and interpret complex smart contract state machines
  • Decode protocol-specific math (e.g. ticks, shares, indexes, health factors)
  • Reconcile inconsistent or incomplete subgraphs
  • Derive yields, rates, and liquidity metrics manually
  • Handle undocumented edge cases and protocol upgrades
This work is repeated independently by every team, for every protocol. The result is an Expertise Barrier: access to DeFi liquidity is gated not by capital or demand, but by engineering research time.

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The Fragmentation Cost

DeFi does not have a shared semantic model. The same concept can mean different things depending on the protocol:
  • “Yield” may be APR, APY, realized, projected, or incentive-inflated
  • “Liquidity” may represent depth, TVL, available borrow, or active range
  • Identical user actions emit different events and require different state reconstruction
Integrating multiple protocols compounds this cost linearly. Five protocols means five mental models, five data pipelines, and five sets of failure modes. This fragmentation slows development, increases risk, and forces teams to build infrastructure instead of products.

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Why hydric Exists

hydric exists to remove protocol-specific expertise from the critical path of building with DeFi liquidity. Instead of each application:
  • studying protocol internals
  • decoding events
  • deriving financial metrics
  • maintaining custom indexers
hydric centralizes this work into a single, reusable system. We do the research once so it does not need to be repeated.

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Semantics Matter More Than Aggregation

hydric is not an aggregator of raw data. Aggregation alone does not solve the problem.
Semantic normalization does. hydric translates heterogeneous protocol state into a unified financial model with consistent meanings, assumptions, and structure. This allows applications to reason about:
  • liquidity
  • yield
  • risk
  • exposure
without understanding how each protocol implements them internally.

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What hydric Does (At a High Level)

hydric provides a unified data layer that:
  • Indexes on-chain state directly from smart contracts
  • Normalizes protocol-specific logic into a shared schema
  • Exposes derived, opinionated financial metrics with explicit assumptions
  • Serves high-performance, queryable data through a single API
hydric does not execute transactions, manage capital, or optimize strategies. It provides the data required for those systems to exist.

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Design Principles

hydric is built around a few non-negotiable principles:
  • Normalization over raw exposure
    Protocol differences are abstracted, not pushed downstream.
  • Deterministic derivation
    Derived values are reproducible from indexed state using defined rules.
  • Explicit assumptions
    Yield, liquidity, and rate calculations are opinionated and documented.
  • Protocol-agnostic consumption
    Applications interact with concepts, not implementations.

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The Goal

The goal of hydric is simple:
Make DeFi liquidity readable, comparable, and usable without protocol expertise.
When that happens, DeFi stops being a research project and starts behaving like infrastructure.