Core Concepts | Agora Finance

Stablecoins

Digital currencies designed to maintain a stable value relative to a reference asset (typically USD). Unlike volatile cryptocurrencies, stablecoins aim to provide consistent purchasing power through various backing mechanisms like fiat reserves or algorithmic controls.

RWAs (Real World Assets)

Tokenized representations of traditional financial assets on the blockchain. These can include treasury bills, bonds, or other financial instruments, allowing them to be traded and managed through smart contracts while maintaining their underlying real-world value.

Redemption Price

The fixed rate at which a token can be exchanged for its underlying asset. For stablecoins and RWAs, this represents their fundamental value based on the actual assets they represent, rather than market-driven prices.

Wallet

A digital tool that stores private keys and enables interactions with blockchain networks. In Agora’s context, wallets must be verified and whitelisted to participate in swaps, ensuring compliance and security.

Price Impact

The effect that trade size has on asset price in traditional liquidity pools. Agora’s fixed-price mechanism eliminates this concern, allowing trades to execute at predetermined rates regardless of transaction size.

Know-Your-Customer (KYC)

A verification process that confirms user identity and eligibility. Agora implements KYC to maintain regulatory compliance and ensure only verified participants can access the protocol’s swap functionality.

UUPS-Upgradeable Proxy

All Factory-deployed contracts use the UUPS style: the proxy stores the implementation address and only the ProxyAdmin can upgrade it. This keeps the proxy bytecode minimal while enabling future upgrades under governance control.

Pair Core Concepts

`Token0`

The first token in an Agora trading pair, determined at deployment. This ordering is immutable and used consistently throughout the contract’s lifecycle for price quotes, fee calculations, and swap execution. In most cases, AUSD will be token0.

`Token1`

The second token in an Agora trading pair, also determined at deployment. Like Token0, this designation is permanent and plays a crucial role in the pair’s operation and price calculations.

`PurchaseFees`

Transaction fees charged when acquiring either token in a pair. These fees are configurable per direction (Token0→Token1 or Token1→Token0) and are collected by the protocol rather than distributed to external liquidity providers.

Fee Bounds

Hard caps that constrain future fee updates. Only the Access-Control Manager may widen/narrow these guardrails.

Oracle Price Curve

Linear, time-based price model: price(t) = basePrice ± APR × Δt. Allows one token in the pair to be interest-bearing without a real-time oracle.

Exact-in vs. exact-out helpers

swapExactTokensForTokens fixes the input amount; swapTokensForExactTokens fixes the output amount. Both wrap the low-level swap() and protect the caller with min/max slippage checks. Reserve accounting

SwapFees Accumulator

Each successful swap adds fee amounts to token0FeesAccumulated / token1FeesAccumulated. These balances can later be harvested to the treasury with collectFees.

Factory Core Concepts

Deterministic Deployment

Each pair proxy is deployed with CREATE3 using a salt derived from token0 + token1, which guarantees the address can be predicted off-chain before the contract exists. Prevents accidental duplicates and lets dApps reference pools safely.

Role-based access control (RBAC)

All privileged paths in both Factory and Pair contracts are gated by named string roles (FEE_SETTER_ROLE, PRICE_SETTER_ROLE, etc.) rather than numeric enums, making permissions self-descriptive and extensible.