The End of Open-Door AQUA Rewards
Aquarius's Asset Eligibility Registry closed a three-year gap in governance. Rather than reactively downvoting spam markets, Proposal 125 moved to an allowlist: only community-approved assets qualify for AQUA emissions. The shift reflects a broader move from reactive to proactive protocol design.
Aquarius's asset registry went live on aqua.network in May 2026, the visible end of a fight against spam and scam tokens that has shaped the protocol since its launch in 2021. The registry itself was approved months earlier, in Proposal 125, which passed on February 20, 2026 with roughly 16.0 billion ICE for against just 587 million against, one of the largest mandates in the DAO's history.
The proposal answers a problem AQUA holders have flagged in nearly every governance cycle: low-quality and outright malicious assets capturing AQUA emissions.
The Problem That Governance Had to Solve
Stellar's open design lets anyone issue an asset and create a trading pair in minutes. That accessibility built the network's breadth. It also handed bad actors a free path into liquidity reward pools.
Under the old rules, a pool needed only 0.5% of total voting power to enter the reward zone. With roughly 40 markets receiving emissions at any time, that bar was low enough for a determined issuer to game with external bribes or their own AQUA position. Once liquidity providers showed up, the issuer could sell into the pool and disappear. Proposal 123 cited the NTR token from the mycoin.my.id domain as a recent example: a repeat rugpull operation that exploited the same loophole more than once.
Proposal 22 in 2022 was an early attempt at a fix. Community discussion at the time noted that it identified the problem but did not fully resolve it. Three more years of incremental governance work followed.
The Approaches That Did Not Win
Two proposals from late December 2025 took aim at the same problem from a different angle. Both expired without reaching a vote.
Proposal 123, "Replacing blanket downvote immunity with downvote immunity given by protocol bribes", argued that AQUA, XLM, and USDC should no longer confer automatic immunity to their pair. Immunity would instead be earned through protocol bribes, which require sustained trading activity. The intent was to tie a market's protection to its real economic footprint.
Proposal 124, "Hybrid Downvote Immunity, Balanced Bribes & Anti-Scam Oversight", iterated eleven times in discussion. It treated external bribes and protocol bribes as parallel paths to immunity, expanded the definition of "utility" to cover niche and stability use cases, and added a layer of delegate oversight for blatantly fraudulent patterns: suspicious domains, sudden one-sided trading, no community presence.
Both designs preserved the existing downvote mechanism and tried to make it smarter. Neither moved past discussion.
What Proposal 125 Did Differently
Rather than refine downvotes, Proposal 125 replaced them. The model is straightforward:
- An on-chain Asset Eligibility Registry, maintained by governance vote
- Only pools where every asset is on the registry qualify for AQUA emissions or pool incentives
- Tier 1 assets (XLM, AQUA, USDC) are whitelisted by default
- Every other asset, including stablecoins, wrapped assets, RWAs, and ecosystem tokens, must pass an Asset Whitelist Proposal with a 10-day minimum voting period
- An Asset Revocation Proposal is the mirror image, taking effect at the next reward epoch
- Bribes and signaling votes for non-whitelisted markets remain permissionless, but they no longer unlock emissions
- Once 15 assets are approved or 50% of active AQUA emissions flow to whitelisted pools, the transition is complete and downvotes and downvoteICE are deprecated entirely
The structural argument carried the vote. The old system asked the community to whack moles one at a time, after the damage. Proposal 125 sets a standard up front and removes the entire reactive layer of governance, including the downvote machinery the alternative proposals tried to repair.
How Aquarius Governance Got Here
Aquarius governance launched in November 2021 at gov.aqua.network. AQUA holders create, discuss, and vote on proposals that determine which markets receive rewards, how the DAO treasury is spent, and what rules the protocol follows.
The mechanics enforce skin in the game. Creating a proposal costs 100,000 AQUA; publishing it for community voting costs another 900,000 AQUA. Both fees are burned. Proposals require a 10% quorum of circulating AQUA and ICE plus a simple majority to pass. Successful proposals reward their author with 1.5 million AQUA.
Governance v2.0, launched on May 20, 2022, added a mandatory seven-day discussion phase before every vote, a 30-day editing window with versioning, and a vote-lock mechanism that unlocks AQUA sooner for voters who participate early.
ICE tokens, introduced in May 2022, decoupled liquidity voting from governance voting. Users who lock AQUA for up to three years receive four non-transferable tokens: ICE (reward boosts), upvoteICE and downvoteICE (liquidity market voting at vote.aqua.network), and governICE (governance proposals at gov.aqua.network). The maximum three-year lock yields 10 ICE per AQUA. Before ICE, holders had to choose between voting on liquidity markets and voting on governance. After ICE, they do both.
Vote Delegation shipped on July 11, 2025 alongside Proposal 107, which linked AQUA emissions directly to actively traded markets. ICE holders can now delegate to trusted community members and still earn voting rewards. The two changes together raised both turnout and stakes: whoever you delegate to votes on which markets earn more.
The System in Action
The first three asset registry whitelist votes have already gone through. sUSD passed on May 10, 2026 (Proposal 138, 17.5B for / 686M against). PYUSD passed on May 17 (Proposal 139, 20.8B for / 3.5M against). ESP is currently being rejected in Proposal 140, with 1.2 billion ICE for versus 14.3 billion against, the registry's first live exercise of its veto. Seven more whitelist proposals (USDP, AQUAmb, yXLM, SHX, RAYO, yUSDC, ETH) are queued through July.
The registry page at aqua.network/asset-registry went live in early May 2026, the same window in which Aquarius's concentrated liquidity pools launched on May 1. The two upgrades complement each other. Concentrated liquidity lets LPs focus capital into narrow price ranges, and the whitelist guarantees those ranges are tied to assets the community has vetted.
June 1, 2026: The Cutover
On May 20, 2026, Aquarius confirmed the activation date. Starting June 1, only markets with whitelisted assets will earn AQUA rewards. The 50% emissions threshold from Proposal 125 has been crossed: AQUA Rewards Alignment now sits at 50.9%, satisfying one of the two conditions Proposal 125 set for retiring the old downvote machinery entirely.
Five assets are whitelisted heading into the cutover: AQUA, XLM, USDC, sUSD, and PYUSD. Asset Registry voting continues on the queued proposals. Liquidity providers in non-whitelisted markets have until June 1 to review their positions, since those pools will stop receiving AQUA rewards once the cutover takes effect.
The Open Question
Proposal 125 did not silence its critics. Proposal 148, now in discussion, raises a fairness concern: whitelist entry effectively requires somewhere between 6 and 10 billion ICE in voting power, which is concentrated in a small number of large holders and delegates. The author asks whether that bar privileges entrenched influence over new or smaller projects, and whether the public has any practical way to audit where delegated votes truly come from.
The concern is structurally similar to Proposal 126 from March 2026, which proposed vote-weight caps and mandatory conflict-of-interest disclosure. That proposal expired without going to vote.
What Has Changed
Aquarius crossed $50 million in TVL on April 22, 2026. In Q1 2026, the protocol led all Stellar DeFi applications with an average of 271,222 monthly transactions. Two changes now reinforce that base: concentrated liquidity pools that let capital work harder, and an asset registry that gates AQUA emissions on community-vetted assets.
The result is a tighter loop. The community decides which assets belong in the registry. The registry decides which pools can earn rewards. Proposal 107 routes those rewards toward actively traded markets. Concentrated liquidity makes those markets more efficient.
The spam token problem was never just a nuisance. It diluted rewards, discouraged serious liquidity providers, and muddied the signal AQUA holders were trying to send about where Stellar needed liquidity. The DAO spent three years trying to fix the symptom. Proposal 125 went after the architecture instead, and the community gave it a 27-to-1 margin.
Sources
- Proposal 125: Asset Eligibility Registry (Feb 2026)
- Proposal 123: Bribe-gated downvote immunity (expired) (Dec 2025)
- Proposal 124: Hybrid Downvote Immunity (expired) (Dec 2025)
- Proposal 126: Decentralization Reforms (expired) (Mar 2026)
- Proposal 148: Fairness concern about Proposal 125 whitelist
- Aquarius Governance overview (Jan 2022)
- Governance v2.0 (May 2022)
- Proposal 107 announcement (Jun 2025)
- Vote Delegation launch (Jul 2025)
- $50M TVL (Apr 2026)
- Concentrated liquidity launch (May 2026)
- Asset Registry page
