Protocol architecture
How the pieces fit: community nodes, onchain contracts and the path capital takes through them. The design follows three principles: sustainability, transparency and decentralization.
Testnet. A modular contract set and six vaults are deployed on Base Sepolia. No venue is bound yet. See Testnet Status.
The diagram shows the full design, including parts that are planned and not live.
Self-sovereign design
Many "decentralized" protocols still depend on central providers. That exposes them to censorship, downtime and data manipulation. Noderr is designed to run each of these functions on its own community nodes.
| Function | Typical DeFi reliance | Noderr design |
|---|---|---|
| Data indexing | Central indexing services, such as the hosted version of The Graph | Noderr's own Validator and Micro nodes |
| Transaction relaying | Central RPC providers, such as Infura or Alchemy | The user's wallet or a decentralized relayer network |
| Front end hosting | Central servers, such as AWS or Vercel | Decentralized storage (IPFS) through multiple gateways |
| Automated strategies | Central bots or teams | Coordinated onchain through the ATE contracts, with Guardian nodes voting on backtest results |
What this is designed to give:
- Security. No single point of failure to attack or to break.
- Censorship resistance. No single entity can shut down or censor the protocol.
- Availability. An outage at one central provider does not take the protocol down.
- Efficiency. Infrastructure costs stay inside the protocol, and the savings pass through to depositor yields.
- Community ownership. The people who run the protocol are the people who use it.
Each vault has its own target APY band. See the vault table. These are targets, not guaranteed, and nothing is earning on testnet. Stacking node operator rewards on top targets a combined 8–28% vault plus node return. Node rewards are a revenue share, not a fixed APY. That range is never a vault only figure.
Node network
The protocol is designed to run on community nodes. Today the protocol's own nodes run it, and operators join by application.
| Tier | Stake | TrustFingerprint | Also required |
|---|---|---|---|
| Micro | None (0 NODR) | No requirement | Low hardware requirements |
| Validator | 25,000 NODR | 0.70 or more | None |
| Guardian | 50,000 NODR | 0.80 or more | Governance approval and a Guardian Utility NFT |
| Oracle | 150,000 NODR | 0.90 or more | Election by a 66% Oracle supermajority and an Oracle Utility NFT |
What each tier does:
- Micro. Basic data collection and network monitoring. The entry tier, open to a wide range of participants.
- Validator. Transaction validation and network security. For experienced operators with a moderate capital commitment.
- Guardian. Votes on strategy backtests today. Will form the Guardian Chamber for security oversight and emergency response. For security experts and long term stakeholders.
- Oracle. The autonomous strategy layer: advanced data collection, strategy execution and strategic decisions. For quantitative analysts, data scientists and institutional operators.
TrustFingerprint scores every operator on performance, reliability and governance participation. The score feeds into rewards and voting power. For requirements and setup, see Node Operators.
Capital flow
Vaults hold seeded test funds. No capital has been deployed to strategies yet, so steps 2 to 6 describe the design.
- Deposit. A user deposits capital (tUSDC on testnet) into a vault. The vault mints vault tokens for the user's share of its assets.
- Allocation. The vault contract allocates capital to the ATE, alongside the vault's conservative Floor allocation.
- Execution. The ATE, coordinated by the four node tiers, runs strategies across integrated DeFi protocols. The adapter architecture is built to integrate many protocols.
- Yield. Strategy returns come back to the ATE.
- Distribution. The ATE returns yield to the vaults, which raises the value of each vault token.
- Protocol fees. A small percentage of yield is collected as protocol revenue.
Protocol revenue is split four ways:
| Recipient | Share |
|---|---|
| Node Operators | 40% |
| Treasury Reserve | 35% |
| Token Buybacks (burn) | 15% |
| Development | 10% |
The Node Operator share is split across tiers 30/30/30/10. Node rewards are a revenue share, not a fixed APY per tier.
Specifications and scale
- Contracts. A modular smart contract set with defined data structures and APIs. See Smart Contracts.
- Data flows. Three flows run through the contracts: user deposits, trading and yield, and governance.
- Scale. Full break even AUM is $165M. The Year 1 target is $45M. The design leaves headroom for much larger AUM.
- Speed. The protocol targets low latency and high throughput on Base (L2).
Security
The design defends against smart contract vulnerabilities, node operator fraud, market manipulation and governance attacks. It layers a bug bounty program, continuous monitoring and emergency controls. See Security.
Next
- How Noderr Works
- Vaults
- Autonomous Trading System
- Downloads, including all diagrams as a ZIP