Hipo

Rejected venues wait the longest for re-review; a rejection has to earn another look before the scheduled date.

Hipo is a decentralized liquid staking protocol on TON. Its single pool held $11.0 million at the 2026-08-14 survey. The registry rejects it on size: one practice advising 100 households moves $1M to $8M into a venue on the same research, and below $100M TVL that book becomes the exit crush. Size alone decides it, whatever the protocol’s quality. A review at size would also depend on the standing of TON itself in the chain registry.

Kill criteria: the events that revoke this verdict
• TVL sustained above $100M for 30 days

The research file

Applicability to the surveyed record

Hipo’s first-party hTON driver identifies itself as infrastructure for the Hipo liquid-staking protocol and automates TON staking and hTON unstaking around validation rounds. Hipo documents a permissionless validator auction in which validators bid return terms for protocol-delegated TON, establishing liquid staking as the applicable mechanism.

Current observation and perimeter

The DefiLlama API read on 2026-08-15 classified Hipo as liquid staking on TON and reported approximately $11.1M TVL. Hipo’s current public site now markets GRAM/hGRAM staking on TON, so the exact legacy hTON versus current product perimeter must be reconciled at reopening; neither observed perimeter approaches the shared v1 $100M threshold.

Control and exit applicability

Validator selection is executed through Hipo’s onchain auction and smart contracts rather than a fixed validator list. The hTON driver describes redemption waiting for a validation round and sufficient treasury coins, while Hipo’s live unstaking guide offers protocol redemption or a DEX sale; exit therefore depends on validator and network operation, protocol cash, or secondary-market depth.

Why the class rule decides

The shared v1 below-materiality dossier controls. Reopen only after TVL sustains at least $100M for 30 days and TON is eligible, then verify hTON backing and exchange-rate history, validator concentration and performance, auction and upgrade authority, audits and incidents, fees, slashing or loss allocation, protocol-redemption timing, secondary liquidity, and named TON staking alternatives.

Sources

The claims above trace to these. Where a number could not be independently verified, the thesis says so.

• Hipo — official hTON driver repository · primary · accessed 2026-08-15
  Supports: hTON protocol identity, TON staking flow, validation-round dependency, treasury-liquidity dependency, unstaking automation
• Hipo — validators · primary · accessed 2026-08-15
  Supports: permissionless validator model, validator auction, ROI selection, smart-contract execution
• Hipo — live hTON unstaking guide · primary · accessed 2026-08-15
  Supports: hTON protocol redemption, validation-funds delay, DEX alternative, secondary-market exit
• Hipo — current public protocol site · primary · accessed 2026-08-15
  Supports: current GRAM and hGRAM perimeter, TON protocol identity, receipt-token staking, current audits
• DefiLlama — Hipo survey record · secondary · accessed 2026-08-15
  Supports: current TVL, TON, liquid-staking category, survey perimeter

Inherited controls

The verdict above grades the protocol layer. Every position also inherits the asset it holds and the chain it settles on. The least safe layer sets the position’s grade, and the position table names which one that is.