The rushed have
always paid more.

Everywhere except onchain. On an ordinary AMM the trader hammering one side of the pool pays the same fee as the patient soul rebalancing on a quiet afternoon. HORO is a Uniswap v4 hook that puts a clock on that.

Impatience here is not a mood, it is a measurement: how one-sided the flow has been over the last three minutes. When trades hit the pool roughly evenly, nobody is in a rush. When they stack heavily on one side, that lopsidedness is the signature of urgency, and urgency is a scarce thing the pool is providing.

The hook does not judge the trade. It asks one question: is this making the pool more lopsided, or less?

Into the pool, in the same transaction that charges it, by a v4 donation. That credits it to the liquidity standing in range absorbing the rush, which is exactly the party carrying the directional risk at the moment the flow turns toxic.

• The hook never holds a balance between transactions. Not ETH, not tokens, not a claim.
• There is no pot, so there is no distributor, so there is nothing anyone can be locked out of.
• If there is no liquidity in range at that instant, the premium is not charged at all rather than set aside somewhere.

Nothing is minted to dress up a number. The premium is a real fee paid by real traders who chose to move now instead of waiting, captured at the moment their urgency was worth the most. When the market is calm the premium is small, because there is little urgency to charge for. That bound is honest, not a limitation.