How it works
Four steps take a skin from a marketplace listing to a coin with a vault behind it. One of them is not ours: Pons runs the curve and mints the token, and everything we built exists either side of that.
The four steps
- 01Pick a skin. Any item with a real sales history qualifies. The reference price is a median of completed trades, blended across three time windows by volume so a single quiet week cannot move it. How that number is built.
- 02Launch on Pons. One billion tokens on a bonding curve quoted in USDG. The supply is sized so the coin opens exactly at its peg rather than wherever Pons's fixed opening market cap happens to land.
- 03Fees fund a vault. The 0.70% creator fee is paid to a vault the coin owns. There is no withdrawal function in it — not a restricted one, none at all.
- 04The vault defends. Past 1.5% of drift it buys or sells, sizes the order itself, and checks on-chain that the price actually moved closer before the transaction is allowed to succeed.
Who runs what
It is worth being precise about the division, because it decides what can be changed later and by whom.
| Component | Operator | Mutable after launch |
|---|---|---|
| Token and bonding curve | Pons V2 | No |
| Creator fee recipient | Pons V2 | Only after a 72-hour timelock |
| Reference price | PonsCS2 oracle | Yes, by signed report |
| Vault parameters | Fixed at deployment | No |
| Keeper that calls defend() | Anyone | — |
The keeper is not privileged
defend() is permissionless. We run a keeper because someone has to, but the function takes no arguments an attacker could steer, reads its own price, and sizes its own order. Calling it when there is nothing to do simply returns without trading.
The life of a coin
A Pons launch has two phases, and the vault behaves differently in each. On the bonding curve the vault trades against the curve itself, which is a constant-product market whose reserves are known to the contract. After graduation the curve is retired into a Uniswap v4 pool and the vault trades against that instead.
- Curve phase. Opens at a market cap of $3,236 and graduates once it has taken in $8,090 of real quote. Everything the vault accrues in this phase — roughly $34 — is the entire war chest it starts life with.
- Pool phase. Deeper liquidity, so a given gap costs more to close, and the fee income now depends on continued trading rather than on the one-way flow up the curve.
Those two numbers are the whole argument, and the next page does the arithmetic on them.
Snapshot data last refreshed Sep 23, 2026 UTC.