01Overview

Every coin launched here charges a 4% tax on its own trading, and pays that tax to the people holding it. Nothing is minted to fund it and nobody tops it up: a coin can only ever pay out what its own trading earned.

The shape borrowed from bitcoin is the schedule, not the asset. There is a block reward, it is split by hashrate, and it halves on a fixed clock. What differs is what hashrate means: here it is not machines, it is how much you hold and how long you have held it.

Payouts are in ETH. Robinhood Chain has no bitcoin asset — there is no wBTC, cbBTC or spot-BTC token on it — so a reserve denominated in bitcoin could not be held, let alone redeemed. The name is the aesthetic; the asset is the chain’s own.

02The block reward

A launch’s block reward is its creator tax: 4% of every trade, taken by the protocol and credited to that launch’s own fee vault.

The rate is fixed at creation and no later transaction can change it — not by the creator, not by us. Pons writes it into the launch record when the token is created, and that record is immutable. It is therefore not a setting on the launch form; it is a property of the product.

This is also why a token imported from another launchpad may mine nothing at all. If it was created with a 0% creator tax, there is no stream to pay from, and no amount of volume changes that.

03Miners

Every holder is a miner. There is no separate staking step, no lock and no deposit — holding is the act. The miner set is read from the token’s own Transfer log, so it is the complete holder set rather than whoever happened to trade recently.

Two consequences worth stating plainly. Splitting a position across wallets changes nothing, because hashrate is linear in size: three wallets with a third each produce exactly what one wallet produced. And selling is the only way to stop mining, which is the whole incentive.

04Hashrate

Hashrate is three numbers multiplied together:

hashrate = holdings × tenure × uptime

holdings

Tokens held, in whole units. The only term you can buy directly.

tenure

1× to 4×, accruing continuously with time held. See tenure.

uptime

1 while mining, halving for each epoch missed, 0 once dark. See uptime.

Your share of an epoch is your hashrate over the sum of everyone else’s. Because two of the three terms cannot be bought, a large new position does not out-mine a small old one by size alone.

05Tenure

Tenure runs from 1× at the moment you buy to 4× after 3 eras held, and it accrues continuously — every epoch, not in jumps at each halving.

It is measured against the pool’s clock, not the chain’s. Nobody can have held for longer than the pool has existed, so a launch whose pool started an hour ago has no 4× miners in it however old the token is.

Tenure is the one thing capital cannot shortcut. Someone arriving today mines at 1× no matter the size of their position, and the only route to the cap is to have been there. Time is the scarce input.

06Uptime

A miner submitting shares is mining. Miss an epoch and uptime halves; miss 4 and it reaches zero and the miner is dark.

A dark miner does not bank its share for later. It is simply absent from the denominator, so what it would have earned is mined by everyone still running. Going offline does not pause your earnings, it hands them to the people who stayed.

Today every holder counts as mining, because the pool contract is not deployed yet and holding is the only signal there is. Idle and dark become reachable states once miners can check in on chain.

07Epochs and eras

Two units, and they are easy to confuse:

epoch

60 seconds. One settlement — sweep, claim, work out shares, pay.

era

5 epochs, 5 minutes. One halving.

A pool’s epoch counter is the number of epochs the keeper has actually settled for that launch, starting at 0. It is not derived from how long the token has existed. A pool that has never been mined has not aged, and a keeper that stops stops the clock with it — which is why the site says paused or not started rather than counting down to a halving nothing is going to settle.

Every launch keeps its own counter. Each pool is its own.

08The halving

Each epoch the pool pays out a fixed share of its vault. That share starts at 8.00% and halves every era.

The last column is the part worth understanding. At steady state — fees arriving as fast as they are paid out — the payout equals the fee inflow whatever era it is. Halving does not shrink what miners earn. It doubles the reserve standing behind what they earn.

Each era the pool holds twice as much against the same flow. Stock to flow doubles every halving, mechanically, rather than as a consequence of anything anyone chooses.

The transition is not smooth, and is not meant to be. The moment f halves, the payout halves with it, then climbs back toward the inflow over the era as the reserve doubles. Same shape as the thing it imitates, for the same structural reason.

09Settlement

Each epoch, per launch, in order:

1. Sweep. Move fees off the bonding curve into the pons escrow. Refused once a launch has graduated, where the hook holds them and only the protocol’s operator can move them.
2. Claim. Withdraw the escrow balance into this launch’s own vault. Fees are credited rather than pushed, so a recipient that cannot receive can never block a sweep for anyone else.
3. Settle. Read holders, compute hashrate, take the era’s emission of the spendable balance.
4. Pay. Send each miner its share, largest first, and write a receipt.

Every payout is recorded with its transaction hash, keyed on (token, epoch, miner) — so a keeper that retries a pass it already completed cannot pay the same epoch twice.

Two bounds are deliberate. A share too small to be worth its own gas is skipped and stays in the vault, to be mined again next epoch by whoever is still there. And a single epoch sends at most 25 payouts, because each one is its own transaction.

10The vault

Every launch has its own fee vault. One token’s trading can never pay another token’s miners.

The vault is a wallet derived from a keeper phrase plus that launch’s own public salt. That buys three things: the address exists before the launch is signed — which matters, because creation is the only moment pons allows the fee recipient to be set; the signing key is re-derived on demand, so no key is ever stored; and the vault holds real ETH, so it can act for itself.

A launch spends what it earned, never what it holds. The vault’s balance is not the budget — the budget is the balance minus the gas float the creator endowed it with at launch. Spending the float would leave the vault unable to send the next payout, which is the one thing it exists for.

The salt is public and reveals nothing on its own. Only the phrase turns a salt into a key.

11Launching

A launch is one transaction, plus a second that funds its vault’s gas. Name, ticker, description and image are yours; the tax, the pair and the supply are fixed by the protocol and stated on the form rather than offered as inputs.

The image is pinned to IPFS before the launch is signed, because the URL goes on chain and is immutable afterwards. The form will not submit while it is still uploading.

The gas float is sent after the launch, not before: the launch is the transaction that can fail, and funding first would strand ETH at an address nothing would ever use. If that second transaction fails, the launch is still a launch — the vault just needs topping up by hand before it can pay anyone.

12Imported launches

Pons carries launches from every site built on it, so a token created elsewhere can be listed here. Only its address is taken: name, symbol, curve, pair and phase are all read off the chain, so a mistyped field cannot become a row and a token that was never launched cannot be listed at all.

An imported launch has no derived vault. Its fee recipient was fixed by whoever created it, so its fees can only be claimed by whoever holds that wallet’s key. Until that key is configured, the token is listed and mines nothing — and, as above, if it launched with a 0% tax it will mine nothing regardless.

13The keeper

One process settles every pool, once per epoch. It stamps a heartbeat at the end of each pass, and the site reads that heartbeat to decide between three states:

running

A pass completed within the last few epochs.

paused

It ran and stopped. Epochs are not settling.

not started

It has never run for this launch.

When it is not running the countdown is replaced by the word, because a clock ticking toward a halving that nothing will settle is a lie told once a second.

14Reading the numbers

market cap

Curve price × supply before graduation; from the pool afterwards, because a graduated curve is drained and has no price to give. A dash means unknown, never zero.

paid out

ETH actually sent to miners. It is a sum of receipts, not an estimate.

the grid

Every holder, area by the square root of hashrate and brightness by its true size. Square root because one holder with most of a supply flattens a linear treemap into a single block.

the chart

Real executed trades, priced at the ratio each one moved. A launch with no mirrored trades draws nothing rather than a flat line, because unknown and unchanged are different claims.