Skip to content

Whitepaper · 3

Economics

Every number on this page was read from the launch configuration deployed on Robinhood Chain and checked against a real trade executed on a mainnet fork. Where the two disagreed, the chain won.

What each trade pays

Two separate fees are in play, and conflating them is the usual source of confusion. Pons charges a 1% base fee on every trade no matter what: the protocol keeps 30% of it, and the coin’s fee recipient receives the other 70%. Separately, the creator sets a charity fee between 0% and 10%, and all of that goes to the recipient too.

Because the recipient is a CharityVault, both streams land at the charity. At the maximum setting that is 0.70 + 10.00 = 10.70 dollars of every hundred traded.

of every $100 traded0% charity feethe minimum$99.00 stays in the pool$0.705% charity feea middle setting$94.00 stays in the pool$5.7010% charity feethe maximum Pons allows$89.00 stays in the pool$10.70to the charity’s vaultPons protocolremains with traders
Checked against a real trade on a mainnet fork: 5,000 USDG at the 10% setting credited the vault exactly 535 USDG — the 10.7% shown here, to the cent.

The bonding curve

A new coin does not have a market yet, so Pons gives it one. Trading runs against a constant-product curve seeded with virtual reserves, and once enough real money has come in, the curve closes and its contents are used to open a real, locked liquidity pool. That transition is called graduation.

1×2×3×4×5×6×7×Graduation$0.00002023 · 6.25×$20,225 market capLaunch$0.00000324 · $3,236 cap0M150M300M450M600Mtokens sold on the curve — 600M of the 1B supply, the other 400M seeds the poolprice, relative to launch
Plotted from getLaunchConfig(0) on mainnet. Graduating takes 4,854 USDG of net buying — the threshold is 8,090, but 3,236 of that is virtual reserve present from the first block.

The phantom reserve, and why progress bars lie

The curve is seeded with 3,236 USDG of virtual reserve against a graduation threshold of 8,090. Reading quoteReserve and dividing by the threshold therefore reports a coin nobody has ever traded as 40% of the way to graduating — and every coin sits at exactly 40% forever.

Real progress has to measure the real side of the reserve against the real distance:

$3,236
virtual reserve present from the first block
$8,090
total reserve at which the curve graduates
$4,854
actual net buying required — the only number that means anything

What graduation does

  • 600 million of the 1 billion supply is sold on the curve; the remaining 400 million is held back to seed the pool.
  • Price rises 6.25× from launch to graduation — a market cap of roughly $3,236 to $20,225 — because the reserve ratio moves from 3,236:1B to 8,090:400M.
  • Liquidity is locked at graduation, and pool trading keeps paying the charity. Graduation is not the end of a coin’s income — though the collection path changes hands, which the trust page explains.

What coins are priced in

Pons quotes against approved pair tokens rather than the chain’s native asset. In practice that is USDG, a six-decimal dollar stablecoin — which is why charity balances here are exact dollars and no price oracle appears anywhere in the system.

Robinhood Chain also carries tokenised equities, and some are approved as pair tokens. A coin quoted in one of those earns fees denominated in that asset, not in dollars, so it cannot feed the dollar-denominated grant pipeline without a conversion step. The site shows those amounts in their own asset and never converts them silently.

The first three seconds

Pons applies a snipe tax that starts at 99% and decays over the first three seconds after launch, to make instant sniping unprofitable. Anything that buys inside that window pays close to everything. The quick-buy control on this site reads the live tax and refuses to fire while it is non-zero, rather than letting a click destroy someone’s money.

NextTrust & transparencyWhat the code guarantees, and what still depends on people