Podium: an hourly buyback engine for a launchpad

1. The problem

A launchpad earns from creating coins: a cut of the curve, a fee on graduation, or a creator fee on its own token. That income leaves the system. The coins that generated the traffic get nothing back, and a launch is worth exactly what its own buyers bring, which is why most boards look the same a week later: a long tail of launches with no holders and no bid.

The usual answers make it worse. Taxing every launch to fund a prize takes from the projects that are already struggling. Paying out in the platform's own token converts a real fee into an inflation schedule. Neither puts a bid under the coins that were launched.

2. The design in one paragraph

Podium keeps the fee where it is, and changes where it goes. The flagship coin $PODIUM trades on the Pons curve like any other coin, and pays the same creator fee. Podium claims that fee into a treasury address, and on the hour the treasury market-buys the coins launched through Podium with it. Every eligible launch gets the same size buy, whether it is the biggest coin on the board or an hour old. The tokens bought stay in the treasury wallet.

Nothing is minted to do this. The only money in the engine is the fee the flagship earned that hour.

3. Where the money comes from

Pons V2 charges a creator fee on every buy and sell against a coin's bonding curve, credited to the coin's creator through a fee escrow contract. For $PODIUM, that creator is Podium. The fee rate is set by the Pons launch config, currently 1%.

Two consequences are worth stating plainly. First, the engine's budget is volatile: it is a percentage of an hour's trading, so a quiet hour funds a small buy and a busy hour funds a larger one. Second, the budget is bounded by real volume; there is no way to make the number bigger other than the flagship being traded.

• ·Fee source: the Pons creator fee on $PODIUM, claimed from the fee escrow.
• ·Fee rate: set by the Pons config (1% at the time of writing), not by Podium.
• ·Budget for hour H: everything claimed for that hour, minus the gas the buy transaction costs.

4. The hourly buy

On the hour, the executor reads the fees collected since the last run, builds the eligible set (§5), and divides the pot evenly. It then performs one buy per eligible coin in a single transaction, routed through the coin's Pons curve, or through the Uniswap v4 pool Pons locked for it if the coin has graduated.

If the pot divided by the eligible count would be smaller than the dust floor (0.002 ETH per coin), the round does not run: the pot rolls into the next hour and the receipt records a rollover. This stops the engine from burning more in gas than it spends on coins.

Each run writes one receipt: the hour, the pot, the eligible count, the per-coin share, and the transaction hash. Receipts are the product. If an hour has no receipt, the engine did not run, and the site should say so rather than quietly skipping it.

5. Eligibility, and why it has teeth

An even split is the fairest rule to a new project and the easiest rule to farm: if every launch gets an equal share, the winning strategy is to launch a hundred coins. Eligibility is therefore the load-bearing part of this design, not a footnote.

A coin is eligible for the buy in hour H when all of the following hold.

• ·It was created through Podium, on the Pons factory. Coins launched elsewhere never qualify.
• ·It traded at least 0.05 ETH of two-sided volume during hour H. Dormant coins skip the round and rejoin when they trade again.
• ·It is the newest eligible coin from its creator wallet. Ten launches from one wallet earn one share, not ten.
• ·The creator still holds at least half of their own dev buy, measured at the start of the hour.
• ·It still trades where Podium can reach it: on the Pons curve, or in the pool Pons locked at graduation.

These thresholds are parameters, not principles. They will be tuned in public, and every change should be announced before the hour it takes effect in.

6. What happens to the tokens

Bought tokens are held in the treasury wallet. They are not sold, not routed into liquidity, and not distributed. The treasury address is published, so the position in every coin can be checked at any time by anyone, and the site's own numbers can be recomputed from chain data rather than trusted.

Holding is a policy, not a guarantee written into a contract. If it ever changes — a decision to burn, to LP, or to sell — the honest version of this document says so before the change happens, not after.

7. What this is not

This is a spending rule, not a return. It is worth being blunt about the limits, because a buyback is the easiest mechanism in crypto to oversell.

• ·It is not yield. Holding a coin Podium buys entitles you to nothing.
• ·It is not revenue share. No ETH is paid to holders of $PODIUM or to creators.
• ·It is not a price floor. An hourly buy of a few thousandths of an ETH does not hold up a chart, and nothing here promises it would.
• ·A buy is not an endorsement. Eligibility is mechanical; the engine has no opinion about a project.
• ·It is not an investment contract, a fund, or a managed product, and nothing here is financial advice.

8. How to check it

Every claim on the site should be reproducible from the chain by someone who does not trust the site.

• ·Fees in: the fee escrow credits to Podium's creator address for the hour.
• ·Eligible set: the launch events from the Podium factory, filtered by the rules in §5 against that hour's transfers.
• ·Share: pot ÷ eligible count, which should match every individual buy in the transaction to the wei.
• ·Holdings: the treasury wallet's balance of each coin.
• ·Missing hours: no transaction means no buy. A gap is a fact, and it stays in the record.

9. $PODIUM

The flagship launches on Pons like everything else: fixed supply from the Pons config, a bonding curve, and graduation into a Uniswap v4 pool locked by the Pons meme hook once the curve fills. Podium does not run its own curve and cannot change the rules of this one.

The whole creator fee funds the engine. Podium has no other income stream today, which means the cost of running it — gas, hosting, indexing — is not yet funded by the engine and must come from somewhere else. That is an open question, not a solved one, and it is listed as such in §11.

10. Status

Honesty about the state of the build matters more than a roadmap.

• ·Live: this site, the launch form's interface, and the spec you are reading.
• ·Proven elsewhere: the Pons V2 launch path (factory, launch-and-buy router, curve maths) already works in another of our projects against the same contracts.
• ·Not live: the treasury wallet, the fee claim, the hourly executor, the eligibility indexer, and every number the site reports as a dash.
• ·Until those exist, the board shows zero launches and the buy log is empty, on purpose.

11. Risks and open questions

• ·Thin volume: a quiet flagship makes the hourly pot trivially small, and a trivial buy is closer to theatre than support.
• ·Thin pools: a buy into a shallow curve moves the price, and the treasury pays that spread.
• ·Farming: eligibility rules are an arms race; assume they will be probed the day they matter.
• ·Execution: one transaction per hour is a single point of failure — a stuck RPC, a bad nonce, or a reverted route means a missed hour.
• ·Key risk: the treasury holds real ETH and real tokens, so its key is the most valuable thing in the system.
• ·Open: who funds operating costs if the whole fee goes to buys.
• ·Open: whether the dust floor and volume threshold are the right numbers, or just the first ones.