# Podium: an hourly buyback engine for a launchpad

v0.2 · 2026-09-20

> Draft. The mechanism below is specified but not yet running on chain; see §10.

## Abstract

Podium is a launchpad on Robinhood Chain built around one rule: the fees it earns are spent on the coins it launched. Every coin created through Podium carries a 2% creator tax paid to a public treasury, and the flagship coin $PODIUM pays its own creator fee into the same place. Once an hour, the treasury spends everything it collected during that hour buying those coins back. The pot is split evenly across every eligible launch, executed in a single transaction, and what it buys is held rather than sold.

## 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. A coin launched here is created with its creator tax pointed at the Podium treasury rather than at the person who launched it. On the hour, the treasury market-buys the coins launched through Podium with the money that tax brought in. Every eligible launch gets the same size buy, whether it is the biggest coin on the board or an hour old, and the tokens bought stay in the treasury wallet.

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

## 3. Where the money comes from

Two taps feed one treasury. Pons V2 takes a creator tax and a fee recipient as parameters when a coin is created (`creatorTaxBps` and `creatorFeeRecipient` on the factory's TokenParams). Podium sets them to 2% and its own treasury address, so every buy and sell against that coin's curve pays 2% into the pot.

The second tap is the flagship. $PODIUM trades on the same rails and pays the Pons creator fee, 1% at the time of writing, into the same treasury.

This is a real cost to a creator and it should be said plainly: launch here and the creator tax on your coin goes to the treasury instead of to you. What you get for it is the hourly buy, which every eligible launch shares equally, funded by everyone's tax including your own. If that trade is not worth it to you, launch on Pons directly and keep your fee.

- Launch tax: 2%, written into the coin at create time as `creatorTaxBps`.
- Recipient: the treasury, set as `creatorFeeRecipient` in the same call — 0x73D191DFBD1bB36765b96efD9700eBdbA94B00C9.
- Flagship: the 1% Pons creator fee on $PODIUM, claimed from the fee escrow.
- Budget for hour H: everything the treasury collected that hour, minus the gas the buy transaction costs.
- Volatile by design: a quiet hour funds a small buy, and no hour can spend money it did not collect.

## 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.

**Worked example. These numbers are an illustration, not a forecast.**

| | |
| --- | --- |
| Fees claimed for the hour | 0.0186 ETH |
| Eligible launches | 7 |
| Per-coin share | 0.00265 ETH |
| Dust floor | 0.002 ETH per coin — cleared, so the round runs |
| Result | 7 buys in one transaction, 0.0186 ETH spent, tokens held |

## 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, 0x73D191DFBD1bB36765b96efD9700eBdbA94B00C9. They are not sold, not routed into liquidity, and not distributed. The address is published, so the position in every coin can be checked at any time by anyone, and the site's 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 free. Your coin's creator tax is the price of being in the hourly buy.
- 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: what arrived at 0x73D191DFBD1bB36765b96efD9700eBdbA94B00C9 during the hour — creator tax from the launches, creator fee from the flagship.
- 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.

Both taps fund the engine, and the engine spends all of it. Podium has no other income stream today, which means the cost of running it — gas, hosting, indexing — is not yet funded 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 spec you are reading, and the treasury address 0x73D191DFBD1bB36765b96efD9700eBdbA94B00C9.
- 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, including the creator tax parameters this design depends on.
- Not live: $PODIUM itself, the launch wiring in this site, the hourly executor, and the eligibility indexer.
- Until those exist the board shows zeros and the buy log is empty, on purpose.

## 11. Risks and open questions

- Thin volume: a quiet board makes the hourly pot trivially small, and a trivial buy is closer to theatre than support.
- The tax is a cost: a creator gives up their fee to be here, and a launchpad that does not return more than it takes is a bad deal. That is the whole bet.
- 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 every collected fee goes to buys.
- Open: whether 2%, the dust floor and the volume threshold are the right numbers, or just the first ones.

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This document describes intended behaviour, not a promise of returns.