How it works

Everything on this page can be checked. The numbers are read off the contracts, the rules are the ones the code enforces, and where something is a choice rather than a guarantee it says so.

What this is

A coin launched here comes with a contract attached to it called the engine. The engine collects the coin's trading fees, and when someone posts about the coin on X it spends some of those fees buying the coin and burns every token it buys.

That is the whole idea. The coin pays for its own buying, out of money it has already earned, in response to people talking about it. Nobody funds the engine, nobody presses a button, and no team wallet ever holds the tokens, because they are burned in the same transaction that buys them.

$MENTION is the first coin running it. The launchpad lets anyone launch a coin with the same engine.

The engine

Where the money comes from

Every trade in the coin pays a fee. Part of that fee belongs to whoever launched the coin, and on a coin launched here that part is paid to the engine instead of to a person. It builds up in a Pons escrow contract until the engine claims it.

There is no other source. The engine has no mint, no treasury and no allocation. If the coin does not trade, the engine has nothing and does nothing.

What happens when it fires

One transaction does all of it: claim the fees from escrow, work out how much to spend, buy the coin with that ETH, and send every token bought to the burn address. The buy and the burn are the same transaction, so there is no moment where anyone is holding the tokens and no step where someone could decide not to burn them.

The burn address is 0x…dEaD, and it is fixed in the contract when the engine is deployed. It cannot be changed afterwards by anyone, including us.

Who pays the gas

The engine reimburses whoever sends the transaction, out of its own balance, for the gas that transaction cost. That is what makes it run without anyone funding it: the wallet that pokes it gets its gas back and can keep going indefinitely.

The reimbursement is bounded three ways. It is capped in absolute terms, capped as a share of the buy it just made, and it can only ever come out of the balance above the floor. On $MENTION those caps are 0.002 ETH per transaction and 5% of the buy. The per-transaction overhead is only paid once per block, so batching pokes cannot collect it repeatedly.

The sawtooth

The engine does not spend everything it has every time it fires. It spends small amounts continuously and saves towards one large buy, which is what produces the pattern the whole thing is named after.

Three lines

Every engine has a floor, a rest line and a cap.

• The floor is never spent. It is the reserve that keeps the engine able to pay its own gas. It can only ever be raised, never lowered, and it is capped at 1 ETH so it can never be raised out of reach to disable the engine.
• The cap is the trigger for the big buy. When the balance reaches it, the engine spends everything down to the rest line in a single transaction.
• The rest line is where the balance lands after that buy. It must be at least a quarter of the cap, which is what stops the big buy from being a market order for the entire balance.

New coins start smaller on purpose. A coin with $MENTION's 2 ETH cap would spend its first months banking towards a buy it never fires, which from outside looks exactly like an engine that does not work. A creator can choose their own numbers at launch, within the same rules.

The four states

Each time the engine is poked it works out which of four states it is in and spends accordingly.

• Idle. The balance is at or below the floor, or the amount it would spend is below the minimum worth spending. It buys nothing and the ETH stays where it is.
• Take. The normal state. It spends a fixed share of everything that has come in since the last buy. On $MENTION that share is 50%, so half of new income is spent and half is banked towards the cap.
• Survive. When income has been quiet, it falls back to spending a small fraction of its surplus so that mentions still produce a visible buy. The fraction grows as the balance approaches the cap.
• Surge. The balance has reached the cap. It spends everything down to the rest line at once. This is the candle.

The minimum buy

Buys below a minimum are not made. The ETH is banked instead and counts towards the next one, so nothing is lost. This exists so that nobody can grind the engine down with a flood of tiny mentions: without it, an attacker could keep the balance permanently just below the cap by triggering endless dust buys.

On $MENTION the minimum is 0.002 ETH, which is a few dollars. The surge ignores it, because a candle is never too small to be worth making.

What counts as a mention

A post on X fires a coin's engine if it contains any one of three things: the coin's ticker written with a dollar sign, the coin's contract address, or a handle the coin nominated at launch.

Matching is case insensitive and bounded, so $MENTION counts and $MENTIONS does not, and an address only counts if it is the whole address rather than a prefix of a longer string.

What gets ignored

• Retweets. Only original posts count.
• Accounts with fewer than 5 followers.
• Accounts less than 7 days old.
• The same account posting about the same coin more than once every two minutes. The cooldown is per account and per coin, so one person cannot be the whole chart.
• The coin's own account, and any handles it asked to have ignored.
• Posts from before the watcher started. It does not go back and buy for history.

Every post that does fire is recorded on the coin's page with a link back to it, so the whole chain from post to burn is public.

Launching a coin

What it costs

One payment, currently around 0.003 ETH. It covers three things: the fee Pons charges to launch a token, the gas to deploy your engine and launch the coin, and a small float left in your coin's own wallet so the engine can pay for its first transactions.

There is nothing else to pay, ever. No listing fee, no subscription, and no cut of anything you raise.

The steps

A launch is three steps that have to happen in order, and the middle one needs an address that does not exist until the first one is done. That means it cannot be a single transaction from your own wallet. So instead:

• You sign a message describing your coin. This is free, happens entirely in your wallet, and proves the payout address you named is yours.
• You are given the address of the wallet that will launch your coin, and the exact amount it needs.
• You send it that amount. One transaction, from anywhere.
• The moment the money arrives, the launch runs on its own. It usually takes under a minute.

You are paying the wallet that does the spending, so your ETH never sits in an account belonging to someone else, and a launch cannot happen that nobody paid for.

What you choose

• Name, ticker, description, logo and links.
• How your fee share splits between your own wallet and your coin's engine. Anything from all of it to none of it.
• The trading fee on your coin, from 0% to 5% each way. The default is 4%. A higher fee fills your engine faster and costs your holders more per trade.
• Your sawtooth, if you do not want the default one.
• Extra X handles that should trigger your coin as well as the ticker.

What cannot be changed afterwards

The ticker, the fee split, the payout address and the trading fee are fixed when the coin is created. They live in the coin's own constructor and its launch record, and there is no function that edits them. Not for you, and not for us. Choose them as though they are permanent, because they are.

Where the money goes

When a coin launched here is traded, the creator's share of the fee is claimed by the engine and then split three ways at the moment it is claimed.

Pons charges its own fee on trades in addition to the creator fee, and that fee belongs to Pons rather than to anything described here. The split above applies to the creator's share only.

What we can and cannot do

Every engine has an owner. This is the part worth reading carefully, because a contract with an owner is only as good as the list of things that owner is able to do.

What the owner cannot do

• Take the ETH. There is no withdraw function on the engine. The only ways ETH leaves are buying the coin, paying the fee split, and reimbursing gas.
• Change where the tokens go. The burn address is fixed at deployment and has no setter.
• Redirect the buying. The token and the pool are bound once, checked against Pons' own record of the launch, and cannot be repointed afterwards. There is deliberately no function to set the contract that receives a buy or the pool it aims at.
• Lower the floor. The reserve can be raised but never reduced, so the promise that a floor is never spent is enforced by the contract rather than by us.
• Change the fee split. On a launchpad coin the split and the addresses it pays are set in the constructor and are immutable.

What the owner can do

• Raise the floor, and move the cap and rest line within the rules above.
• Change how much of incoming fees is spent rather than banked.
• Change the minimum buy, within a quarter of the candle size.
• Change the gas reimbursement caps, within hard limits in the code.
• Tighten the price limit on buys.
• Hand ownership to someone else, or to nobody, which freezes all of the above permanently.

In short, the owner can tune how aggressively the engine spends. The owner cannot stop it spending on the thing it was built to buy, and cannot take the money out.

What it does not protect against

Things a docs page is tempted to leave out.

• Price impact on the candle. The big buy is deliberately not size limited and does not set a tight price limit. It is meant to land as one visible move, which on a thin pool means the last part of it is bought at a worse price than the first. Every token bought is burned either way, but the engine is not trying to get a good fill.
• Ordinary buys are size limited, the candle is not. Before a coin graduates to a normal pool, routine buys are clipped to a fraction of the pool so they do not chew through the book. The surge is exempt on purpose.
• The engine does not make a coin go up. It buys and burns out of fees the coin earned. If nobody trades the coin there are no fees, and if nobody posts about it there is no trigger.
• We do not vet coins. Anyone can launch here. A coin appearing on this site is not an endorsement of it, and the people who launch coins here are not us.
• The trigger depends on X. Mentions are found by polling X's search API. If that is down or rate limited, buys are delayed until it is not.

Reading the tracker

Every coin has a page showing its engine live. The numbers mean:

• Banked. ETH the engine is holding right now, including the floor it will never spend.
• Claimable. Fees sitting in the Pons escrow that the engine has earned but not yet pulled in.
• Next buy. What the engine would spend if it were poked at this instant, and which of the four states it is in.
• The feed. Every post that fired a buy, what it spent, what it burned, and the transaction. Anything marked as banked is a mention that arrived when the amount was below the minimum, so it was added to the balance instead.

Addresses

Everything runs on Robinhood Chain, chain id 4663.

Every coin launched here has its own engine, listed on its own page. Nothing on this site is financial advice.