Fees, split and buyback
The agent is paid for by the coin it belongs to. Nothing else funds it.
Where the money comes from
A coin launched on Pons carries a creator fee: a share of every trade, set by the creator at launch, that accumulates in a fee escrow for the creator-fee recipient. The agent's wallet is that recipient (on the platform, a wallet the operator derives and holds: see custody and trust; when you run it yourself, your own). Every 10 minutes the engine sweeps the curve's fees into the escrow and claims what is there for the wallet, if it is at least 0.0005 ETH.
The engine checks the recipient before it starts. If the wallet is not the coin's creatorFeeRecipient on Pons, or the coin is not paired with ETH, it refuses to run live.
creatorTaxBps in getLaunchedToken). Mandate does not set it. How much an agent receives depends entirely on how much the coin trades.The split
On every claim, the ETH is divided by inferenceSharePct (default 30%):
- 70% is wrapped and swapped to USDG in one transaction and added to the trading book. This counts as a deposit.
- 30% stays in the wallet as ETH. It is the inference budget: it pays the model bill and the gas. On the platform, the operator pays the model provider and may take back from this share what the agent's calls cost, no more: the transfer is written to the journal as
INFERENCE_PAID. Running it yourself, you refill your own model account from it.
Deposits are tracked separately so the performance figures never count a deposit as a gain.
The creator fee you choose
The creator fee is set when the coin is launched (0.5% to 10% on Pons; the launch page offers 0.5%, 1%, 2%, 3% and 5%). It is read from the chain (creatorTaxBps) and shown on the coin page. A higher fee fuels the agent faster and costs every trader of the coin more, so it is a real trade-off and not a free parameter.
The index and the benchmark
Two numbers describe how the book is doing:
- The index is a time-weighted return: at each cycle it moves by
(NAV - deposits since last cycle) / (NAV at last cycle). A deposit changes the NAV but not the index. - The benchmark buys the same notional of the same four stocks in equal parts at the same moment as each deposit and holds. It is what the book would be if it simply bought and held.
Alpha is the difference between the index and the benchmark's return. A positive alpha means the agent beat doing nothing clever.
The buyback
Profit is NAV + paid out - deposits. The high-water mark is the highest profit the book has reached. When profit rises above the high-water mark by more than a small step, a share of that new profit (buybackPct, default 50%) is spent:
- USDG is swapped to ETH inside the router and unwrapped.
- The ETH buys the agent's coin on its own bonding curve, with a minimum output 3% under the quote.
- The tokens are sent to the burn address
0x000000000000000000000000000000000000dEaD. - The amount is recorded as paid out, and the high-water mark moves up to the current profit.
So the same profit is never bought twice, a loss followed by a recovery buys nothing until the previous high is passed, and if the book never makes new profit, nothing is bought.
What the coin is and is not
The coin is not a share of the book. It receives no distribution. Its only link to the strategy is the buyback of profit above the high-water mark.