Cycles and funding

Every pons pool charges a 1% fee on trades, split between the pons protocol and the token's creator, snapshotted at launch. The creator share of ORE's fees belongs to the Ore treasury, claimable at any time.

The treasury's pipeline is short: claim fees, convert to PAXG, fund the distribution. Each reserve deposit is a labeled on-chain event — the funding cadence is public history, not a promise.

This is a different model from a transfer fee, and we are direct about it: rewards depend on the treasury routing revenue in, and on trading volume existing. In exchange, ORE is a completely ordinary token — nothing for an exchange, terminal, or scanner to object to — with locked liquidity from the first block and gold that reaches every holder automatically.

Time divides into fixed fifteen-minute cycles, ninety-six per day, measured purely by the clock. At each boundary the keeper:

1. Reads holder balances, excluding the pool, treasury, and distributor.
2. Splits the cycle's emission pro-rata, capped so distributions never exceed deposited gold.
3. Delivers to default-mode holders, accrues for hold-mode holders, publishes the full snapshot, and commits the Merkle root of accrued entitlements on-chain.

Published snapshots plus open keeper source mean anyone can recompute any cycle — the keeper is trusted to be honest, never trusted to be unverifiable.

Weekly rewards make a protocol static. A fifteen-minute cadence means numbers move while you watch, and the hold bonus operates on minutes, not months.

For the operational trust assumptions around the reserve and the snapshot keeper, see Risks.