Graduation
A Pons coin starts on a bonding curve. When enough ETH has been paid into it (4.2 ETH for the standard configuration), it graduates and moves to a pool. An organism has to follow it, because a hook's order is a buy, and a buy needs a market.
Where a graduated coin trades
On Robinhood Chain, a graduated Pons coin trades in a Uniswap v4 pool: native ETH against the coin, with a Pons hook attached. This was read from the chain, not from documentation: the pool of a graduated coin was found through the PoolManager's Initialize event, and the pool id computed from the key matches the id the market data shows.
| Part of the pool key | Value |
|---|---|
| currency0 | native ETH (address zero) |
| currency1 | the coin |
| fee | 0 (the hook takes the creator tax) |
| tick spacing | 200 |
| hooks | 0xe5e702641ea86f4ae6cc3cdaed2b886f976be044 |
| PoolManager | 0x8366a39cc670b4001a1121b8f6a443a643e40951 |
The three states of a coin
The organism reads its coin's state at every beat.
| Venue | How it is known | What happens |
|---|---|---|
curve | graduated() on the curve is false | price from the curve reserves; a buy is a curve buy |
pool | graduated, and the PoolManager holds a pool at the id computed from the key | price from the pool's sqrt price; a buy is a Universal Router V4_SWAP |
none | graduated, but no pool at that id | nothing can be bought: hooks stay idle and the journal says the coin has graduated and has no pool to buy on yet |
The pool must exist before anything is bought. If the key were wrong, the organism would see none and do nothing; it cannot buy in a pool it has not found.
How a pool buy works
One transaction through the Universal Router: swap the ETH sent with the call for the coin, settle, and take the whole output straight to the burn address. The coin never sits in the wallet.
Two guards sit around it:
- A price-impact wall. The pool's price and in-range liquidity are read, and the order is cut down to the largest amount whose estimated price move stays within 4%. A thin pool takes less than the hook ordered; the journal shows what was actually spent, and only that is taken from the treasury.
- A minimum-out guard, from the same estimate with 2% of slack and the coin's creator tax taken off.
If the estimate is off (for example the swap would cross a tick), the minimum-out guard makes the transaction revert and nothing is spent.
Fees after graduation
The organism claims whatever the Pons escrow holds for its wallet, as before. After graduation the creator tax is taken by the hook. On the chain, deposits into the escrow do happen inside pool-swap transactions, but not on every swap: the hook appears to batch them. In our fork test, the organism's own pool buy did not trigger a deposit, so the timing of fees after graduation is not something this version claims to know. If fees arrive slowly, the battery charges slowly, and the organism sleeps more.
What is still not covered
- The step in between. After a coin fills its curve and before its pool exists, there is nothing to buy on. The organism waits. No coin was caught in that step during testing, so that path is tested with a stand-in.
- Pools of other shapes. Only the standard Pons pool (ETH against the coin, the Pons hook, tick spacing 200) is handled. A coin paired with something other than ETH is refused when the organism starts.
- Impact beyond one tick. The estimate is first-order inside the current tick range. It errs by reverting, not by overspending.