A launchpad where every coin has a perp.

Coins launch on Pons V2, on Robinhood Chain. The same transaction opens a perpetual market for the coin, so anyone can go long or short with leverage from its first block.

The spot market is Pons: the bonding curve, then the Uniswap V4 pool after graduation. The perp market is ours.

How the perp prices itself

A perp that settles on a bonding curve can be drained. Pumping a curve and selling back only costs the fees, because the price impact comes back on the way out. On a fresh Pons coin, anything above about $20 of open interest makes "long, pump, close, dump" profitable.

So each coin's perp trades on its own virtual curve (vAMM). Longs buy on it, shorts sell on it, and PnL settles there.

• Index: 70% an average of the perp's own price, 30% an average of the spot price, sampled by the keeper every five minutes, as a median of three.
• Funding pulls the perp toward the index, capped at 0.05% an hour. Pumping the spot can bend funding a little and that's all.
• Liquidations read a 60-block average of the perp price, never one block.
• Per-account cap: one account can't move the perp price more than half the way to anyone's liquidation price, and never more than 10%.
• Per-side cap: all the longs together (or all the shorts) can't move the price more than half the way to liquidation either, so the last one out of a crowd is still solvent. Plus a limit on how far opens can move the price in one block.
• Repeg: the perp's curve drifts toward the index, 1% per sample at most, so a coin that runs away on spot is followed within hours. A position closed less than five minutes after it was opened, with the perp repriced in between, gives its profit back to the market, up to 2% of its size: timing the keeper earns nothing, and a quick trade that made nothing gives nothing.

Perp graduation

Leverage and sizes follow the depth of the coin's spot market. When the coin graduates on Pons, its perp graduates too.

0.1% per side

Every perp trade pays 0.1% on each side. Here is where it goes.

Spot trades pay Pons as usual: a 1% curve fee plus the creator tax. The creator's part of those lands in the coin's own vault on HyperPons, whoever sweeps it: half goes to the creator, and the rest is split the same way.

Nobody funds the house

On a vAMM, traders pay each other: a winner is paid by the traders who came in later or got liquidated. The insurance fund covers positions that go under before they are liquidated, and pays for the perp's curve to follow its coin (up to half the fund at a time). It fills from fees. Creators never deposit anything.

Liquidations read the perp's price averaged over 12 minutes, so a push has to be held to liquidate anyone; the perp's own repegs, which only the keeper makes, move that average at once, so a position the perp drifts against is liquidated in time. A trader who goes under before being liquidated is paid for at once: first by what the perp's own repegs took from its traders, then by the fund. If neither can cover it all, the market goes reduce-only until the profit of the next positions to close, or the fund as it refills, pays the rest back. In the rare case where a winner already cashed out before the loser went under and nothing is left to cover it, those still in the market share the cut, as in any pooled market. Nobody can take ETH out of the engine, not even its owner, and a change to a stage's leverage or margins waits two days.

Read this

• You can lose all your margin. Leverage on a coin that is hours old is as risky as it sounds.
• The perp can drift from the spot when nobody arbitrages. Funding pulls it back, slowly.
• No third-party audit yet. The contracts went through three independent internal reviews (accounting, pricing and liquidations, the launcher), every attack tried in a test, and every finding was fixed before this deployment. Coordinated accounts were simulated on 400 real Pons launches: pushing the price onto a crowd liquidated no one, and pumping the spot to carry a perp long lost money in about 90% of runs, and the rest were coins that rose on their own.
• Pons runs the spot market and the fee escrow.
• Derivatives are regulated in many countries, including the EU. Not available where prohibited.