No-emissions policy
No PLOUTO is minted to pay a staker, a keeper, a team member or anyone else. Not at launch, not on a schedule, not at anyone's discretion.
What enforces it
Three independent things, in increasing order of strength.
1. The staking contract never touches supply
GravityStaking has no minting capability of any kind. It holds PLOUTO that stakers deposited and returns exactly that. Its only outbound value transfers are:
safeTransferof a staker's own principal back to them.- ETH payments from its own balance.
There is no code path that increases anyone's PLOUTO balance beyond what they put in.
2. Rewards are denominated in ETH
The reward asset is not the staked asset. notifyRewardETH() is payable and works entirely in native ETH. Even if someone wanted to pay rewards in PLOUTO, the accumulator has no mechanism to source it.
3. The token itself cannot mint
This is the strongest guarantee, and it comes from Pons rather than from Plouto.
Pons launch tokens are fixed-supply ERC20Burnable. Selector extraction from the deployed bytecode of a live Pons token confirms:
| Selector | Signature | Present |
|---|---|---|
0x40c10f19 | mint(address,uint256) | absent |
0x42966c68 | burn(uint256) | present |
0x79cc6790 | burnFrom(address,uint256) | present |
0x18160ddd | totalSupply() | present |
There is no reachable mint entrypoint. Supply can only go down.
What this costs
Being emissions-free is not free. It means:
- There is no bootstrapping subsidy. Early stakers are not paid extra to show up. If revenue is zero at launch, rewards are zero at launch.
- Rewards cannot be tuned. No governance lever can increase the reward rate to attract capital.
- Growth is not purchasable. Many protocols buy their initial TVL with emissions. Plouto structurally cannot.
Those are real disadvantages, and they are the direct cost of the guarantee.
What "no emissions" does not mean
It does not mean the supply is unchanging. Supply decreases over time as buybacks retire tokens. The guarantee is one-directional: nothing is created.
It also does not mean nobody can be paid. Keepers, audits and infrastructure are funded from the reserve — in ETH, out of revenue, not out of anyone's token supply.
Verifying it
Read the token contract on Blockscout and check its function list. If mint is not there, no amount of protocol governance can conjure it. That check does not require trusting Plouto's documentation at all, which is the point.