Revenue source
Plouto has exactly one source of income: the creator-fee share of trades in the PLOUTO market on Pons V2.
That is the whole list. There is no treasury sale, no emission, no fee on transfers, no tax on staking, no subscription and no external funding built into the protocol.
Where the fee comes from
Every trade on a Pons market pays a fee. Pons divides that fee between its own protocol share and a creator share. Plouto is the creator, and the creator share is directed to the PloutoRevenueRouter.
The live Pons launch configuration observed while this protocol was built:
| Parameter | Value |
|---|---|
curveFeeBps | 100 (1.00%) |
supply | 1,000,000,000 PLOUTO |
phantomQuote | 1.68 ETH |
graduationThreshold | 4.2 ETH |
poolFee | 0 |
tickSpacing | 200 |
Plouto adds no tax of its own
Pons allows a creator to add an additional tax on top of the base fee, up to maxCreatorTaxBps (currently 1000, i.e. 10%). Plouto sets creatorTaxBps = 0.
The reasoning: an extra tax makes every trade worse for every holder in order to fund the protocol faster. Plouto takes its share of a fee the market was already paying instead.
Revenue is proportional to volume, not to price
This is worth stating plainly because it is often assumed backwards. Fee revenue scales with trading volume. A token whose price rises with no trading generates no fees. A token trading heavily at a low price generates fees.
Consequently:
- Rewards depend on activity, not on appreciation.
- A quiet market produces a quiet protocol. See empty-volume behaviour.
- Nothing about the design guarantees that volume will exist.
What Plouto never counts as revenue
ETH sent directly to any protocol contract is a donation, tracked separately and excluded from the 60/30/10 split. It cannot inflate totalRevenueClaimed.
This matters because "fees earned" is the headline number a protocol is judged on, and it would be trivially easy to inflate by sending yourself ETH. Plouto's router books revenue only from a measured escrow-claim delta, and the classification is enforced in receive().
Post-graduation
After the market graduates into a Uniswap v4 pool, fees accrue on the Pons meme hook instead of the curve. The mechanism is different but Plouto's position is the same: it is the creator-fee recipient, and it claims from the same escrow.
Converting hook fees to ETH may require the Pons sweep operator. That is a dependency Plouto cannot remove — see sweeps.