every token has a card behind it. its market cap sits next to the card's price, so you always know how much of the card the market has priced in.
the first token to launch takes this spot.
total tax earned across every pairing.
landmark printings, every one referenced above $300. pick one to launch a token paired with it.
| # | card | set | rarity | reference | 7d | tokens |
|---|
one tx. pick a card, name the token, sign. the card is the pairing, not the name: call the token whatever you like and give it its own logo, or launch it as the card itself.
how pairings work, how to launch one, and what happens to the fees.
most new tokens start with nothing to point at: no story, no benchmark, no way to tell whether a price is big or small. collectible cards are the opposite. a rare printing leaves auction records, graded sales and market prices anyone can look up.
tradecards joins the two. every token launched here is paired with one card printing from the catalogue. the card is the token's face and its benchmark: at a glance you know what the token stands for and how its market cap compares with the card it's named after.
only catalogue cards can be launched. it's a curated list of printings, each referenced above $300, from base set holos to gold star grails. every entry is one exact printing: set, number, rarity and variant. two printings of the same pokemon are two different cards, and two different pairings.
each reference comes from a public source for that exact printing, named on the card and on every token paired with it. the 7d column is how the card's market drifted over the week against its 30-day average. it's noisy on vintage cards that rarely sell.
everywhere on tradecards a token's market cap sits next to its card's reference. the ratio is the number a pairing is built around. below the card it reads as a percentage, above it as a multiple. the ratio moves from both sides: the token trades around the clock, the card follows auctions. neither price sets the other.
anyone with a wallet can launch, in one tx. the site calls the tradecards factory's launch. the factory opens the card vault first, then calls pons's PonsV2LaunchFactory.launchToken naming the vault as the creator fee recipient, so the token's beneficiary is the vault from block one. pons mints the fixed 1b supply into a bonding curve that trades in eth; at 4.2 eth the curve sells out and graduates into a permanently locked uniswap v4 pool. an opening buy, if you add one, settles on the curve in the same tx at the untaxed price.
$CARDS pairing: <id>, the card's name, set, number and reference on launch day, and a note that it's not redeemable for a physical card.token addresses end in 7777, the tradecards signature. pons deploys with create2, so the address is a function of the salt and the launch terms: the launch page mines a salt in your browser, a few seconds, and checks it against the factory before you sign. name and ticker are public on-chain metadata, check them before signing.
1% on a buy, 1% on a sell, on the curve and on the uniswap v4 pool after graduation: the tradecards tax, charged by pons as the launch's creator tax. not a per-launch choice: the factory always launches at that rate, so no pairing can quietly charge more than another. on top of it pons charges its own 1% base fee on every trade and keeps 30% of that as protocol revenue; the other 70% is paid to the creator, which for a tradecards token is the vault. tradecards takes a 6% commission of what a vault harvests. the rest stays in the vault.
a benchmark on its own is not binding. a token can name a $28,400 card forever without a dollar ever moving toward one. the vault is what makes the pairing cost something: the tax is routed to a contract belonging to that token, not to the wallet that launched it. one vault per token, so what each pairing has earned is countable on its own. the beneficiary is written into the token at launch. the vault never hands it off; only pons's own owner could redirect it, and only behind a public 3-day timelock.
pons books every fee in eth into a claimable escrow ledger. on the curve the vault can sweep its own pending fees. on the v4 pool the fees a buy pays arrive in the token and first need a conversion swap that only pons's sweep operator may run, which it does on its own schedule. the vault's harvest sweeps what it can, claims the vault's escrow balance and recognises what arrived, paying tradecards its commission on the way in. anyone can call it, it can only move fees toward the vault, and a vault fills even if nobody presses the button.
every vault answers to the same owner, the owner of the tradecards factory. the owner can withdraw a vault's balance to a wallet of their choosing. that is the only call that can name a destination; a second open call pays a vault out but only ever to the owner. everything a vault collected and everything that left it is public in events. read a vault as a public record of what its pairing earned, not a guarantee about what happens next.