BLOG · 3 Sept 2026 · 8 MIN
How the pons bonding curve prices a launch
A pons launch does not start as a liquidity pool. The entire supply is minted onto a bonding curve, and the price is derived from how much of that supply has been bought so far. Nothing is set by hand, and nobody has to provide liquidity for trading to begin.
The curve as a vending machine
The curve holds the whole supply from the moment the token exists and will always trade with you in either direction. Buying raises the price, selling lowers it, and you are never waiting for a counterparty. That last property is what makes a launch tradable from its first second.
Why the opening price is not zero
The curve carries a phantom reserve: a virtual balance counted for pricing that nobody deposited and nobody can withdraw. It sets the opening price and is why the first buyer does not get the supply for nothing.
On the standard configuration the phantom reserve works out to roughly 1.68 ETH against a supply of one billion, putting the opening price near 1.68 × 10⁻⁹ ETH per token. The graduation threshold sits at 4.2 ETH, and the ratio between those two numbers fixes what fraction of supply reaches the pool — about 28.6% is held back, leaving 71.4% to sell on the curve.
Fees come off different sides
A buy is charged on the way in: the trade fee, the creator tax and any snipe tax come off what you spend, and only the remainder reaches the curve. A sell is priced first and the fees come off the proceeds.
This asymmetry catches people who quote a sale by mirroring a buy. Doing that overstates what you get back. The two directions genuinely need separate arithmetic.
The last buy behaves differently
The curve never sells past its reserved allocation. A buy that would cross that line is filled to the edge, repriced from the token side, and the difference refunded in the same transaction.
So the final buy of a launch can return fewer tokens than a quote taken a moment earlier suggested, while still honouring the rate you accepted. Any quote that ignores the remaining sellable supply will overstate both the tokens received and the amount actually spent.
Then it graduates
Once the curve sells out it closes, and everything it collected seeds a Uniswap v4 pool whose liquidity is locked permanently. Because the reserved share is fixed at creation, every launch on the same settings arrives at a pool of the same size at the same price — whether it was bought out by one order or a thousand.
The longer version, with the numbers this article refers to.
Keep reading
6 min read
What happens when a launch graduates
When the curve sells out, the launch becomes a Uniswap v4 pool with permanently locked liquidity. What changes for holders, and what closes earlier than you expect.
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Why one large buy costs more than several small ones
On a constant-product curve, a single large order pays a worse average price than the same amount split into pieces. The arithmetic, and where it stops being true.
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The pons snipe tax window is three seconds, not five
The documentation says five seconds. The deployed contract returns three. Here is how to read the real value, and why the difference decides whether a bundle lands inside the window.