Documentation

How Footnote works

Footnote is a launchpad for tokens tied to research. Anyone can launch an article; the work’s authors get the author fee from every trade. This page is the full reference.

What it is

Paste a public link to a research paper, preprint, article or long-form post, and Footnote launches a token on it via the Pons launchpad on Robinhood Chain. The token trades on a bonding curve, graduates to a Uniswap v4 pool paired with ETH, and shows up on DexScreener and trading terminals like any other token.

The difference is where the creator fee goes. On most launchpads it goes to whoever pressed the button. Here every token carries a 2% author fee on every trade, and the recorded fee recipient is the Footnote treasury, which holds it for the work’s verified authors. Footnote keeps none of the author fee.

The research market

Research is one of the largest bodies of valuable work on the internet with almost no direct economic link between the people who make it and the people who use it. Decentralised science (DeSci) projects try to close that gap; Footnote does it at the level of a single paper.

The problem

Attention around a paper already gets monetised: by journals, by aggregators, by the trading of tokens that reference it without permission. Authors see none of it. Meanwhile memecoins show that people will happily put money behind an idea they find exciting; it just never flows back to the idea’s source.

Footnote doesn’t stop people launching tokens on research. It routes the value to where it came from.

How it works

1. Paste a link. arXiv and DOI links auto-fill title and authors. Other sources are accepted with manual entry. You choose a name (≤32 chars), ticker (≤10), optional description, image and X link.
2. Preview and launch. Everything is locked at launch, so you review a full preview first. Footnote charges nothing to launch; you pay gas and Pons’s launch fee (about 0.0005 ETH). You can add an initial buy in ETH in the same transaction so nobody front-runs you.
3. Trade on the curve. Fixed supply of 1,000,000,000 tokens on a bonding curve. When the curve fills (at 4.2 ETH in this configuration) the token graduates to Uniswap v4 with liquidity locked.
4. Authors get paid. A 2% author fee on every trade accrues in ETH to the treasury. Once an author verifies, their share is sent to their wallet and keeps flowing as more accrues.

Fees

The author fee is the Pons creator tax, fixed at 2% for every token launched here and enforced onchain. Footnote keeps none of it. The Pons trading fee applies to every token on the launchpad; the platform receives the creator-side 0.70% of it to run the service. Pons sets its own fees and may change them for new launches.

Custody

Trading is non-custodial: you hold your tokens and ETH. The author share is different. It accrues to a treasury the platform controls and is paid out on verification. That is a trust assumption, so every article’s accrued, paid and pending balances are published on its page with explorer links for each payout.

One more trust assumption sits with Pons: its owner can reassign a token’s fee recipient after a 3-day public timelock. Any such change is visible onchain.

Author verification

Claims are tied to the wallet that submits them. Co-authors verify separately and the accrued ETH is split equally among verified authors; unverified shares wait. Every method ends with a human review before any payout.

Start a claim

Supported sources

Any public URL is accepted. These get first-class handling:

FAQ