Lot: Fee Auctions Without a Buyback Bot
Lot is a launchpad on pons v2 where a coin's creator fees are not paid to a wallet but sold. Each coin launched through Lot receives a house: an immutable contract that collects the coin's fees, forwards a fifth of them to buy and burn $LOT, and offers the rest as a lot every one to five minutes. Bidders pay in the coin itself. The highest bid takes the ETH and is burned; every losing bid is returned as credit. Because the burn is priced by open competition rather than by a bot swapping into its own book, the protocol needs no price oracle, no keeper wallet, no slippage budget and no operator.
The auction is the buyback.
A conventional buyback-and-burn holds a wallet, runs a bot, and buys the coin on the open market at whatever price the book asks. It pays slippage, it can be front-run, and holders must trust that the wallet is used as promised. Lot inverts this. The house never buys the coin. It sells what it already holds — the ETH the coin earned in fees — to whoever will pay the most coin for it. Rational bidders push the price to the pot's fair value; the coin they pay with is destroyed. The protocol converts fees into burned supply at a price real participants agreed on, and holds nothing it could misuse.
One contract per coin, configured once.
A house is deployed as a minimal-proxy clone by the Lot factory in the same transaction that launches the coin on pons. pons requires a creator-fee recipient at creation, so the house must exist first; it is then initialised against the coin pons reports, and refuses any coin whose fee recipient is not its own address. The creator chooses two terms at launch: the lot length, between one and five minutes, and their own cut of each sold lot, between zero and thirty percent. Neither can be changed afterwards by the creator, by Lot, or by anyone else. The house has no owner, no pause, no upgrade path and no withdrawal that pays anyone other than the winner, the creator's published cut and whoever paid the gas to settle.
Bids are held, never spent, until the hammer.
A lot opens with the pot at whatever the house has collected. Bids are denominated in the coin and must exceed the standing bid by at least one percent. A displaced bid is not returned by transfer but credited inside the contract, so it can be re-bid without another transaction and withdrawn whenever the bidder chooses. A bid placed inside the soft close — a tenth of the lot, between ten and thirty seconds — pushes the hammer back by the same interval, so a lot cannot be sniped, only outlasted. At the hammer the highest bidder is owed the pot less the published cuts, and their bid is transferred to the dead address. A lot that draws no bid does not sell; its pot rolls into the next.
Twenty percent of every fee buys and burns $LOT.
Before any lot is formed, the house forwards a fifth of each fee it collects to the Lot burner. Only fresh inflow is skimmed; a rolled pot is never skimmed twice. The burner is a single immutable contract that anyone may trigger. While $LOT trades on its pons curve, a call buys $LOT directly from the curve and delivers it to the dead address, with a floor computed in the same transaction from the curve's own pricing, so a sandwich can take at most one percent. Each call spends at most a quarter of an ETH, waits thirty seconds for the next, and pays its caller one percent. After $LOT graduates to its Uniswap pool the burner sells its ETH for $LOT by the same open auction a house uses, because an unattended on-chain swap without an oracle is not a risk the protocol is willing to hold. $LOT itself is a plain pons launch whose own creator rewards fund development and audits; it is the one coin on Lot that is never auctioned.
Anyone can settle. Nobody has to.
Fees on pons v2 do not reach a recipient on their own: they rest on the curve until swept, then in the escrow until claimed. A house performs both steps itself, because pons permits the fee recipient to sweep, and wraps each in a try/catch so a quiet epoch or a graduated launch cannot brick settlement. Settlement is permissionless and pays its caller two and a half percent of the pot, so the auction survives the disappearance of Lot's own infrastructure. Winners and settlers withdraw their ETH themselves; the creator is paid directly with a bounded gas stipend and falls back to a withdrawal if their address cannot receive. A party that refuses ETH can therefore only harm itself.
Reserved ETH is never auctioned twice.
The pot is defined as the house's balance less everything it already owes. That single invariant is what prevents an unwithdrawn win from being sold again as the next lot, and it is held under every path: a sold lot reserves the whole pot before any payout, a failed push converts to a debt rather than a refund, and settlement of a later lot reads only the unreserved remainder. The contract holds, at all times, at least the standing bid plus every bidder's credit in the coin. Re-entrancy is refused at the boundary. There is no rescue function, no admin key, no upgradeable settlement logic and no path by which the deployer can be paid. The test suite exercises a winner that re-enters on payout, a winner that rejects ETH outright, the double-skim case and the burner's price floor.
Three contracts, one list.
LotHouse is the auction and the skim. LotBurner is the $LOT buy-and-burn with its curve-priced floor and post-graduation auction. LotFactory is a list: it clones a house, launches the coin, binds the two and records the result, holding no funds and retaining no control. The site reads all three from the chain server-side and never exposes an RPC key to the browser. Launching, bidding, settling and withdrawing are direct wallet calls to the contracts; the interface simulates nothing it does not then sign. Contracts are written in Solidity 0.8.24 with a 21-test Hardhat suite and are not yet deployed or audited.
Contract addresses will be published on this page and on the Explore page with Robinscan links once deployed. The pons v2 reference is at docs.ponsfamily.com/v2.