Useful work.
A buyer.
Your cut.

THOT is intended to connect people who produce useful AI research with buyers who want to learn from it. The token pays for licensed traces. A qualifying lock improves the contributor’s share of their own sales.

Start with an actual purchase.

1. A contributor saves supported AI work in a private library.
2. The contributor enrolls the exact material, licence and THOT price, authorizing qualifying sales once at contribution time.
3. A buyer funds a matching purchase in escrow. The purchase proceeds automatically, without another contributor approval. The treasury can be that buyer.
4. After recorded delivery and a one-hour dispute window, the service finalizes an undisputed sale and pays the contributor’s wallet. The receipt records the payment.

The selected direction is for buyers to pay in THOT. They can use tokens they hold or acquire them from the market. The trace market splits that funded payment; it does not create new tokens. Treasury-funded purchases follow the same escrow and seller-share rules.

The 30% unlocked share is selected. All five thresholds and shares are selected, including for treasury-funded acquisitions. Enrollment must show the authorized token price and retention schedule. Funding records the exact payout under the contributor’s qualified tier. Future unfunded sales can be stopped; already purchased rights remain in force. The seller’s share is the payment for that purchase, not a bonus added on top. Neither a token balance nor a quoted market price guarantees that it can be sold for a particular number of dollars.

The service finalizes an undisputed sale and pays the seller’s wallet after the one-hour window from recorded delivery. Manual claiming remains available if the service is delayed. Delivery is intended to occur with the purchase; the failure timeout remains two days. Delayed delivery, disputes or delayed finalization can extend the wait. Failed delivery makes the buyer’s funds refundable. Sale proceeds have no extra vesting period and are separate from the THOT a participant has locked.

The app records a durable delivery job and withholds plaintext until the matching release hash is acknowledged onchain. The operator attests availability, not that the buyer read the trace. Licensed retrieval ends 30 days after the automatic sale. Deleted or expired sources stop new listings; copies supporting unexpired committed rights are retained until those rights expire.

The lock improves your own sales.

Each selected tier uses a 90-day minimum lock, a seven-day seasoning period, and at least ten days remaining when an offer is quoted. The quote records the qualified tier and honors that share through settlement. Newly added tokens must season; an unqualified balance gets the base share. Companion contracts are implemented and tested locally; production deployment and funding remain required.

You do not need to buy or lock THOT to receive the 30% base share. The selected top tier keeps 95% of the same sale: about 3.17 times the unlocked payout. This advantage comes from the fee schedule; locking by itself does not generate earnings, a fixed APY, or a claim on everyone else’s sales. A larger lock does not bypass trace quality, consent, licensing, or budget limits.

Hold to buy. Lock to keep more.

Buying other people’s traces requires a combined balance of at least 100,000 THOT across the buyer’s authenticated wallet and that buyer’s own qualified locks. Staking is optional for buyers. Purchase escrow is excluded, and the buyer must retain the threshold after funding an order. A buyer with no lock and a 100,000-THOT order would therefore need at least 200,000 THOT before funding.

The gate is checked after funding and when the standing authorization is applied to the automatic sale. These are balance checkpoints, not a continuous holding requirement or a defense against all temporary borrowing. Ineligible purchases cannot complete; a later balance change does not revoke purchased licences. Only the publicly named treasury acquisition vault is exempt from this balance gate, and its reserve and spending limits still apply.

Introduce useful contributors. Share the fee.

One accepted referral can earn a share of the protocol fee on the referred contributor’s genuine, independent licensed sales. The rate follows the referrer’s qualified lock tier, separately from the seller’s tier.

For example, a 100,000-THOT sale by a top-tier seller pays that seller 95,000 THOT. If the eligible referrer is also top-tier, they receive 30% of the 5,000-THOT protocol fee: 1,500 THOT. The protocol retains 3,500 THOT. Referral payments do not reduce seller proceeds and mint no tokens.

Register the contributor-approved referrer during enrollment, before activating a listing and before the first automatic sale. Attribution lasts 180 days from registration. Only quotes issued after attribution can earn a referral; already issued quotes retain their terms, with no retroactive referral. A qualifying quote snapshots the referral rate and preserves it through settlement. There is one referral level, with no treasury-funded, self, affiliated, or reimbursed purchases eligible. Referrals reward eligible sales, not signups, token purchases, or passive holding.

The treasury can be the first buyer.

The selected launch plan targets a fixed initial supply of 1 billion THOT on Pons, with a disclosed creation-time purchase of 500 million THOT to fund the contribution reserve. There is no investor or partner allocation in this plan.

The purchaser must supply the launch capital. Once funded, the reserve holds existing THOT that the treasury can spend on specific licensed traces. Each acquisition goes through the same purchase escrow as an external buyer’s order, under the contributor’s standing authorization and the same 30%–95% seller shares. An operator can approve a sampling campaign or batch and a worker can buy its enrolled traces within contract limits. The reserve supplies the THOT; the operator supplies gas. A custom assayer is not required to buy and inspect those licensed samples.

The subsidy is the treasury’s purchase budget. It is not a second award added to a sale payment. A treasury purchase moves existing reserve tokens and does not count as independent buyer demand; the protocol’s retained share of its own purchase is internal recycling.

Before making paid offers, publish the reserve address, spending controls, available budget, and acquisition terms. An estimate or private upload alone creates no entitlement to payment.

Treasury reserve, purchase escrow, and contributors’ locked principal are separate. A contributor’s lock must not finance acquisitions. A separate treasury contract can hold existing THOT and fund approved purchases, so no extra minting function is needed. Committed purchases cannot exceed funded assets.

A bounded first acquisition campaign.

Selected first-campaign parameters. The planned acquisition places 500 million THOT in the reserve, with 50 million THOT of first-campaign spending authority. The other 450 million remain inactive. Authority is a ceiling on gross purchase commitments, not an earned seller balance.

• A limited start: up to 1 million THOT of gross treasury purchases can begin without outside purchases, still subject to the daily cap.
• Further spending needs buyers: each THOT spent by reviewed independent buyers on finalized trace purchases permits at most one additional THOT of gross treasury purchases.
• Time also limits spending: daily purchase ceilings decline with a selected 180-day half-life and stop after 360 days. The daily and total limits apply even when there is enough buyer spending.

With no independent buyers, the treasury can commit at most 1 million THOT gross in total. Even with sufficient buyers, the selected time limits allow at most 37.5 million THOT gross over 360 days. Sellers receive their applicable 30%–95% share of those purchases.

Each issued, funded treasury offer consumes spending authority once, including if it later expires. Returned protocol fees and refunds do not reset that authority. Treasury purchases, token trading fees, and token turnover do not count as independent trace-buyer spending. The full whitepaper specifies the budget formulas and review rules.

Timing matters: reserve campaign activation has a seven-day governance delay. Fresh locks still need seven days to qualify. Sale proceeds use a separate one-hour dispute window after recorded delivery, then the service finalizes an undisputed purchase and sends the proceeds to the seller’s wallet. A pending payment is distinct from withdrawable proceeds.

A useful market could reinforce itself.

Independent buyers who need THOT may acquire it. Productive contributors may lock THOT to retain more of their own sale proceeds. Better trace supply may attract more buyers. These are possible responses to a useful product, not automatic steps or guaranteed demand.

Treasury purchases also move tokens into sellers’ hands. Sellers can sell, and locked tokens can return to circulation at expiry. Those flows can offset buying and locking. The mechanism does not guarantee price appreciation.

Trading fees and trace revenue are different.

The chosen Pons setting adds a 1% creator-tax field to the 1% base fee for a displayed 2% total trade fee. With native Buyback & Lock off, the inspected configuration allocates 1.7% to the creator and 0.3% to Pons. Recheck and publish the deployed recipients and split at launch.

Those fees apply to trading through the relevant launchpad or pool mechanism. They do not establish an automatic tax on every transfer or every market in THOT.

The trace marketplace separately retains its fee from actual trace purchases, less any eligible referral payment. That remainder can fund operations. Trading revenue may also fund disclosed acquisitions when it has actually been collected and allocated; it is not the same as independent demand for research and creates no passive holder dividend.

From your work to a payment.

1. Capture privately. Use a supported CLI capture, import a history or configure an available API connection in your workspace.
2. Authorize a release. Choose the research, THOT price and license once. Opt into treasury sampling if you want the reserve to consider it.
3. A buyer funds the purchase. Property checks can run before payment; the complete purchased release becomes available after funding.
4. Your share becomes payable. An undisputed purchase settles after the one-hour delivery window. The worker sends the proceeds to your linked wallet; you can also claim them yourself.

A dispute pauses payout for operator review. Its hash and outcome are recorded onchain; the explanation stays private. The operator can issue a full refund or release the agreed split.

An estimate, a funded offer, and a payment.

Estimated value compares what similar research has sold for, even before your own trace has sold. It needs sufficient evidence and does not guarantee a buyer. Purchase escrow holds a buyer’s funded payment under the acquisition terms. Sale proceeds are the seller’s share of a completed purchase. Treasury funding changes who buys the trace; it does not create an extra reward to count twice.

Borrowing against future trace revenue would require a lender, a repayment agreement, and a basis for underwriting. There is no borrowing facility in the launch app.