Mechanism

The pipeline

Every stage is on-chain and permissionless. YieldETF adds nothing before graduation and controls nothing after it; the protocol only observes graduations and holds the result.

Graduation

A token launches on Pons v2 and trades up a bonding curve. There is no presale and no insider allocation; the curve is the only way in. When the curve completes, Pons moves the liquidity into a Uniswap v4 pool controlled by the Pons hook, which locks it permanently. From that moment the pool can reprice but never close.

Pons v2 pairs graduates against ETH by default, and against tokenized stocks for RWA launches. Both pair types are indexable; RWAX exists specifically for the second kind.

Indexing

The GraduationRegistry accepts any graduate that anyone registers. A listed token becomes eligible for vaults once it clears two thresholds:

• Age: at least 7 epochs (7 days) since graduation.
• Depth: at least 25 ETH in the locked pool.

Vaults weight eligible tokens by locked-liquidity depth, capped at 15% each, with excess weight redistributed pro rata. Depth is a manipulable-resistant signal here because the liquidity that produces it cannot be withdrawn after the snapshot.

Yield

Locked pools still earn swap fees. Each vault owns fee-collection positions on its constituents' pools; at every epoch rebalance the harvested fees buy more of the basket. Nothing accrues to a treasury, and there is no performance fee in the current deployment. Yield shows up as NAV drift, not as a separate reward token.