01
From snowballs to fomoballs
The original snowball was built around a simple idea: a token can market make itself. Every trade generates fees, those fees accumulate behind the token, and they are eventually spent buying the token back — with everything acquired sent to the dead address. More trading, more fees. More fees, more buybacks. More buybacks, less supply.
A fomoball adds a new input to that mechanism: attention. Every coin launched here has its own snowball, and instead of waiting only on trading activity and a clock, a thesis posted on fomo can fire it.
The important distinction is that this is not one token being bought by every thesis on fomo. Each launch has its own mechanism, and its own vault. Write about coin A and coin A's snowball activates. Write about coin B and coin B's does. The attention stays connected to the token receiving it.
There is nothing to configure. Every coin here charges 4% and runs the same engine, so the only thing that distinguishes two of them is the coins themselves.
02
The thesis trigger
A thesis is more than a post. It is somebody publicly explaining why they are paying attention to a coin, published in the fomo app. We do not host them.
Normally that conviction ends at the post. Maybe somebody reads it and buys, maybe they share it, maybe nothing happens. A fomoball makes the thesis itself an input: the social layer stops sitting above the market as commentary and becomes a signal the mechanism responds to.
The keeper reads fomo's feed for every coin launched here. A thesis it has not seen before is recorded against that coin, and on the same pass the coin buys and burns. A thesis is a trigger, not a score: it does not have to out-argue the clock, and it goes straight through the cooldown that would otherwise hold the engine back.
- 01 Post again, fire again. Every thesis is its own trigger. Write a second one and the snowball fires a second time; write ten and it fires ten times, each spending what the coin has earned since the last.
- 02 Confirmed before it counts. A thesis is marked answered only once its buy has confirmed on chain, so a run that reverts leaves the thesis standing for the next pass rather than being quietly dropped.
- 03 Gas still binds. A thesis skips the timing gates and nothing else. If the budget is smaller than the gas it would cost to deploy, the coin waits, whoever asked.
03
The fee
Every buy and every sell pays 4%, in the quote asset, in both directions. It is written into the token's record on chain at the moment it is created and it cannot be changed afterwards. Not by the creator, not by us.
It used to be a setting, one of four, each with its own rate. That made the single most important fact about a coin — what it charges the people trading it — a configuration option, and it meant two coins on this site could not be compared without first comparing their terms. One rate, every coin.
| Creator fee | 4% | fixed, on chain — cannot be changed after creation |
| Direction | both | charged on every buy and every sell |
| Quote asset | ETH | denominated in the chain's native quote token |
04
The vault
Each launch gets its own wallet, derived at creation, and that wallet is named as the fee recipient in the same transaction that creates the token. It is the only address the fees can be paid to.
That wallet holds exactly one coin's money. It is not a shared treasury, so one coin's fees can never be spent on another's buybacks, and there is no pooled balance for anyone to argue about. The site can sign for it in order to run the engine; it cannot send the money anywhere the engine does not.
A coin may only ever spend what it earned. The budget is the sum of the claims the keeper made for that coin, less what it has already spent buying itself back, capped by what the wallet actually holds above its gas float. It is never simply the balance — that would treat anything sitting in the wallet as fee revenue.
05
The clock underneath
Nobody writes about most coins most of the time, and a coin earning fees in silence should still deploy them. So underneath the trigger there is a floor: the engine scores four readings and adds them up, and at 1.0 it acts.
- Thesis How many theses are standing unanswered. One fires a snowball outright; the count is what keeps a coin people are still arguing about hot after the first answer has gone out. 3 unanswered scores 1.0.
- Time How long since the last snowball, against a 20m cadence. The floor that guarantees a coin nobody mentions still gets bought.
- Budget How much has gathered, against what a full-size snowball would deploy. Stops the engine spending dust on gas.
- Dip How far under its recent average the price is. 12% under scores 1.0, which is what makes it buy weakness rather than strength.
The weights sum to one, which is what makes the threshold mean something: any single term reaching 1.0 is sufficient on its own, and several partial reasons add to the same verdict. Because they add, a large enough dip pulls a snowball forward long before the clock would have called for it, and a flat market with nothing written about it still gets its scheduled run on time.
| Term | Weight | Scores 1.0 when… |
|---|---|---|
| Thesis | 0.30 | 3 or more unanswered theses |
| Time | 0.35 | 20 minutes since last snowball |
| Budget | 0.20 | full snowball-size budget accumulated |
| Dip | 0.15 | price 12% below recent average |
06
How big a snowball gets
Two limits, and the smaller one wins. The first is the share: what fraction of the gathered balance a single snowball is willing to spend, enlarged when a thesis or a dip is driving it. The second is the impact cap, a ceiling on how far one buy may move the price.
budget × 0.75 × (1 + 0.5·dip + 0.5·thesis),
budget,
reserve × 2%
)
The cap is the one that matters. A buy large enough to move the price several per cent is purchasing its own exit liquidity, so the engine clips the spend rather than sending the order and hoping. When that happens the snowball is recorded as capped and the remainder stays in the vault for next time. Nothing is lost, only delayed.
07
Every number in one table
Read off the engine at build time. If one of these changes in the code it changes here in the same commit, whether or not anybody remembered to edit this page.
| Parameter | Value | What it governs |
|---|---|---|
| Creator fee | 4% | every buy and every sell, both directions |
| Clock cadence | 20m | what the time term is measured against |
| Cooldown | 10m | hard floor on clock-driven runs; a thesis skips it |
| Spend share | 75% | of the standing budget, before boosts |
| Thesis boost | +50% | enlargement when a thesis is driving the run |
| Dip boost | +50% | enlargement at a full-strength dip |
| Impact cap | 2% | most of the venue's quote reserve one snowball may spend |
| Dip reference | 12% | drawdown that scores 1.0 on the dip term |
| Thesis reference | 3 | unanswered theses that score 1.0 on the thesis term |
| Term weights | 0.3 / 0.35 / 0.2 / 0.15 | thesis, time, budget, dip — summing to 1 |
08
What this does not do
- Fee It is not free money. The fee comes out of the people trading the coin, and the buyback puts it back into the same market they are trading in. What changes is who ends up holding the supply and when the buying happens, not how much value exists.
- Floor A buyback is not a floor. A coin can only ever spend what it has earned in fees. On a quiet coin that is a small number, and a snowball into a falling market is a small buy into a falling market.
- Thesis A thesis is not a prediction. It is somebody's opinion, published somewhere we do not moderate, and the engine does not read it — it counts it.
- Trust The engine is ours, and that part is trusted. The fee and its recipient are fixed on chain by pons and hold without trusting anyone. The cadence, the weights and the burn itself are executed by a keeper holding the vault keys; pons has no idea any of it exists. Every snowball is on chain, every thesis that caused one links to the transaction it caused, and every input to the decision is published on the coin's page — so the commitment is checkable even where it is not enforced.