Fee routing
How the trade fee is divided before and after it reaches the coin's vault.
At the Pons market
Link launches set a 2% creator tax and switch Pons buybacks off. Combined with the current 1% Pons base fee, of which Pons keeps 30%, a trader pays 3%: 0.3% to Pons and 2.7% to the creator-fee recipient, which is the vault. Pons sets these parameters and pays out on its own schedule, so the numbers describe policy, not an instant per-swap transfer.
Inside the vault
The vault's receive() function cuts every incoming payment (refunds excepted) into whole 27-wei units and assigns 15 to liquidity, 5 to $LINK buyback and burn, and 7 to the creator. Measured against official-market volume that is 1.5%, 0.5% and 0.7%.
Payment in: 0.027 ETH
→ liquidity 15/27: 0.015 ETH
→ $LINK burn 5/27: 0.005 ETH
→ creator 7/27: 0.007 ETHLeftover wei (at most 26) rolls into the next payment. The ratio is hard-coded; nobody can change it.
The $LINK burn leg
Burn funds pile up as buybackNative. Any address may call flushBuyback(), which can only send them to the immutable LinkBuybackEngine. There the keeper buys $LINK in limited runs (0.02 ETH each, 15 minutes apart by default) and burns every token acquired; the engine verifies on-chain that total supply fell by exactly that amount.
Nominal versus deposited
Converting ETH into pool assets costs swap fees, slippage and gas, so what reaches the pool can be less than the nominal share. Coin pages list received, reserved and invested amounts separately, and money still sitting at Pons is never counted as liquidity.
Creator withdrawals
claimCreator(recipient) is restricted to the creator recorded at launch and draws only on the creator balance, never on the liquidity or burn reserves. If the recipient cannot accept ETH the call reverts and the balance is untouched.