$VORTEX

The protocol's own token, and the fee stream meant to buy it back.

Status: the token does not exist yet. The fee stream that would feed it is live and accruing; where it goes is a one-line configuration change. Everything below separates what is running from what is not, because the difference matters.

The stream

Every trade on every coin launched here pays a fee. The creator takes 70%. The protocol takes 30%, and of that:

                                   ┌── 80%  →  buyback     0.24% of trade volume
1% trade fee ── 30% protocol ──────┤
                                   └── 20%  →  operations  0.06% of trade volume

24% of all fee revenue is earmarked for buying $VORTEX back and destroying it. At the default 1% pool fee, that is 0.24% of everything ever traded through the launchpad — not of the protocol's profit, of the volume.

This is not a promise about a future contract. It is how the deployed FeeVault splits every collect today: buybackBps is set to 8000, and the 24% is transferred on every collection.

Where it goes right now

To the treasury. buybackSink currently points at the same address as operations, because there is nothing to buy yet.

That is the honest state of it. The 24% is being separated and accounted for, but no token is being purchased or burned. Anyone can verify this by reading buybackSink() on the vault and seeing that it equals treasury().

What switching it on requires

setBuybackSink(address) — one owner call, no redeployment. That is deliberate: the sink was made a mutable pointer from the first version precisely so that shipping the buyback later would not mean migrating every launch.

Two things have to exist first.

The token. Supply, distribution and launch mechanics are not decided. This page will say what they are when they are; inventing numbers here would be worse than leaving the space empty.

A buyback module, and this is the part that is genuinely hard. Fees do not arrive in one asset — they arrive in every asset anything has ever been launched against. Today that is AERO, BRETT, NVDAc, cbXRP, wtSKHY and two dozen others, in wildly different sizes and decimals. A buyback engine has to route all of them into $VORTEX without being front-run on every leg.

PONS, whose fee model this one copies, solves it off-chain with an automated TWAP rather than a swap-on-collect. That is the shape this will most likely take, for the same reason: converting two dozen thin markets atomically inside a fee collection is a sandwich waiting to happen.

What this is not

It is not a claim on protocol revenue, not a governance right, and not a security. The mechanism described here is a fee routing decision the protocol owner can make and unmake. Until the sink is pointed somewhere else, the 24% accumulates in the treasury like the other 6%.

Related

The creator's own share has an equivalent, and that one is shipped: a creator can route their 70% into buying their own coin back and burning it, per launch, changeable at any time. See Fees. It is the same idea one level down, and it works today because a single coin has a single pair asset and one pool to buy in — which is exactly the constraint $VORTEX does not have.