What this solves
An NFT collection stops earning the moment it sells out.
Secondary royalties are optional in practice, the creator has already been paid, and holders are left with a picture and a hope. Whatever economy a collection has after mint day is a promise somebody has to keep by hand.
A quiver moves that economy into the contracts. Trading the art produces fees, the fees collect in a pot, and holders who activate their NFT split the pot. Nobody operates it, nobody can withhold it, and it keeps working whether or not the creator is still around.
Trades create fees. Fees fill the pot. Activated arrows split it. Anyone can open a payout round, and nobody can stop one.
The flywheel
Every fee a collection generates ends up in one pot, and the holders who activated their arrow split it. That is the whole idea. These six steps are the entire system.
One signature deploys the token, the collection, its market and the pot.
YouMint the next arrow in line, or snipe one exact number.
BuyersPay Draw to switch an arrow’s payouts on. The tier buys weight.
HoldersPull in the fees the Draw token earned on its curve.
AnyoneOnce the pot holds 0.05 ETH, close all of it into one round.
AnyoneEvery arrow activated before the round opened claims its share.
HoldersEvery buy, snipe, sell and pledge, priced in Draw.
BuyersTakes 10–15% in ETH and keeps none of it.
Holds the ETH until somebody opens a round.
The token earns creator fees from pons as it trades.
Splits what it collects, and cannot be redirected.
Half joins the pot for holders, half goes to whoever launched.
Steps 04, 05 and 06 say anyone because they mean it. There is no operator and no scheduled job: the amounts and destinations are fixed when the collection is created, so whoever calls them only spends the gas. If we disappear, a single holder can keep the payouts running.
The more a collection is traded, the bigger the pot — which is the reason to hold an activated arrow rather than flip it.
What activating costs
Activation is the one step where a holder spends money, so it is worth being exact. There are three tiers, priced in the collection’s own Draw token:
| Tier | Costs | Weight | vs. Tier 1 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tier 1 | 66,666 Draw | 10,000 | 1× |
| Tier 2 | 166,666 Draw | 12,500 | 1.25× |
| Tier 3 | 666,666 Draw | 20,000 | 2× |
What the fee buys is the weight. Your share of a round is your arrow’s weight divided by the weight of every activated arrow in the collection, so if yours is the only one activated you take the whole round. The top tier costs 666,666 Draw for 2× the weight of the cheapest — it buys a bigger share of every round, not a better rate.
Three rules that catch people out:
- Selling clears it. Activation belongs to the arrow rather than to you, and the contract switches it off the moment the arrow moves. The next owner pays again from scratch and nobody is refunded.
- Upgrading costs full price. Moving up charges the new tier’s whole fee, not the difference, and you cannot move back down.
- Timing matters. Activating stamps the arrow with the current time, and a round only pays arrows already activated when it opened. Upgrade between rounds: doing it while one is open re-stamps the arrow and forfeits its claim on that round.
The words
Yew renames the handful of things it does differently. Everything else is a plain ERC-721 and a plain ERC-20. These names appear throughout the interface and the contracts.
- QuiverThe collection
- A fixed-supply NFT collection with its own contract set. Up to 4,444 arrows.
- ArrowOne NFT
- Numbered, tradeable, and it owns a wallet of its own.
- DrawThe token
- The quiver's own ERC-20. Arrows are priced in it, and activating one costs it.
- RangeThe market
- The only contract that can mint an arrow: buy the next one, snipe a number, or sell one back.
- ActivationSwitching payouts on
- An arrow earns nothing until it is activated. Half the fee is burned, and selling the arrow switches it off.
- Payout potWhere the fees sit
- Where trading fees collect, and what payout rounds are opened against.
- PaydayEmptying the pot
- Once the pot is full, anyone can call Payday to close it into a round that activated arrows can claim. The caller only pays the gas.
- PouchThe arrow's wallet
- Earnings land here and transfer with the NFT when it sells.
- TitheThe fee split
- Takes the Draw token's creator fees and halves them: pot and creator.
Launching a quiver
Launch from the launch page in four steps: name and ticker, art, the Draw token and price, then review. Nothing needs a contract deployed by hand.
A quiver has to point at a token that already exists, so creating one is naturally two calls. Wallet batching can sign two calls as one confirmation, but only on chains the wallet has enabled it for, which is why YewVolleydoes all of it inside a single contract call instead: it launches the Draw token, buys the creator's first Draw on the curve it just made, calls createQuiver with the real address, and deploys the contract that will split the token's fees. One confirmation on every wallet, all of it or none of it, and no half-finished launch to recover from.
Nothing is minted up front
Arrows are minted as they sell, so a quiver of 100 and a quiver of 4,444 cost the same to launch, and the creator never pays gas for art nobody bought. The buyer pays for their own mint, roughly 175k gas.
Who the launch belongs to
Nothing that carries rights is attributed to the launcher: the Draw token's creator fees end up at a tithe that names the caller as its creator, the first buy is delivered to them, and the quiver is registered in their name through createQuiverFor, which the fletcher accepts from that one address. pons' own deployer field is the exception — it is whoever called launchToken, and only pons' configured forwarder may name someone else. It carries no rights: the factory records it and never checks it, while fees and every creator action are gated on the fee recipient instead.
Getting an arrow
- Hold the quiver's Draw token.Buy it with ETH on the quiver's own curve, straight from the desk.
- Take an arrow. Buy next takes the next one in line, or type a number and Snipethat exact one if nobody owns it yet. Same Draw price, higher ETH fee. Every arrow's art is visible before you buy it, so sniping is how you go for a specific piece.
- Activate it with Draw to switch its payouts on. Tiers weight your share, and transferring the arrow switches it off again.
- Claim. When the pot bar is full anyone can call Payday. Activated arrows share it by tier, and Deliverpushes an arrow's share into its pouch.
Arrows sold back to the range are resold before any new one is minted, so the supply on offer stays honest and the last arrow really is the last.
How arrows earn
A payout round freezes its share table the moment it opens. Only arrows activated before that point can claim it, so activating after a round opens does not dilute anyone who was there first — you are simply in line for the next one. Changing your tier re-dates your arrow for the same reason, so upgrade between rounds rather than during one.
A round can never pay out more than the pot it was opened with, and whatever nobody claims within seven days rolls into the next pot instead of sitting stranded in the contract.
Rewards are delivered to an arrow's pouch, not to the wallet that happens to hold it. The pouch address is fixed from the moment the quiver exists and can receive funds straight away; the account contract itself is deployed the first time its owner spends from it. Sell the arrow and the pouch goes with it, contents included.
Fees
Arrows are priced in Draw, but every trade also carries ETH, and all of that ETH goes to the payout pot with no protocol cut.
| Action | ETH fee | Where it goes |
|---|---|---|
| Buy the next arrow | 10% | Payout pot |
| Sell an arrow back | 10% | Payout pot |
| Snipe a specific number | 15% | Payout pot |
| Borrow against an arrow | 10% | Payout pot |
| Activate an arrow | Draw, by tier | Half burned, half treasury |
| Trade Draw on its curve | pons' own rate | Half pot, half creator |
The contract cannot know what an arrow is worth — it only knows the Draw price — so it enforces those percentages against a 0.01 ETH arrow as a floor, and the desk prices the real thing off the Draw curve. The premium on a snipe is the point: choosing your number is worth more than taking the next one, and that is what keeps the rarest arrow from being free to target.
The Draw fee split
A quiver earns twice. Trading the arrows pays ETH into the pot, and trading the Draw tokenon its bonding curve earns creator fees from pons. Those creator fees are not paid to the creator's wallet: they are paid to a YewTithe, deployed alongside the quiver, which splits everything it collects half to the pot and half to the creator.
The more the token trades, the more the holders are paid — not just the creator.
Both destinations are written into the tithe when the quiver is created and cannot be changed afterwards, by the creator or by anyone else. Collectingis open to anyone: the split is fixed, so there is nothing to gain by being the one who triggers it, and the creator's half does not depend on the creator being around to ask. The desk shows what is waiting and lets anybody push it through.
This is also why every Draw token is paired against ETH. The pot pays out in ETH, so fees earned in some other asset would be money the flywheel could not use. For the same reason the token's buyback burn is left off — it would consume part of the fee before the split.
Art and rarity
Every arrow shows its own art from the first sale. The metadata folder is pinned before the launch and handed to the collection as its base URI, which has no setter — so tokenURI returns the same thing on day one as it does forever, and nobody, creator included, can swap the art after people have bought it.
That means rarity is public: you can see which number holds the 1 of 1 before anyone owns it. Snipe exists precisely so you can go and take it, and it costs 15% instead of 10% — the premium for choosing your number rather than taking the next one in line. That premium lands in the pot the rest of the holders are paid from, so a targeted rare arrow pays the collection on the way out.
The one thing still hidden is the deal itself: an Originals layout is shuffled with a random per-quiver salt, so two quivers launched with the same name and ticker do not hold their rarities in the same places.
Pledges
A pledge pays out 70% of the arrow's range price in Draw and holds the NFT for the term. Repay the principal and the arrow comes back. Miss the deadline and anyone can liquidate it — but a liquidator has to pay the principal into the book to take the arrow, so they are buying an arrow worth full price for 70% of it. That discount is the incentive to liquidate, and it is why defaulting costs you the arrow rather than paying you.
Borrowing carries the same ETH fee as buying an arrow. A pledge book that was never seeded with Draw can be topped up later by anyone who wants lending to work in that quiver.
Yew Originals
The house art pack, for creators who do not want to make their own. Twelve hooded outlaws — Robin, Brainlet, Doomer, Bloomer, Chad, Smug, Soyjak, NPC, Boomer, Zoomer, Sheriff and Crying — each drawn once, then layered into a fixed run of 1,111 arrows. The supply is not configurable, because the pack holds exactly that many pictures.
Every arrow is a different picture. An arrow is four layers — the character, a background colour, a garment colour and a corner emblem — and the pack uses each combination exactly once. No two arrows in a quiver share art, and no arrow is a near-duplicate of another with the same character.
Layering rather than drawing 1,111 pictures is what makes that affordable, and the art style is why it works: flat ink line work has flat regions, so the build floods the paper from the image border and repaints the clothing by colour, leaving every line untouched. The emblem is stamped into whichever corner of a given character has the most empty paper, so it never lands on a face.
Rarity is dealt by exact allocation, not per-arrow dice rolls. The background carries the headline table — 333 Paper, 222 Fog, 178 Moss, 155 Clay, 111 Dusk, 56 Ash, 44 Gold, 11 Yew, and a single 1 of 1 — while garments and emblems have their own distributions on top, so a scarce background wearing a scarce emblem is scarcer still. Every outlaw is equally common.
The pack itself is the same for everyone and pinned once, so launching on it needs no upload and no wait. What a quiver does at launch is shuffle it with a random salt and write its own metadata folder, so arrow #7 in your quiver and arrow #7 in the next hold different pictures.
The 1 of 1 sits outside the layered pack and keeps its own art and backdrop, so it has no near-misses: exactly one arrow in the run holds it. It is also the image the quiver itself leads with.
Contracts
These are deployed once and reused by every launch, on Robinhood Chain (4663). What gets created per quiver is its own collection, range, activation, payout pot and pledge book.
Creates a quiver: deploys its collection, range, activation, payout pot and pledge book in one call.
Launches the Draw token, creates the quiver and deploys its fee split, in a single transaction.
YewTitheOne per quiverHolds the Draw token's fee seat and splits what it collects 50/50 between the payout pot and the creator.
The registry of every quiver, and what the site reads to list them.
Derives and deploys the account behind each arrow's pouch.
The implementation cloned behind every pouch.
Addresses live in src/lib/yew/deployments.ts, updated as a set after forge script DeployYew. Source for all of them is on GitHub.
What we build on
This belongs to pons. Yew calls it and cannot change it.
Launches the Draw token on a bonding curve. Belongs to pons; Yew only calls it.
Security model
- Only the range can mint. The collection accepts a mint from one address and no other, so there is no path to an arrow that did not pay for itself.
- Rounds are bounded by their own pot. A round is opened against a snapshot and can never pay out more than that, so no sequence of claims can drain more than was collected.
- The art cannot be changed. The metadata folder is fixed at creation and the collection has no function to repoint it, so what a buyer sees is what they own.
- The fee split cannot be redirected. The tithe holds the pot and the creator as immutables, and pons only lets the current fee recipient hand the seat on — which, after launch, is the tithe itself.
- Activation is dated, not instant. An arrow activated in the same second a round opens is not in that round. Without that, a bot could watch for the round and activate in the same block to claim a payout it was never part of.
- Nothing here custodies your wallet.A pouch is owned by its arrow, and only the arrow's owner can spend from it.
The payout flow is community run.Anyone can collect the token's fees, anyone can call Payday, and anyone can deliver a share — the split and every destination are fixed at creation, so a caller pays gas and gains nothing beyond it. That is deliberate: a payout depending on one particular wallet staying online is a promise, not a mechanism. There is no cron job, no keeper and no server anywhere in Yew. If we vanish, it still pays.
Limits & caveats
- Fees follow trading. A quiver nobody trades earns nothing. The pot is funded by activity, not by time.
- The floor is a floor, not a valuation. Fees are enforced against a 0.01 ETH arrow on-chain. If your arrows are worth far less than that, the fee is proportionally heavier than 10%.
- Draw is a bonding-curve token. Its price moves as people buy and sell, so the ETH cost of an arrow moves with it even though the Draw price is fixed.
- Rarity is public from the first sale. Nothing stops a buyer going straight for the rarest arrow; the snipe fee is the only thing standing in the way, and it is paid to the holders rather than kept.
- Draw fees only exist while the curve does. Once a Draw token graduates off its bonding curve, pons stops crediting creator fees, so the split pays out what was already earned and no more.
- Audit status. The contracts are tested against live chain state but have not completed a third-party audit. Treat early launches accordingly.
Never share your seed phrase
Yew will never ask for it. Launching only ever requires a signature from your own wallet — review the addresses and the transaction preview before you sign.
Yew is an independent interface and contract layer built on pons. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by Pons Labs. Nothing here is financial advice — review every contract address and transaction before signing.