$PAID

Every fee paid.family claims is split 80/20. The 80% is paid to an X account. The 20% buys $PAID on the open market and burns it, so the supply only ever goes down.

What it is for

$PAID is the protocol's value accrual, not a governance token and not a fee token. Holding it does not change what paid.family charges, who can launch, or who gets paid. Nothing about the bridge is gated behind it.

Its only job is to be the thing the 20% is spent on. The more fees the bridge carries, the more supply is removed.

How the buy and burn works

1. A claim settles. Creator fees are claimed from the pons fee escrow and recorded as a fee event, keyed on the claim's own transaction hash.
2. The cut is set aside. 20% of that event is written to the ledger as a pending buyback, tied to the fee event it came from so it can be reconciled later.
3. $PAID is bought on the open market. The protocol buys from the same pons curve or pool as everyone else, at whatever the price is when it buys. No special route and no discount.
4. The tokens are burnt. pons v2 tokens are ERC20Burnable, so the burn is the token's own burn function. Both the buy and the burn are on chain, so the whole path can be checked by anyone.

One chain, one market

A token earns its fees on Robinhood Chain and $PAID lives there too, so the protocol cut never has to cross a bridge before it is spent. Payouts settle in dollars through Money from a pre-funded float, and the only bridge in the whole path is the treasury's off-ramp to Kraken.

Held balances that expire

When a recipient has no X Money account, their 80% is held rather than paid. If it stays unclaimable for 7 days, that balance is recycled into a buyback too.

Those are recorded separately from protocol-cut buybacks, so the two sources can be told apart in the ledger rather than blended into one number.