abstract: a contract is the creator-fee recipient of one token on pons and holds what arrives in a single reserve. it has one function. the silence between two consecutive calls to that function is measured in blocks and called the gap; gaps under a fixed floor of 4,096 blocks are refused outright, gaps over the floor but under the standing record are recorded as a touch and spend nothing, and a gap g longer than the record R causes the contract to spend balance × (g − R) / g of everything it holds buying the token on the open market, send the purchase to the dead address, and set R = g. there is no owner, no schedule, no upgrade path and no discretion, so the only thing that has ever made the machine act is being ignored for longer than it has ever been ignored before.
note: every value on this site that comes from the chain renders as an em dash until the chain produces it. nothing is estimated, sampled, backfilled or demonstrated.
keywords: creator fee, block interval, monotone record, geometric retention, irreversible burn.
1 · the object.
the contract is the creator-fee recipient of one token on pons. fees arrive as the token trades and they arrive on no schedule the contract knows about. everything that arrives sits in one reserve. there are no sub-accounts, no earmarks, no vesting and no tranches; the reserve is a single number and it is the only asset the machine has.
the contract exposes one function. calling it is the whole interface. there is no admin entry point beside it, no owner able to reach the reserve, no proxy behind it and no path by which the code can be replaced. whatever the contract does on the day it is deployed is what it does forever, and the only input it accepts is the fact of being called at a particular block height.
because there is no schedule, the machine has no idea of lateness. it does not know that a month has passed, or that a market has moved, or that anyone is waiting. it knows one previous block number and one record. everything else that would ordinarily constitute state — prices, holders, intentions — is outside it and stays outside it.
so the object is small enough to state in a sentence and that is the point. a reserve, a stored block height, a stored record, and a rule that fires only when the distance between two calls exceeds the largest such distance the contract has ever seen. it is indifferent to being read, and this site is a record of it rather than an interface to it.
2 · the gap.
the gap g is the difference in block height between the current call and the previous one: g = bₙ − bₙ₋₁. it is not a duration. seconds are a client-side convenience and never enter the contract, because the chain's clock is block height and block height is the only clock the machine can be made to read.
the contract cannot see the interior of a gap. nothing happens inside it from the contract's position — there is no tick, no accrual event it observes, no witness that time passed. the gap is inferred at the far end, from two numbers, at the instant the second call lands. before that instant the gap does not exist in the machine at all.
nor does the contract store history. it keeps the last block and the record and discards the rest. a gap that was measured and did not break the record leaves no trace beyond the advanced block number; a gap that broke it leaves only the new record. there is no array of past gaps, and no way to ask the contract what the third-deepest silence was.
the consequence is that from the contract's position almost the whole chain is time it has no evidence of. it can prove one interval — the one it is standing in — and it can name one number it once proved. everything else is absence, and this site reproduces that absence rather than papering over it.
3 · the floor.
the floor F is 4,096 blocks and it is fixed at deploy. a call arriving with g < F reverts. no state moves, the stored block number is not advanced, and the caller pays gas for nothing. the section of the machine is untouched by anything that happens beneath the floor.
a floor exists so ordinary traffic never touches the mechanism. without it, every routine interaction would be a gap of a handful of blocks, the record would be set at a trivial value in the first minutes of life, and the ladder would begin from noise. the floor gives the first band a defined upper edge and makes the first meaningful silence the first observation.
holding the record down is possible and it is not free. anyone who wants the machine kept shallow must call it at least once every window, forever, at their own cost, and must never miss. suppression is a subscription paid in gas against an adversary that pays nothing, waits, and does not tire.
and one missed window undoes it permanently. the record is monotone: it never falls. a single long silence sets a new record which the suppressor must now beat every time, at twice the vigilance, against a reserve that the long suppression itself made large. the cheapest moment to hold the machine down is the first, and it never gets cheaper again.
4 · the rule.
on a call with gap g exceeding the record R, the contract computes balance × (g − R) / g, spends exactly that much of the reserve buying the token, sends everything it bought to the dead address, and then sets R = g. the three steps are one transaction; there is no interval in which the purchase exists and is not yet burned.
a call with g under the floor reverts and changes nothing at all. a call with g over the floor but under the record records the touch — the stored block number advances — and spends nothing. only the third case, g > R, moves the reserve, and it moves it by a fraction determined entirely by the ratio of the new silence to the old.
the fraction is scale-free. it depends on g / R and not on what the reserve holds, so beating the record by a hair costs a hair and doubling it costs exactly half of everything. the amount destroyed depends on what accrued during the silence, which is to say the machine spends most where it was ignored longest.
nothing in the rule rewards the caller. the transaction transfers no fee, no share and no claim to whoever sends it; it costs gas and returns nothing. the machine does not ask to be sealed and does not care who does it.
5 · the ladder.
the rungs are laid out from the floor at F · 2ⁿ. rung 0 is the floor itself, rung 1 is 8,192 blocks, rung 10 is 4,194,304, and depth D = log₂(R / F) counts how many of them the record has passed. depth is a count of doublings, not of seals: one very long silence can cross several rungs in a single call, and the machine records the crossing rather than the rungs.
the retention over a sequence of breaks telescopes. if the record moves R₀ → R₁ → … → Rₙ, the surviving fraction of a balance present throughout is the product of R₀/R₁ × R₁/R₂ × … × Rₙ₋₁/Rₙ, and every intermediate term cancels, leaving R₀ / Rₙ — that is, F / Rₙ.
so the path is irrelevant. a hundred small breaks that end at a record of R destroy exactly what one enormous silence to the same R would have destroyed. the intermediate history does not appear in the result, which is why the contract can afford to store none of it.
and at exact doublings the arithmetic is trivial: retained = 2⁻ᴰ. every halving of what remains costs a doubling of the silence, and the required silence grows without bound while the reserve falls geometrically toward nothing.
every halving of the reserve costs a doubling of the silence.
6 · the burn.
the burn fraction (g − R) / g is strictly less than one for any finite g, so the reserve is reduced but never emptied. beating the record by one block over R spends almost nothing; beating it by a factor of two spends exactly half; a factor of four spends three quarters. the curve approaches total destruction and never reaches it.
the fraction is fixed at a half per rung and the amount is not. the reserve that a doubling destroys is whatever accrued during the doubling, and since each rung takes twice as long as the last, each rung has twice as long to accumulate. the share never changes and the sum destroyed doubles forever.
what is bought is burned in the same transaction and sent to an address nobody holds. there is no treasury, no buyback wallet, no discretionary deployment and no second decision. once a seal fires the tokens are outside the supply and the reserve that bought them is gone.
nothing about this is reversible and nothing about it is scheduled. the machine spends only on evidence of neglect, and the evidence has to be produced by someone bothering to call it after the neglect is over.
beating the record by a little costs a little; doubling it costs half.
7 · what this is not.
there is no admin. no address has a privileged call, no role can be granted, and no key exists that reaches the reserve. there is no pause, no emergency stop and no circuit breaker; if the rule is wrong it is wrong permanently and it will keep being wrong on schedule.
there is no fee switch, no blocklist, no allowlist and no upgrade path. the contract is not behind a proxy and its logic cannot be replaced, extended or migrated. the deployment is the specification.
there is no market data inside the contract. it has no oracle, no price feed, no notion of value and no opinion about whether a burn was well timed. it knows a block height and a record, and it acts on the difference between two numbers.
there is no reward for calling and no penalty for not calling. sealing pays nothing to the sealer, and neglect costs nobody anything except that the reserve keeps growing until the neglect ends. nothing the contract did not observe is reconstructed anywhere — not by it, and not here.
8 · limitations.
an empty machine can be hardened for nothing. while the reserve is small the cost of holding the record down is close to gas alone, and the mechanism is at its weakest exactly when it has least to lose. that weakness is structural and is not fixed by anything the contract can do.
the contract stores no arrival times. it cannot say when any particular fee arrived, and so neither can this site say when any particular fee was destroyed — only that at a given seal a given amount left the reserve. anything finer would be estimation, and estimation is not printed here.
the ladder runs out against human timescales. past rung fifteen the required silence exceeds anything a chain with living participants is likely to provide, so the deep rungs are printed for completeness and greyed. arithmetic continues where practice stops.
and the site is a reader, not a witness. it derives everything from events the contract emitted; a read that fails is a blank, not a guess, and there is no second archive to fall back on.