Snipe Tax & Exemptions

Pons's anti-sniping mechanism is a decaying tax on the first seconds of a curve's life — this is the protocol feature the whole bundle flow is designed around.

The mechanic

• Starts near 99% at launch and decays rapidly
• Applies to buys (and sells) while active — external snipers eating the opening block pay almost everything into the tax
• Readable live per curve: currentSnipeTaxBps returns the current rate in basis points — the app shows it rather than assuming

Exemptions

launchToken/launchAndBuy accepts snipeTaxExemptions[] — up to 32 addresses documented as intended for "a team bundling its opening buys across several wallets". That is literally the product's use case: the engine passes every bundle wallet so the progressive accumulation never pays the opening tax.

Why it shapes the bundle

• The 32-exemption cap is why bundle size maxes at 32 wallets
• Because exemptions are set at launch, wallets can't be added to the exemption set afterwards — the bundle must be fully generated before launch, which is exactly what the pipeline enforces
• External snipers still pay the tax; your monitoring (the Snipers view) exists precisely because they appear anyway and unwind into it

In the UI

The launch wizard doesn't mention the tax — the engine handles it silently. You see its effect in the sniper table: externals who bought block-0 either paid the tax or waited for decay.