Where a trade fee actually goes

Most launchpads have one fee and one recipient: the platform. This one splits every curve trade three ways, and two of those three legs are earned by people who are not the platform. That arrangement is the reason several things elsewhere on this site work the way they do, and it is worth understanding before you launch anything or agree to promote anything.

Everything below is a number in a deployed contract. The last section says how to read each one yourself rather than take this article's word for it.

The fee, and the three legs

A trade on the curve costs 2%. After graduation the pool charges 1%, and that leg splits the same way. Both are taken from the trade, not from your balance — the contract keeps them before it credits you.

The 2% divides like this:

The protocol's share is what is left after the other two, which matters more than it sounds: it means the creator and promoter legs are the fixed quantities and the platform absorbs any rounding, rather than the other way round.

The promoter leg is the unusual one

Forty percent of every trade fee is set aside for the people who promoted the launch. Not paid to them — set aside. A creator then decides who gets it.

The mechanism is a window. Periodically the contract opens one containing the promoter share accrued since the last one, and the creator allocates percentages of that window to specific addresses. Three properties are worth knowing because they are guarantees rather than intentions:

• A creator allocates a percentage, never an amount. They cannot name a figure, so they cannot overcommit a window or move value from one window into another.
• A window that is not fully allocated lapses 50/50 between the creator and the platform. It is not held indefinitely and it does not roll forward.
• A rank cap limits how much of one window any single promoter may take — 10% for a new promoter, rising to 30% at the top rank. The cap is a ceiling on one person in one window, not a budget.

What is a guarantee, and what is a statement we make

This distinction is the most important thing in the article, and it is easy to miss because both kinds of fact appear on the same screen.

Guarantees, enforced by code nobody can change:

• Fees already credited to you are claimable by you and only you. There is no function that lets us take them, redirect them, or pause a claim.
• A referral attribution binds once and never moves. Who is owed for a referred wallet cannot be rewritten afterwards, by anyone.
• An unallocated window lapses on the split above rather than being kept.

Statements this platform makes, which a contract cannot check:

• Whether you are enrolled — that you hold an account here with an X account connected.
• Whether your X badge is live right now.

Those two come from our own records and are written on chain by us. A contract has no way to know whether they are true, which is why they are worth naming rather than leaving inside a word like "eligible". We can also withdraw an account's standing entirely; that is recorded publicly with a reason and is reversible, and it cannot touch anything already earned.

Your rank sits between the two categories. It is derived from your lifetime earnings, and that figure is summed from the splitter's own allocation events — so it is a measurement anyone can recompute from public logs, not an assertion. It only ever rises: the registry refuses a total lower than the one it already holds.

Referrals are a different leg again

A referral pays a share of the protocol's 30%, not the creator's and not the promoters'. Nobody's existing earnings shrink because somebody arrived through a link — the platform's own share is what funds it.

Two rules protect the link itself:

• A referral name proved with a verified X account can never be taken. If you rename yourself on X and somebody else registers your old handle, they cannot claim your referral name. Links you have already published keep pointing at you.
• The binding is permanent in both directions. One X account connects to one wallet, once. That is what stops one person minting a code from every address they own, and it is why the connection cannot be moved afterwards.

Reading it yourself

Every figure above is public. None of it requires trusting this page.

• The split for a specific launch — read creatorFeeShareBps and kolFeeShareBps on that launch's BondingCurve. They are stamped in at creation and immutable for the life of the token, so a launch created under an earlier fee model carries the old shares forever. Do not assume this article describes a launch you are looking at; read the curve.
• The rank ladder and the caps — allocationCapBpsOf and the threshold table on KolRegistry. Both are settable by the owner, so read them rather than this table.
• What you are owed — claimable on KolSplitter for the promoter leg, and on ReferralLedger for referrals. Both are the unclaimed balance, so they drop to zero when you withdraw.
• What you have earned in total — sum the Allocated events on the splitter for your address. That is the same computation the platform performs to set your rank, run against the same logs.

The fees and payouts page carries the current numbers and the exact call signatures. Where it and this article disagree, that page is newer — and where the chain and either of them disagree, the chain is correct and both are wrong.