$VELL token
Vellichor's utility and governance token — live on Robinhood Chain via the pons launchpad.
$VELL is the token holders hold (balance-checked at snapshot points, not locked or staked) to unlock priority access to curated bottle drops, get marketplace fee discounts, and participate in governance over which bottles Vellichor acquires next. Unlike Vault Units (the ERC-1155 tokens representing fractional ownership of a specific physical bottle), $VELL does not represent a claim on any bottle — it governs the protocol, not the vault contents.
What $VELL is
$VELL is live on Robinhood Chain— the same chain Vellichor's own contracts (VellichorVault.sol, VellichorMarket.sol) are deployed on — launched via the pons launchpad (PonsLauncherToken.sol), trading against a Uniswap V3 pool.
- Supply: 1,000,000,000 $VELL, fixed — minted once to the launch factory at deployment. No further minting is possible.
- Tax: none. The contract has no buy/sell tax mechanism at all.
- Controls: none after launch — no owner role, no mint function, no blacklist. The only restriction is a temporary, formula-based max-wallet/max-tx limit on pool buys during a fixed post-launch block window (anti-bot/anti-whale), after which the token behaves as a plain, fully liquid ERC-20.
$VELL is immutable and ownerless. Once deployed, nobody — including Vellichor — can mint more supply, apply a tax, or blacklist an address. The launch-window buy limits are enforced by a fixed formula in the contract itself, not by admin discretion.
How the platform uses it
This section describes the intended design — as of now, none of this is implemented in VellichorVault.sol or VellichorMarket.sol. Both contracts currently only reference the payment token (USDG, live on Robinhood Chain mainnet) — neither touches $VELL anywhere. This needs to be built before $VELL has any real function beyond being tradable.
$VELL uses a hold model, not staking or burning— a deliberate simplification. Vellichor already has one token-locking mechanism (Vault Units as DeFi collateral, per the roadmap's Phase 3). Adding a second, separate locking mechanism for $VELL would mean two different "my tokens are locked" systems in the same product. Reading a wallet's balance at a snapshot point avoids that — no staking contract required.
All thresholds below are fixed token counts, not USD value — this was a deliberate correction from an earlier USD-denominated design, specifically to remove any dependency on a price oracle. A fixed count is simple to check on-chain (balanceOf() >= threshold) and can't be gamed by manipulating $VELL's price right before a snapshot.
1. Marketplace fee discount tiers
Tiered by $VELL balance, checked at the moment of a buyUnits() or buyListing()call. Vellichor's base marketplace fee is 2%. Discounts are expressed as a flat percentage-point reduction off that 2%, not a percentage-of-the-fee — this was corrected from an earlier draft that used "1% / 2% / 5% discount," which was ambiguous and, read as points off 2%, made Tier 2 zero out the fee entirely and made Tier 3 mathematically impossible (a discount larger than the fee itself). The fee floor is capped so it never reaches zero — treasury always collects something, even from the largest $VELL holders:
| Tier | Threshold | % of total supply | Discount (points off 2%) | Resulting fee | Reduction |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tier 1 | 100,000 $VELL | 0.01% | 0.25 points | 1.75% | 12.5% cheaper |
| Tier 2 | 500,000 $VELL | 0.05% | 0.5 points | 1.5% | 25% cheaper |
| Tier 3 | 1,000,000 $VELL | 0.1% | 1.0 point | 1.0% | 50% cheaper |
2. Priority drop access
Holding 1,000,000 $VELL (0.1% of total supply), checked at a snapshot block (e.g. 24 hours before a new bottle opens to the general public), unlocks an early-access window. This is a hold check, not a stake — nothing is locked, the token stays fully liquid.
This threshold is deliberately set equal to Tier 3 of the fee discount table above — a holder who qualifies for priority access also automatically qualifies for the top fee discount tier, rather than tracking two separate, unrelated thresholds.
3. Governance — on-chain
Governance will use a dedicated on-chain governance contract, not off-chain Snapshot-style voting. $VELL balance at a snapshot block determines voting weight on which bottles Vellichor curates and acquires next, and the outcome is enforced by the contract itself rather than relying on the team to manually honor an off-chain signal. This is a heavier build than off-chain voting (needs its own contract, its own audit) but means votes actually bind on-chain outcomes rather than just being advisory.
None of these three are implemented yet. Before mainnet, each needs its own contract logic and audit — the same way buyUnits() and buyListing() were built and reasoned through individually. The on-chain governance contract in particular is a substantial build on its own, separate from the Vault/Market contracts.
Resolved decisions (formerly open questions)
- ✓Launch platform: live on Robinhood Chain via the pons (ponsfamily.com) launchpad. Contract: 0x3d8C79bE2071CA84b0EfAe66E1437d9417ea4226.
- ✓Owner/admin surface: none. $VELL (PonsLauncherToken.sol) is a fixed-supply, immutable ERC-20 — no owner role, no mint function, no tax, no blacklist. The only time-boxed restriction is a formula-based anti-bot/anti-whale max-wallet/max-tx limit on pool buys during a fixed post-launch block window; afterward it behaves as a plain ERC-20 forever.
- ✓Total supply: 1,000,000,000 $VELL.
- ✓Priority drop access threshold: 1,000,000 $VELL (fixed count, no oracle needed).
- ✓Fee discount tiers: 100,000 / 500,000 / 1,000,000 $VELL → 1.75% / 1.5% / 1.0% resulting fee (down from the 2% base). Corrected from an earlier ambiguous "1%/2%/5% discount" draft.
- ✓Governance: on-chain, dedicated governance contract (not off-chain Snapshot-style).
- ✓Threshold denomination: fixed token counts, not USD value — removes the price-oracle dependency entirely.
Still open
- Design and audit scope for the on-chain governance contract.