There are four rungs. Each one costs a fixed amount of burned $PONS and grants a permanent multiplier on the cat's weight, so it eats a bigger share of every meal from then on.
Cumulative & permanent, the dollar figures are totals, not steps. Reach $24 of burned $PONS on a cat and it sits at 2.00× for the rest of its life, on top of whatever rarity weight it already had.
Priced in dollars, not tokens
Each rung is a fixed dollar amount of $PONS, valued live when you feed, not a fixed number of tokens. This matters more than it looks. $PONS can move 20-40% in a single day; a ladder priced in a fixed number of tokens would either drift out of reach when the price rose, or get cleared out in an afternoon when it fell. Pricing the rungs in dollars keeps the cost of feeding steady no matter what the token does.
Why it stops at 2.00×
The cap is deliberate, and it's there to protect you, not us. If feeding had no ceiling, a whale could pour money in and quietly come to own most of every meal, drowning out everyone else and erasing the meaning of rarity. Capping the boost at exactly double means:
- The most anyone can amplify a cat is 2×, so no single holder can run away with the pot.
- Rarity order is preserved, a fully-fed Stray still eats less than a fully-fed Coned. The tiers still mean something.
- The promise is simple and unchangeable: a fully-fed cat earns exactly 2.00× an unfed cat of the same kind. That ratio is fixed in the contract.
Anyone can feed anyone's cat
There is no ownership check on feeding. You can burn $PONS to boost a cat you don't own, a friend's, a stranger's, one you just think deserves it. It would have felt wrong to write a contract that forbade it. A stranger feeding a stray is the entire thing this project is named after.
When you feed a cat, you are burning something liquid to buy a bigger slice of future meals, meals whose size depends on trading volume that nobody can promise. Whether it pays off is a bet on how much $FRANKLIN gets traded from here.
And there's a catch we won't hide: the boost is a share of a fixed pie. If everyone feeds their cats, everyone's slice returns to roughly where it began, you'd all have spent $PONS to stand in the same places relative to each other. When we build the feeding screen, it will show you that number, your share if you feed and everyone else does too, right next to the optimistic one. That second number is the honest one.
What the burn does for $PONS
Every dollar fed is $PONS sent to a burn address and gone for good. It's real, it's verifiable on-chain, and, we'll say it before anyone else does, it is small. Against a token with a billion units, the total that could ever be burned this way is a rounding error, and it will not move the price by itself. Feeding is a game mechanic and a permanent record of belief in a cat. It is not a tokenomics engine, and we won't sell it as one.