TokenPROPOSEDNOT DEPLOYED

TAON is proposed. It does not exist.

No contract, no address, no market, no staking, no reward. A token is reconsidered only if all 8 published gates pass at the same time; 0 of 8 are met. The current line is product first, token later, and the token recommendation is token not yet justified. This page says why a token may one day exist, what it would and would not do, and what was rejected.

LIVE ROUTER

VERIFIED

Runs today: a request is routed, answered and recorded. Free while charging is off.

PROPOSED ECONOMICS

PROPOSED

Written down and modelled. Charging is off, revenue is $0, no fee is collected and no TAO has been bought.

NOT-DEPLOYED TOKEN

NOT DEPLOYED

TAON has no contract, no address and no market. 0 of 8 token gates are met.

0 sections on this page fold on a phone. Each opens on its own; this opens them all.

Why TAON may exist, and what was rejected

The question asked was: why must TAON exist instead of credits, TAO itself or ordinary equity? Nine functions were tested. One survives, narrowly and on a condition. The rest are rejected, with the reason.

SUPPORTED, narrowlyReward entitlement: Only a token gives an open, transferable share in TAO rewards that code enforces for on-chain inflows. Supported only if usage, not trading, supplies most of the funding; today product revenue is $0, so it does not.
REJECTED as a reasonStaking: Staking only scopes who is eligible for rewards. Counted once, under reward entitlement.
REJECTEDProvider bonding: Subnets already pay and score their miners; receipts are unsigned, so there is nothing objective to slash against.
REJECTEDRoute curation: Routes are chosen by measured eligibility, cost, latency and outcome. A vote cannot make a provider faster.
REJECTEDCredit discounts: A discount for holding a token is a price cut paid for by buying the token. Credits can carry any discount directly.
REJECTEDAccess tiers: Account tiers already exist in code. Gating an API behind a holding hurts the product and adds nothing an account flag cannot do.
REJECTEDGovernance: The treasury is a signer-controlled multisig. Token voting would be theatre while signers control funds.
REJECTED for version oneReserve participation: A permanent reserve is protocol-owned; nobody holds a claim on it. A claim on a reserve is fund-like and has no audit behind it.
REJECTED as a reasonLiquidity formation: Pool liquidity is needed only to trade the token itself. Customers buying routed work do not need it.

No NFTs, seats, governance votes, burns or locking tiers: no function needs them. A receipt is already a durable record per request; an account covers identity and tiers.

The sentence a token would have to make true

PROPOSED ECONOMICS · NOT OPERATING · TOKEN NOT DEPLOYED

These figures are the proposal of owner brief 20466 (2026-11-05). No fee is collected, no TAO has been bought, no vault, treasury or token exists, and no legal review has been done. Nothing here is a balance, a rate of return or a promise.

“Stake TAON to participate in TAO rewards funded by real usage and eligible market fees.”

Each part of the thesis sentence, and whether it is true today
Part	True today?
Stake TAON	False today: no token, no staking contract.
to participate in TAO rewards	False today: no vault, no TAO.
funded by real usage	False today: product revenue is $0. Under the proposal the words may be used only while product deposits supply at least half of the vault’s trailing 90-day funding. At the modelled Base case they would supply 46%, so the sentence would be false there too.
and eligible market fees	False today: no pool, no fee.

The tokenless path would deliver “AI usage buys TAO.” without any token: credits for usage and a published TAO reserve funded from eligible surplus. What it cannot deliver is a holder proposition, which is the part that needs evidence first. The holder line, Stake TAON. Accrue funded TAO., is therefore PROPOSED, NOT OPERATING, TOKEN NOT DEPLOYED.

Staking and funded TAO: the reward vault

A reward vault (E1a Model A, amended): TAO that has arrived in the vault streams to TAON stakers. Zero TAO deposited means zero rewards. The vault holds assets against staker liabilities and is never a protocol-owned reserve.

Holders stake TAON to be eligible; holding TAON in a wallet earns nothing. Rewards are TAO that has already arrived in the vault, streamed over seven days to TAON staked during the stream.

The vault's five states and what a page would read in each
State	Page reads
ACTIVE	Funded rewards streaming.
UNFUNDED	No funded rewards this period. Stake, unstake and claim stay open.
IDLE	Nobody staked; the clock pauses and nothing is released.
PAUSED	New stakes and new funding paused for at most 14 days; claims and exits stay open.
UNAVAILABLE	The reward asset cannot be transferred, or the bridged TAO backing has fallen below one to one. Amounts owed are unchanged in units.

Required invariant. Total claims plus accrued liabilities never exceed funded reward assets. Coverage in units is one by construction; a fall in the bridged asset’s market value is the one risk the vault cannot neutralize.

No fixed APY, no return promise, no rebasing, no reflection arithmetic.
No rewards from future assumptions: zero TAO deposited means zero rewards.
No admin withdrawal of the reward asset or of staked principal, in any state.
No projected rate on any page. At most a trailing amount per staked unit, labelled as past.

A staker who arrives mid-stream shares only the part still to be released. Exit costs a seven-day cooldown with no accrual. Unvested team tokens and listed contracts cannot stake; the exclusion is address-based, so it is not a promise that the team never participates.

The fee split

PROPOSED ECONOMICS · NOT OPERATING · TOKEN NOT DEPLOYED

Half acquires TAO. Half funds TAONIC.

The proposed market fee and its split
Term (PROPOSED)	Value
Market	TAON / TAO: a Uniswap v4 pool on Robinhood Chain, TAON paired with the bridged TAO
Eligible swap fee	1.00% of eligible swaps in the TAONIC pool only
Ceiling	1.50%, immutable, written into the hook
To the TAO mechanism	50% of every eligible fee: the reward vault
To the treasury	50% of every eligible fee: the TAONIC treasury multisig
Wallet transfers	None. Wallet-to-wallet transfers are never charged.
Product surplus	Half of eligible product surplus is bought as TAO and deposited in the same vault; half funds the treasury. Eligible surplus is what remains after refunds, processor fees, provider costs, operating and tax reserves and earlier losses.
Excluded	No hidden token-side fee. No mutable or unlimited tax. No blacklist. No arbitrary mint. No discretionary seizure. No undocumented exemption.

Fees would arrive as bridged TAO on Robinhood Chain, which depends on its issuer and the CCIP bridge; they are never native TAO. Fees accumulate in a collector that anyone may sweep, half to each recipient, so a swap never depends on the treasury address. Nothing here is collected today: there is no pool and no hook.

Treasury and team policy

The account that would receive half of every eligible market fee and half of every eligible product surplus. Signer-controlled: not decentralized, not a DAO, not community-governed, never a hidden team wallet.

A multisig contract account on Robinhood Chain. No single key, no hot key, no automation key with spend rights.
Signers and threshold: OWNER DECISION. Any choice needs a threshold of at least two, above half the signers, at least one signer independent of the operator, one key per person, each on its own hardware device.
Address published at least 14 days before any pool exists, with the owner list and threshold read at a stated block.
Fees accumulate in a fee collector and anyone may sweep them, half to each recipient. Swaps never depend on the treasury address.
Every payment published within seven days with its category; a monthly statement signed by two signers; a quarterly reconciliation by an independent reviewer.
No undisclosed related-party payment. Team pay is a related-party payment and runs under a published standing notice with a monthly cap (OWNER DECISION).

The treasury half would fund: team and product, new subnet integrations, provider and infrastructure costs, audits and security, disclosed liquidity support, operations, distribution and marketing, legal and accounting. The treasury address is an immutable constructor argument of the fee split. A wrong address would silently receive the treasury share forever, so the constructor must refuse the zero address, any system address and any address without code, and two people must compare the multisig’s owners and threshold against the signed disclosure before deployment.

Distribution options, as proposals

Every percentage, the supply and the launch route are owner decisions made in writing, and only after the gates pass. Two sets are shown so the choice is visible; neither is adopted. An unlocked team wallet holding half the supply, and a single-sided launch at a set price, were rejected on 2026-11-02.

PROPOSED ECONOMICS · NOT OPERATING · TOKEN NOT DEPLOYED

Set A: auction-led, product first (analyst recommendation): insider-controlled buckets 35% in total
Bucket	Share	Lock, vesting and rules
Public auction	30%	Uniform clearing price; per-wallet cap; no team, treasury, contributor or adviser bids
Locked liquidity	30%	Paired with all auction proceeds in a no-withdraw locker, permanently
Treasury	15%	Behind a seven-day timelock; six-month cliff; at most 1.25% of supply released per quarter
Team	10%	Vesting contract: 12-month cliff, 36 months linear; excluded from staking; never revocable
Contributors	6%	Six-month cliff, 24 months linear; unvested tokens revocable to the treasury, never to the team
Security and audit reserve	4%	Released only against a published audit or bounty invoice; never sold on the market
Usage incentives	5%	Granted only against paid margin receipts (proposed); off by default until counsel

Once fully vested, the team could take about a quarter of the opening pool’s TAO (modelled). The analyst departs here from the 2026-11-03 preference for zero team tokens.

Set B: no team tokens (the 2026-11-03 preference): insider-controlled buckets 15% in total
Bucket	Share	Lock, vesting and rules
Locked liquidity	80%	Single-sided, no-withdraw locker
Treasury	12%	Timelocked
Security and audit	3%	Against invoices only
Usage incentives	5%	Off by default
Team	0%	Paid from the treasury’s fee half within a published cap

At modelled volumes the fee half is small, so this under-funds the team unless fees rise or usage grows.

Analyst recommendation: no token until the eight gates pass; then a public uniform-price batch auction of part of the supply, with all proceeds and the matching supply locked permanently in one canonical hooked TAON pool. No undisclosed insider purchase, no wash trading, no hidden wallets, no misleading holder chart; parameters published 14 days ahead. A fee and caps slow snipers and do not stop them, and anyone can open another TAON pool that pays no fee.

The eight gates: 0 of 8 met

All eight must hold at the same time. Passing them authorizes an owner decision, never a deployment. Thresholds may be raised at any time and lowered only with 30 days of public notice. Status read 2026-11-05; charging is OFF.

The eight token gates G1 to G8 with what was read on 2026-11-05. Proposed, none met: 0 of 8.
Gate	Threshold	Evidence required	Who decides	Read 2026-11-05	Status
G1 Real paying users	200 or more paying accounts, de-duplicated by payment instrument, 30% or more buying a second pack, over 90 consecutive days of charging on (assumed thresholds).	Counts from the accounts and payment tables, with operator and helper accounts excluded and counted, checked by an independent reviewer.	Lead engineer, checked by the independent reviewer.	Accounts OFF, charging OFF, 0 paying accounts.	NOT MET
G2 Measured product revenue	The register D-R21 accounting fixes merged and reviewed; charging on for 90 days with no unresolved ledger discrepancy above $1; earned revenue reported in three consecutive signed monthly statements.	Merged commits with tests, the review report and the three statements.	Lead engineer proposes, independent reviewer confirms, project owner signs.	Revenue $0, charging OFF, D-R21 not verified merged.	NOT MET
G3 Positive eligible surplus	Eligible surplus of at least $1,000 a month for 3 months in a row, with the TAO half of those months bought and recorded.	Three signed monthly statements computed by the published surplus formula, plus the purchase records. For scale only: about 4,900 paid attempts a day at the proposed prices (modelled).	Project owner, on statements signed by 2 signers.	Eligible surplus $0, not computed while charging is off.	NOT MET
G4 Multiple working subnet routes	4 or more connected routes across 3 or more distinct subnets, at least 2 routes for text, and 95% or more answered over 30 days.	The public accounting read for a 30-day window, per route and overall, with no-route and timeout counted as not answered.	Lead engineer.	2 of 10 routes configured, on 2 subnets; 22 of 45 non-reused requests answered all time, under half.	NOT MET
G5 Published reserve and treasury policy	A treasury multisig address with its signer roles and threshold (an owner decision), spending categories and statement schedule published; a reserve address with 3 or more monthly purchase or no-purchase records and the custody drill.	Publication on the site and in the repository; statements signed by 2 signers; drill transaction hashes.	Project owner.	No multisig, no reserve address, no records; the drill was never run.	NOT MET
G6 Fork-tested and audited contracts	Every holder-mechanics property implemented as a Foundry invariant or unit test; fork tests on chain 4663 against the official PoolManager, Universal Router, Quoter, StateView and the bridged TAO, run in CI through a reproducible RPC with zero skips; an external audit of the exact commit with every high and medium finding closed or accepted in writing.	The CI run and the final audit report. Skipped tests do not count.	Independent reviewer confirms the audit scope matches the code to deploy.	Prototype only: local and one-off fork runs pass; no CI, no reproducible RPC, no audit.	NOT MET
G7 Verified paired TAO asset and viable liquidity	Identity: address, code and bridge named by a first-party source. Issuer governance: the admin multisig’s owners and threshold read and published, the full role history with no undisclosed minter, bridge limits and redemption verified. Liquidity: measured depth at which a $1,000 buy moves the price two percent or less, from a disclosed plan.	Chain reads with block numbers, the Chainlink token page, the liquidity plan.	Lead engineer.	Identity verified in code and in Chainlink’s directory; issuer governance UNKNOWN; depth UNKNOWN. 1 of 3 parts met.	NOT MET
G8 Legal and custody readiness	A signed written opinion from qualified counsel in the operator’s jurisdiction on the token, staking rewards in bridged TAO, the fee split, product-surplus distribution, team allocation, marketing, geography and tax; treasury and guardian keys on hardware wallets with at least 2 independent signers under signer agreements; a published custody drill.	A public summary of the opinion (the opinion may stay private) and the drill hashes.	Project owner.	No counsel engaged; no keys, multisigs or signer agreements exist.	NOT MET

Risks

The reward asset depends on an issuer TAONIC does not controlVERIFIED IN CODE (the power exists); signers UNKNOWN: The bridged TAO on Robinhood Chain is a Chainlink BurnMintERC20 with no supply cap. Its admin is a Safe-style contract whose signers and threshold are UNKNOWN and which can grant minting rights to any address. The vault would count units of that token; its market value and its backing are the issuer’s and the bridge’s to keep.
Backing is visible, redemption is not verifiedVERIFIED IN CODE (balances); redemption INFERENCE: A lock pool on Bittensor EVM held about as much TAO as was minted on Robinhood Chain and Base when read. Whether the lock-side token redeems one to one for native TAO is an inference, not a verified fact. Robinhood’s own documentation does not list TAO.
Native staking is not reachable from Robinhood ChainVERIFIED IN OFFICIAL DOCUMENTATION: A stake position lives on Bittensor under a coldkey or a contract mirror. Any reserve that stakes must bridge to Bittensor EVM and use a Bittensor-side contract or a substrate multisig: a custodial boundary with keepers or signers. The reward vault needs none of this; a permanent staked reserve would.
Most modelled vault funding is trading, not usageMODELED: In 10 of 15 modelled scenarios most reward-vault funding would come from TAON trading fees. The vault stays solvent in every scenario; the thesis does not. That is why the usage share would be published and the words "funded by real usage" would be switched off below half.
Thin market on exitMODELED; depth UNKNOWN: Modelled: against 100 TAO of pool depth, a 1 TAO buy (about $260) moves the price about 2% and a 5 TAO buy (about $1,300) about 10%; a large exit event collapses the TAON price even while every claim is paid in full. Measured TAO depth in v4 pools on this chain is unknown.
Bridge, keeper and signer failuresSPECIFIED: A bridge outage pauses product deposits; a keeper outage delays sweeps and loses nothing because anyone can sweep; signers who never execute the product purchase leave a published payable undelivered. Each failure has a page state, not a fix.
No counsel has reviewed any of thisUNKNOWN: Sixteen counsel topics are pending, from the holder proposition to custody, marketing, geography and tax. Website wording stays PROPOSED until that review completes.

Contracts

PROTOTYPENOT AUDIT-READYNOT LAUNCH-AUTHORIZED

A Foundry prototype of the TAO-denominated fee hook, fee collector, locker, vesting, reward vault and staking vault. Never deployed anywhere. No external audit. No key, wallet or transaction was used.

What the contracts branch (contracts/redesign-2026-11-05 at 82ba7839) establishes and what it does not
Evidence	Read 2026-11-05
Local Foundry suite	175 tests passed, 0 failed, 0 skipped (16 suites), from the branch log. Unit, fuzz and invariant tests for the vault properties I1 to I12 and P1 to P8.
Robinhood Chain fork suite	24 fork tests passed, 0 failed, 0 skipped, against the real PoolManager, Universal Router 2.1.2, V4Quoter, StateView and the bridged TAO at pinned block 106,558,300, in one run whose log is uncommitted. A re-run through a free public RPC passed 23 of 24: the RPC refused one storage read (HTTP 403). Free RPCs keep historical state for seconds to minutes, so a fresh fork run is not reproducible in CI: a release blocker, not a pass.
Mutation check	38 of 38 mutants killed in the committed run, including a deliberately broken round-up-claims variant. A later, uncommitted re-run with more mutants killed 53 of 54; the survivor accepts a team vesting schedule with a short linear period.
Findings N1 to N13	Per the branch’s commit messages: N1 and N13 closed with regression tests; N2 to N8 and N12 fixed or decided. N9 (the timelock is a notice, not a veto) and N11 (an expired operation cannot be re-queued) are documented and unchanged. The branch’s review documents are the phase-0 record.
External audit	None. Counsel: none engaged. Key custody: none exists.

Never described as Robinhood-compatible without passing fork evidence, never as audited, and never as authorized. Contract preparation may continue without authorizing a launch.

Open owner decisions

Chosen by nobody here. Where two records disagree, both are stated and neither is applied.

Which reserve model stands: the 2026-09-23 record (reserve growth, no staking) or the 2026-11-05 analysis (a funded reward vault with staking). These pages describe the 2026-11-05 analysis as the proposal, labelled PROPOSED; the owner has adopted neither, and the two records letter their models differently.
Multisig signers and threshold for the treasury, and for any reserve.
TAO purchase cadence: the 2026-09-25 record says weekly review with a $250 minimum; the 2026-11-05 policy models a monthly batch with the same minimum.
Whether the TAON/TAO pair proceeds at all: the bridged asset’s identity is verified, its issuer governance is not.
Token distribution set, supply and launch route (Set A or Set B above, or neither).
Whether any usage-incentive allocation exists, and only after counsel.
Whether the Demand Reserve ever controls capital, and under which published, timelocked policy.
Engagement of counsel and of an external auditor.

Website wording stays PROPOSED until legal review completes. No counsel has reviewed any of it.

Demand Reserve Status: the evidence matrix and the gates Docs: the mechanism and its sources