Principle: Fund research. Reward evidence. Recycle value. Never sell rankings.
$HEY is research working capital for HEY Research Lab. It exists so that useful research
work is easier to fund, verify, reward and repeat. It is not the product, and price is not the
loop.
This page describes how the token is meant to work. It does not say which uses are switched on:
that changes with the deployment, and a page written once cannot know it. The $HEY page
and GET /api/hey/profile say, for each use, whether it is live or planned, read from the
product's own switches at the moment you ask.
The flywheel
Robinhood Chain builders
↓
HEY discovers and indexes them
↓
research demand appears
↓
users / projects use $HEY
↓
research requests · bounties · bonds · API keys
↓
researchers / Scouts / reviewers do useful work
↓
verified evidence enters HEY
↓
HEY intelligence improves
↓
more users / builders / integrations
↓
more research demand
↺
Treasury reinforcement:
2% creator tax on every trade (on the curve and, after graduation, in the v4 pool)
↓
HEY Treasury; HEY's policy splits it in three equal parts:
research bounties · infrastructure and data · platform operations
↓
better HEY product and evidence
↓
more useful $HEY actions
↺
The flywheel does not depend on where the token trades: fixed supply, a bonding curve paired with ETH that graduates into a full-range Uniswap v4 position the Pons locker holds permanently.
Four primitives
| Primitive | What it is | How it works | Later |
|---|---|---|---|
| Spend | Pay for scarce work or access | Request Research and labelled paid placements, priced lower for holding tiers; API keys with a monthly allowance that follows the tier | API and MCP credits paid in $HEY (planned, not built) |
| Earn | Be paid for verified useful work | Research bounties, half at approval and half after ninety days if the evidence still stands | Ecosystem contributions |
| Stake / Bond | Put something behind a claim | Scout claim bonds, owner update bonds, submission bonds; returned when the claim checks out, kept only by a reasoned decision | Evidence challenges (designed, not built) |
| Recycle | Treasury revenue funds more work | HEY’s policy splits the creator tax paid to the treasury in three equal parts: research bounties, infrastructure and data, platform operations. Its spending is not recorded in the ledger yet. An advisory holder vote on where the research third goes, in rounds the founder opens | — |
Reasons to hold, without price language: a lower price for research, a larger API allowance, earlier reading of research notes, the right to claim and be paid, and a say over research money — each lost on selling. The research economy explains each one.
Neutrality (hard invariant)
$HEY ownership, balance, spending, bonds, bounty funding, API usage and treasury holdings
never influence Build Momentum, Verified Builder, activity status, Still Building, the Discovery
Gap, Under the Radar, Top Builders, shipping status or narrative scoring.
This is enforced in code, not policy: the scoring code cannot read balances or payments at all, and an automated test fails the build if any ranking or status code refers to the token, a payment or a payer. Payment for research raises only a project's place in the research queue.
What never gets token-gated
Home, Explore, Search, Ships, basic Pulse, project pages, Methodology, Sources, organic
rankings. A wallet appears only for an explicit $HEY action the reader chose.
Treasury
The treasury receives the 2% creator tax, paid by Pons (since graduation, by the pool hook when fees are swept; HEY has not yet recorded which asset each payment arrived in), and the HEY paid for research requests, placements and bounty funding. HEY’s policy splits the creator tax paid to the treasury in three equal parts: research bounties, infrastructure and data, platform operations. Its spending is not recorded in the ledger yet. No buyback and no market operations: no part of the treasury is used to trade $HEY, and fees are never described as price support. Every treasury flow is documented before it exists.
The treasury ledger page says what the ledger records today and what the monthly statement will hold. The treasury's balances have moved more than the ledger explains; until the creator tax and the treasury's spending are recorded, HEY makes no claim about how past creator tax was spent.
No HEY pool hook (decided 2026-10-10)
HEY does not write a Uniswap v4 hook of its own for the $HEY pool, and has no plan to. The reasons:
- No problem for it to solve. No liquidity provider or reader has a problem a hook would fix: trading works, and the research uses of $HEY do not happen in the pool.
- The liquidity is already locked where it is. The launch position is the full-range Uniswap v4 position Pons minted at graduation and its V2 locker holds; a new pool with a HEY hook would split liquidity away from it, not add to it.
- The utilities are off chain. Request Research, bounties, bonds, API allowances, early access, the funding vote and the Research Terminal are decided by HEY's own records and verified transfers; none of them needs code that runs on every swap.
- Neutrality. A hook acts on trades. Anything HEY ran on $HEY's trades would be a market operation, which the treasury policy rules out, and would put HEY's own code between readers and the price of the token HEY researches by the same rules as every other.
- Audit cost. A hook holds other people's funds on every trade; writing, auditing and maintaining one would cost more than any use above could repay, and would be spent on the market instead of on research.
Phases
PHASE 1 $HEY live ← launched on Pons V2; HEY verified and integrated it
PHASE 2 Request Research ← built
PHASE 3 Research bounties ← built
PHASE 4 Bonds behind claims ← built
PHASE 5 API keys with tiers ← built
PHASE 6 Early access · holder vote ← built
LATER API and MCP credits ← announced, not built
LATER Evidence challenges ← designed, not built
Built is not the same as switched on: each use has its own switch, and the $HEY page says which are open today.
Metrics that matter
Product and economy: research requests funded and completed, median completion time, HEY spent on research, public research outputs produced, bounties funded and completed, active Scouts, accepted evidence, HEY paid to contributors.
Neutrality: paid requests with negative or inconclusive outcomes; paid requests that did not become Verified Builder; paid projects ranking below unpaid ones.
Failure modes this design avoids
Most HEY sitting idle in wallets; utility that exists only on a roadmap; projects buying visibility; Scout rewards attracting spam; a treasury that accumulates without recycling; token UI overwhelming the research product.