Presale

Populx runs an off-chain, OTC-style presale. There is no on-chain presale contract; participants send ETH (or USDT / USDC) directly to the official Populx treasury wallet, and the team credits their positions on-chain after TGE via the staking contract.

One launch chain, two payment lanes. The Populx protocol (token, staking, vault, zap) only launches on Ethereum mainnet. The presale just lets you pay on either Ethereum or Base — Base is offered as a convenience (cheaper gas, faster confirmations) and contributions made there are bridged back to ETH mainnet by the team before TGE. Your Founder / Citizen allocation is identical regardless of the network you paid on.

Two roles, two outcomes. When you participate from agora.populx.app you choose between Founder (locked LP-PPLX) and Citizen (non-locked stPPLX). The role decides what you receive at TGE — your ETH/stable transfer itself is identical.

How it works (end-to-end)

You connect your wallet on agora.populx.app and pick the payment lane you want to use. Five lanes are available: ETH / USDT / USDC on Ethereum mainnet, ETH / USDC on Base. USDT on Base is intentionally unavailable because Tether does not deploy a native USDT on Base (only third-party bridges exist, which we do not accept under the USDT label). Whatever lane you choose, the protocol itself launches on Ethereum mainnet only.
You choose Become a Founder or Become a Citizen. The dapp calls POST /presaleOtc/intent on the API to register your intention (wallet, role, network, currency, amount).
The dapp then asks your wallet to send the funds to the official Populx treasury wallet. For ETH it is a plain transfer; for USDT/USDC it is a standard ERC-20 transfer.
Once the transaction is mined, the dapp calls POST /presaleOtc/confirmTx with the transaction hash. The API verifies on-chain that the value reached the treasury and marks the intent as verified.
After TGE, the team aggregates the verified intents and credits each wallet on-chain in one transaction via stPopulx.distributePresale(wallet, amountAsset, amountLP) — or in batch via stPopulx.distributePresaleBatch([...]). The vault funds the PPLX side; the LP side comes from the treasury-seeded LP.

Founder vs Citizen

Founder

Locked LP-PPLX — best yield

You receive a locked LP position in the staking contract. Your contribution helps seed the initial Uniswap V2 PPLX/ETH pool that opens trading at TGE. The LP is staked on your behalf — you do not need to manually zap or claim — and is locked for the timeLock period (currently 12 months).

Yield advantage. Because your LP is locked, the daily rewards cron weights your position with a +50% locked bonus (a 1.5× multiplier applied off-chain when lpLocked is true). On top of that you also keep your share of the Uniswap V2 0.30% trading fees that accrue inside the pool — that part is purely market-driven and on top of the staking APY.

After the lock you can unStake the LP normally.

Citizen

Non-locked stPPLX — flexible

You receive a non-locked stPPLX position in the staking contract. You can unStake at any time, with the standard anti-dump friction: 5% taxUnstake + 7-day vestingTime. While staked, your stPPLX earns reflections, epoch bonuses and the standard staking yield (no locked bonus by default).

Opt-in lock. You can choose to lock your stPPLX from the staking page (stake(amount, asset=true, locked=true)) to unlock the same +50% locked bonus applied to Founders. Lock duration is also timeLock (12 months); you give up flexibility, you gain APY.

You can also compound, claim rewards, or convert to a Founder-style locked LP position later via the Zap.

APY matrix

Both APY tiers are configurable via the daily reward pools (asset side and LP side, set off-chain by the team) and cannot be changed retroactively for past distributions — only future runs of the cron use the new values. The locked bonus, by contrast, is hardcoded at 1.5× in the cron.

Citizen, non-locked: base APY on the asset side.
Citizen, opt-in locked: base asset APY × 1.5.
Founder, locked: base LP APY × 1.5 + Uniswap fees.

Live values for the four APYs are exposed by the API at POST /getAPY as apy_asset, apy_asset_locked, apy_lp, apy_lp_locked, and shown on the staking dashboard.

Realised vs headline APY

The headline APY is normalized against a fixed baseline of 90 M PPLX (the entire vault), not the current staked supply. This is intentional: the baseline does not move every time someone stakes or unstakes, so the displayed figure stays stable. The cron, however, distributes the full daily pool prorata against the actual on-chain weighted stake. As long as the real weighted stake is below 90 M (essentially always at launch), your realised APY is higher than the headline. Founders and early Citizens therefore get an outsized share of the early reward pools — see the full mechanics on the Staking page.

Where the rewards come from (and what happens long-term)

Daily staking rewards are paid out of VaultPopulx, which was funded with 90 M PPLX at deploy. With an aggressive APY calibration the vault is a finite resource — once empty, every claim mints fresh PPLX via the main token's swapChildPopulxToPopulx fallback. This is intentional: the protocol is meant to switch into the Drought era at that point, where 60% of every transfer tax is burned, so trading volume offsets the new mint. See the Token page for the full inflation / deflation math.

Per-wallet limits

Min deposit: 0.1 ETH equivalent.
Max cumulative cap per wallet: 2.5 ETH equivalent, summed across all your deposits and across both networks (Ethereum + Base) at the configured ETH/USD rate.
When you submit a deposit, the dapp shows the remaining capacity for your wallet. Once you hit the cap, further intents are rejected.

Why off-chain?

Multi-chain & multi-currency. A single contract on one chain cannot accept ETH on Ethereum, ETH on Base, USDT and USDC natively. The OTC flow lets us accept the five available payment lanes (ETH/USDT/USDC on Ethereum + ETH/USDC on Base) without bridging.
No upgradable presale contract. The previous design required deploying additional contracts and trusting them with everyone's deposits. The OTC flow uses only the standard treasury wallet plus the existing staking contract — fewer attack surfaces, no new admin keys.
Distribution after TGE. Tokens are credited only after the LP is seeded and trading is live, so participants can immediately stake / claim / compound — no separate “claim” UI needed.

Safety & recovery

The team can never spend tokens you have not already sent — your wallet signs each transfer to the treasury directly.
Populx, stPopulx, rPopulx and zapPopulx all expose onlyOwner recoverERC20 / recoverETH functions in case a wrong token gets stuck on a contract — these never touch user stakes.
distributePresale and distributePresaleBatch are onlyOwner: only the team key can credit Founder / Citizen positions, and the credits come out of the team-funded vault/LP.

Disclaimer. Per-wallet caps, ETH/USD reference rate and the presale window are configurable values on the API side; check agora.populx.app for live values before transacting. This is not financial advice.