HOWAEROWORKS

01

The fee is the fuel

AERO does not print value out of nothing. Everything it hands out came in first, as Pons creator fees. Those fees land in one place — the treasury — and every payout downstream is carved out of them.

No inflow, no payout. That is the whole guarantee, and it is the reason the treasury is published rather than described.

02

The treasury fills every 30 minutes

On the half hour, the keeper claims whatever the fees have produced and routes it. Part of it becomes the reservoir that buys the tokenised aerospace shares handed to holders who scan. Part of it covers the chain fees of the airdrops, so an eligible address that gave its wallet never pays to receive. Part of it is set aside for the donation below. The rest runs the project.

The size of each part is not published, and that is deliberate: it is an internal decision, and a number on a page is not a promise anyway. What is published is what actually moved, transaction by transaction.

The wait is never longer than half an hour. Every claim is recorded, and the reservoir below is read live from that record — not typed into this page.

The keeper buys the shares itself, on-chain, at the moment it has people to pay — so every purchase is a transaction you can open. The reservoir below is what is left after those purchases, and the last one is linked under it.

Part of every fee goes to the children of first responders

A share of each turn is set aside for the First Responders Children's Foundation, born in the days after 9/11 to support the children of first responders killed in the line of duty. It is taken out of what runs the project, never out of what the holders receive.

A donation nobody can check is worth nothing. So the share leaves the treasury for a wallet of its own on every turn, which makes each transfer a transaction anyone can open, and the running total below is read from that same record. The foundation takes crypto through its own donation desk, which issues a fresh address for each gift, so the final step is made by hand and its receipt published here. Both numbers are shown, what is set aside and what has actually been sent, because they are not the same thing until the transfer is made.

03

You scan a boarding pass — or a train ticket

Point the camera at the barcode. Your browser decodes it on your device: the name and the record locator never leave it. The server receives a SHA-256 fingerprint — enough to enforce one pass, one claim; not enough to know who flew.

• 1 kmflown becomes one mile
• ×1.5in business
• ×2in first

Every mile lands immediately. The hunt adds a 15% bonus on top, waiting for you at the airport you land at — nothing is ever held back, the cache only gives more.

Trains count too

A train ticket is read the same way, on your device: two stations, a date, a class, and an anonymous fingerprint. One kilometre by rail is one mile, first class counts one and a half. Supported today: SNCF e-tickets; Eurostar, through the two European ERA codes it prints; Renfe and OUIGO España, through the common Spanish ADIF code and the newer Renfe QR; and the European UIC 918-3 code used by Deutsche Bahn, ÖBB, SBB and most of central Europe. A Renfe or OUIGO ticket carries no class, so it counts as second. Amtrak can't be read for now: its QR code only carries the reservation number, not the trip.

The station database already covers the world: 70,000 codes across Europe and the US, and 47,000 more stations by name in Canada, Australia, India, China, Japan, Korea, the Middle East, South-East Asia and Latin America. Their ticket formats are added one by one, as we get real tickets to read.

A rail trip shows up on the map and on the claims wall with a RAIL badge, and converts at the epoch exactly like a flight.

Uber and Bolt rides count too

Paste the original receipt email (in Gmail: Show original) or upload it as a .eml file. The server checks the provider's email signature (DKIM) and keeps only the distance, the date and the provider (plus one-way fingerprints against double claims): one kilometre is one mile, with a wallet, and at most 5 rides per wallet per rolling 24 hours. Screenshots, PDFs and forwarded emails are refused.

04 LIVE

Part of it has to be hunted

The Hunt is live. A scan credits every mile it is worth, immediately. The cache in the airport you land at adds a 15% bonus on top — nothing waits anywhere, and nothing is held back.

Here is what comes: a share of the miles will sit in a cache at the airport you landed at — a GPS point, a clue, a 180-metre radius. Standing there, your position and a photo taken live will release it.

That photo will be looked at, then dropped. It is the one thing that travels: the server checks whether the scene is an airport, whether it fits the one you landed at, whether it is a photo of a screen, and whether it has been used before — then keeps the verdict and nothing else. Never the image. Your boarding pass still never leaves your phone.

Hunted miles will be worth more than scanned miles: at conversion time they carry +35% weight. Scanning pays; going to get it will pay better. Caches will only ever sit in public, city-side places — never near security.

05

Holding decides your share

Miles alone do not convert. At each epoch the keeper checks on-chain that your address holds at least $10 of AERO. The threshold is in dollars, not in tokens, and it is recomputed every epoch at the price of the moment — ten dollars stays ten dollars. If you are above it, your miles turn into fractions of tokenised aerospace shares. If you are below, nothing is lost: the miles accumulate and wait.

How much you hold sets how much you take. The weight climbs with your balance, but along a square root, so one whale cannot clear the table.

• $10minimum to be eligible
• ×1at the holding threshold
• ×2at four times the threshold
• ×10at a hundred times
• ×12hard ceiling, whatever the balance

Every eligible address receives between two and eight dollars per epoch, by holdings: never crumbs, never the whole pot. What an epoch can spend is a fraction of the reservoir of the moment, and when a crowd shows up, everyone is scaled down together: rewards follow what came in, and the reservoir is never emptied.

06

The three baskets

Miles do not become cash. They become fractions of tokenised aerospace shares, issued on Robinhood Chain and held in your own wallet. Three baskets, and you can see them on-chain right now.

BoeingBA

The aircraft under you, most of the time. The default basket: every flight feeds it.

0x4d21…d452

SpaceXSPCX

Private, and rarely within reach. A boarding pass is a strange way in — that is the point.

0x4a0e…5eea

FIREFLY

Firefly AerospaceFLY

Small launchers and a lunar lander. The youngest of the three, and the most volatile.

0x03bc…075d

One basket per epoch, in turn. An epoch does not hand out all three at once: it hands out one. Boeing, then SpaceX, then Firefly, then Boeing again. Every 30 minutes, the next in line.

AERO issues none of these. They are Robinhood's tokenised shares, bought with the treasury and sent to wallets that hold AERO — the protocol distributes, it does not print. Their addresses are in keeper/config.mjs, readable by anyone.

07

The snapshot you cannot time

Conversion happens once per epoch — every 30 minutes, the same clock that fills the treasury. What came in on one turn goes out on the next. The snapshot itself falls at a moment drawn at random inside the closing window, and it is never announced. Borrowing the token for the length of a snapshot does not work if nobody knows when the snapshot is.

• 30 minone epoch
• 1claim per wallet per epoch
• 6claims per wallet per day

Those two limits are on the wallet, not on the pass — a pass is still one claim, forever. And they are checked when a wallet is attached to a flight, whether that happens at the scan or later.

One basket per epoch, in turn. An epoch does not hand out all three shares at once: it hands out one. Boeing, then SpaceX, then Firefly, then Boeing again. Which one is next is never a surprise — it is simply the next in line.

Failed sends consume nothing: the miles stay whole and go again next epoch. Successful conversions are posted publicly, line by line, on the wall at the bottom of the home page — the address masked, the amount never.

08

Ten years of old boarding passes

The drawer counts. Any pass up to ten years old can still be claimed. Over a week old it goes in as archive: 25% of face value, credited at once, no hunt — you are not at that airport any more.

One pass, one claim, forever. The fingerprint makes a second attempt impossible, on any device.