From V2 reflection to V4 hooks
1. From V2 reflection to V4 hooks
Everything about PAM comes from one design change. This page is that change, in full.
The 2021 problem
Reward tokens in 2021 ran on Uniswap V2. V2 pools are a fixed AMM curve with no way to inject custom logic into a swap. If the contract wanted a tax, it had to come out of the swap itself, in the token being swapped.
So fees were collected in the native token. Buy 1,000 $TOKEN with a 10% tax, the contract kept 100 $TOKEN. To pay anything useful back to holders (ETH, a stablecoin, a different reward token), the contract had to sell that pile on its own pool.
That's the flaw. Every distribution cycle dumps the native token on the only pool it trades in. In flat or rising markets, organic demand covers it. When attention fades, forced selling becomes the largest seller in the pool. Price slides, holders sell, the slide accelerates. Parabolic up, relentless grind down.
Nothing about that was fixable at the V2 layer. The fee had to come from somewhere, and inside a V2 swap the only place was the token in the user's hand.
What V4 changed
Uniswap V4 shipped in January 2025 with hooks: contracts the pool calls before and after each swap. Hooks can inspect the swap, modify it, and take the fee in either of the two currencies in the pool, regardless of direction.
That one capability undoes the flaw.
PAM's pool is $PAM/ETH with a hook attached. On every swap, the hook takes its fee (4% on buys, 6% on sells) in ETH, not in $PAM. The fee routes to a small on-chain pipeline: accumulate, swap ETH → $ASTEROID on a separate pool, distribute pro-rata to holders.
The $PAM pool never sees a protocol sell. $ASTEROID trades on its own liquidity, untouched by our mechanism. The $PAM price curve is fully decoupled from the reward path.
In one line
The fee enters as ETH, not as the native token.
Everything in the rest of these docs follows from that sentence: the three-contract architecture, the tokenomics, the claim flow. All of it exists to express that idea cleanly and make it impossible to change after launch.
What the old model got right and we kept: passive accrual (hold, earn), fair pro-rata distribution, a single transparent on-chain source of yield. What we removed: the structural need to sell the token against itself.