The creator tax

Covenant charges 3% on every buy and every sell, taken in ETH and paid to the creator. It is a constant in the contract: nobody, creator included, can change it after deployment.

This tax funds the project. None of it reaches the bonds — the reward pool is funded separately, from the reserve and from committed tokens.

The launch tax

For a window at launch, the tax starts higher than 3% and falls linearly back to 3%, on buys and on sells alike.

The reason is the shape of the launch itself. Covenant opens with single-sided liquidity and no developer buy, which is exactly the configuration bots watch for. An elevated early fee makes sniping the first blocks unprofitable, and sends the excess to the project rather than to the bot.

Three properties make this safe to trust rather than merely to believe:

• the starting rate and the decay length are fixed at deployment and immutable;
• the rate only ever decreases — there is no path in the code that raises it;
• the decay cannot be restarted.

The app reads the live rate from the contract and displays it, with a countdown, so you always see what you will actually pay.

The pool fee

Separately, the Uniswap pool charges 0.01%, which accrues to the protocol-owned liquidity position rather than to the creator. That position has no withdrawal path, so those fees stay where they are.