Certified Top Blaster

01-24-24 - 01-17-24

Project Overview

Top Blaster is a novel ERC20 token concept on Base where:

Users are taxed 6.9% on sells
ALL of the taxes enter a prize pool
Whoever “Top Blasts” (pays the most for their tokens) gets all of the fees for that period
Users must spend >= 0.69e to qualify as Top Blaster
Each period lasts 6 hours

Launch Details

We decided to launch with a short, capped presale (15 minutes or 25e) in order to seed the initial liquidity pool and generate a starting prize. Users could contribute anything from 0.1 to 1e, for a share of 48.5% of the total supply. The presale filled nearly instantly, in just 24 seconds.

What Went Right

The game concept was easy to digest
Frontend and branding were beautiful
No bugs in the contract. All mechanisms worked as planned
The 1 hour livestream countdown generated a lot of hype and attention
Presale filled instantly—in just 24 seconds
Liquidity to MC ratio of 20e: 485m tokens resulted in an initial marketcap of ~$300k—low enough for people to buy if they missed presale. A 1:2 liquidity-to-market-cap ratio is something we will consider for future launches
First prize pool ended up being 22e, which was paid out to someone who just (from what we can tell) happened to Top Blast the chart with a 0.69e buy at the pico top. GG to the lucky player

What Went Wrong

Game periods were too long. We expected people to battle toward the end of the period to claim the ETH in the pot but did not happen. The price had moved to the point where participants felt Top Blasting was out of reach
If the game period was ~1hr, we may have seen launch hype carry forward
Team made $0. We could have taken some small fees and nobody would have cared (we debated taking 1% of the 6.9% fee, but decided against it)
The team took 3% of the total supply and planned to sell just like players, but ended up not selling any as volume died down
Since the token had a sell tax, we couldn't use V3 pools. Using a V2 pool causes the LP fee to be re-added to the pool, whereas V3 keeps it separate and can be a solid source of revenue. With this constraint, withdrawing earned fees from the LP post-launch felt wrong
There was little incentive to hold the token. It made sense to buy $BLSTR to try to get the pot, but it's difficult to see a reason why a user would hold for a long period if they weren't competing for the prize pool
Donald Trump launched a memecoin 6 hrs after CTB went live. The attention and hype went to the store to get milk and cigarettes

Anti-Sniping Findings

Snipers are a huge problem when launching tokens. Being the first to buy is a risk-free trade with infinite upside, but if someone controls a lot of the supply for basically no money, they'll continuously dump on less sophisticated supportoors.

In the process of deploying, we aimed to:

Give people a good price, not sniper bots
Get tokens in the hands of players who may hold for the whole period.

We decided to experiment with democratizing access to the lowest price with a mini presale. For the most part, this achieved our goal. On launch, we had ~30 initial holders with a small % of the total supply each. This isn't perfect, but it worked about as well as expected. We have a few solutions for launching our tokens more fairly, and will continue to iterate on this initial launch process.

Wrap-up

Overall, we're proud of what we built. This was a great first project for TokenWorks™ and learned some valuable lessons. We gained meaningful insight on capturing and retaining attention, and better strategies for future token launches.

The contract owner was set to the TokenWorks archive contract, and we'll auction off the NFT as a final momento.

We'll be back soon — back to the TokenWorkshop.