$ket part 1: launch
Call me Elon the way I be launching these coins
This series covers the background and first week of events of the launch of $ket, an Avalanche token presale for an AI trading bot.
My involvement in this project
I try to be as impartial as I can, but everything I write has some bias. Full disclosure, I helped to launch the token and build some tooling, but I have little to no impact on the future of this project at this point, my job is done. I’m just a holder now.
The idea
I think Nobs started this as a joke, originally. But he actually worked on it enough to make it into a real thing.
I didn’t read any of the details behind the project before aping into the presale, as is tradition. This is crime szn, after all.
But the rough idea, as I understood it, is to crowdfund a treasury via a token launch and then use an AI-driven approach to trading that includes market sentiment, chart data, and copy trading smart wallets.
Nobs even has the bot actually clicking the buttons on the UI, which is impressive, if stupid. My AI trading bot will obviously be much better than that and do the trading programmatically (I kid).
Presale
It was pretty easy to get into the presale. Basically, if you were a person with literally any AVAX history and you clicked like on the post, you had a good shot at getting in. Some of the shittiest people I know (including people who have had beef with Nobs in the past) got in, because technically they are community members (bad ones).
Obviously some influenza also got in, that’s how the game is played I guess.
Tokenomics
It ended up being 350K raised from 350 individuals, and 175K into the liquidity pool. Raise was done partially in AVAX and partially in USDC, and unfortunately AVAX took a deep shit halfway through the raise.
There’s no actual identified use of the 10% for ‘development’, but I promise it will be FSH directly into the LP once I can trick Nobs into signing the proper Gnosis transaction.
Art
Nobs paid a bunch of artists to create custom art for the project. I’m no expert, but I think the art is good.
The character and composition mimics the approach taken by the $fwog token. I was first introduced to the so called ‘art token meta’ by a research doc that 0xChefGoose wrote on the topic:
I think it’s a pretty cool idea. Good art leads to good memes on Twitter, which leads to more sharing.
Team
The prelaunch ‘team’ was:
tactical_retreat (me): Pressed the buttons to launch the token, provided some guidance, and built Ketboard (along with VirtualQuery).
Russell: Helped set up some kind of legal bullshit, waste of time since crime is legal now. Honestly his whole job is obsolete, feel bad for him.
Nobs: Everything else. Which is a lot of shit that you’re probably not thinking of and I’m too lazy to list here.
None of the three of us were compensated in any way for the token (I got paid for Ketboard), and there’s no token allocation (other than us each having 1 presale slot, which we would have gotten anyway).
I’m sure Nobs is underwater when you consider how much he’s paid for art, for Ketboard, and for legal stuff. He’s kind of a fucking idiot, right? I mean, I am too, but him even more so.
The team now is just Nobs. The fate of our funds rests in his bot dev abilities. May god have mercy on our souls.
Lore
The symbol for the token was chosen via a series of polls on Twitter.
The final name was actually coined by 0xPrimata, who successfully campaigned in the back channel group chats and defeated all other potential names.
The entity for ‘Yellow Cat DAO’ is actually legally incorporated in Wyoming.
Hence the twitter account’s name.
Ketboard
Prior to launch, it was announced that a ‘shame board’ for presale participants would be published.
The idea originates from a dashboard published for AICC, where various influenza made millions of dollars from a $200 investment.
This is a bit different obviously, since the presale was done via Twitter everyone’s wallet was linked directly to their socials.
The rule for the board is that if you dump more than 50% of your allocation, your socials are exposed, along with your PNL.
Launch prep
Obviously the prep work from Nobs was extensive. Gathering and confirming presale data for 350 people is a lot of work. There’s also the planning, actually building the bot, and wrangling the mentally handicapped (me) for the launch.
On my end, I put about 3 days into preparing for the launch. A short list of dev-type things I did, which are common to basically every launch:
Gather token requirements
Airdrop prep
Test Layer Zero bridging
Verify DexScreener / TokenSniffer won’t have an issue with the token/deployment
Script the deploy, LP add, airdrop, and other token transfers
Prepare shenanigans
Draft a launch timeline and rollout plan
I have absolute paranoia when it comes to doing things in web3. Especially when those things involve moving $175K of other people’s money. It probably didn’t need to take three days, but I did a lot of testing, verification, and pointless worrying.
Launch day
The launch was timed for 11 AM ET, to ensure that most people (fuck Asia) would be awake.
Every launch is concerned with fairness and snipers, and given how much interest there was in this launch, I obviously wanted to give everyone a fair shot. So I made some preparations to punish anyone buying a CA that wasn’t explicitly posted by the main account on Twitter.
Unfortunately, my legal council advised me that rugging snipers might be considered “a crime”. Note that this was prior to crime becoming legal. So I posted some warnings.
Not that “potentially a crime” ever stopped me. I went through with it, I just made it as likely as possible that people wouldn’t lose money doing stupid things.
So anyway, perhaps I over prepared but everything went smoothly (from a technical POV). Only one person tried to snipe the launch, with a very small amount.
Token went up, until people started selling.
Up next
The shamefi arc.