Cabalcoin

Project Overview

Cabalcoin is an ERC20 token on Ethereum, where you must convince an AI agent "Cabal" to sell your tokens.

Mechanics

• Tokens are restricted from selling/transferring while the Cabal is active.
• You submit the amount of tokens you want to tell, and a convincing plea of why you should be allowed to sell.
• The plea, token amount, and market conditions (Are you in profit? How long have you held? Is the token trending up or down?) are fed into the model.
• The AI gives the submission a score and if it is above 70 it is approved and a signature is generated.
• The user can use the signature to sell within 15 minutes.
• After 24 hours with no pleas the AI is removed and selling is unrestricted.

Backstory

• What if you had to publicly beg in order to rotate out of your positiion? Cabalcoin explores this social dynamic.
• In a market dominated by rotation and short-term exits, Cabalcoin utilizes AI-guided mechanisms to limit holder's ability to sell while incentivizing sustained participation.
• We wanted to see if adding friction to the trading process could in fact improve market dynamics.
• Each buy was given a random business card minted on Base, and each plea was displayed in a "Coinfessions" style image.
• This made it easily sharable on Twitter, and some users bought only to try to get the rare business cards.

The Launch

• We decided to launch the token on Mainnet since gwei was so low (1 gwei) and mint the cards on Base.
• Fair Launched by pairing the full token supply in a single-sided Uniswap V4 liquidity pool.
• 1 ETH was used to buy the token at launch and distribute to FundingWorks NFT holders equally (~4% of supply).
• That being said, the token was sniped by a 3rd party almost immediately with a 10 ETH buy (accumulating 25% of the token supply).

What Went Right

• There were no bugs in the contract, and only minor frontend bugs that were easily resolved.
• People loved the business cards, and we sprinkled surprise Artist backgrounds throughout (Thanks to XCOPY, AlphaCentauriKid, Batzdu, Gremplin, Diid, Yungwknd, Cydr, Neurocolor, Clay Devlin, and Hanrgb).
• The pleas and cards were shared across Twitter, bringing in interest other than "The token price is going up" which is rare.
• The AI Cabal was able to prevent unreasonable sells (It took the sniper 20+ attempts to sell).

What Went Wrong

• Uniswap V4 routing was a pro and a con. No one accidently bought on Uniswap/Telegram bot by accident. They had to come to our site and accept the T&C.
• That being said, it's really hard for a token to take off when Uniswap does not route through it, and a lot of charts have inaccurate data.
• Since it took 20+ attempts for the sniper to sell, it actually allowed them to sell at multiples higher than if they sold the first time.
• We should have implemented a maximum sell amount per attempt, although we didn't want to be overly restrictive.
• We could have launched at a higher FDV (~$50k to start) which would have prevented the sniper from accumulating such large supply.

Wrap-up

This is the first release since the FundingWorks campaign. After launching, ~20 people burned their NFTs and reclaimed most of their ETH.

Although this is intended behavior, it's demoralizing seeing people burn after each launch. I understand why people continously hype up releases and draw out deadlines.

I am incentivized to NOT actually release projects, although the people burning most likely did not mint for the right reasons (Seeking a profit).

We constantly tweaked the idea and it's really hard to tell what will work until you actually release it.