CTO

Project Overview

CTO (Community Takeover) is an ERC20 token on Base, where anyone can takeover the token, change the name/image/ticker, and earn creator fees.

Mechanics

Token with a 4% buy/sell tax.
Fees are split between the CEO (Me) and the current CTO (Chief Technology Officer).
Holders can try to CTO the token and update the name/image/ticker by rolling a dice onchain using Proof of Play's vRNG.
1% of their tokens are burned when they call the function.
If successful, the token metadata updates to their submission and they start earning ETH automatically from trades.
They remain CTO until someone else takes over.

Backstory

We've seen the concept of "CTOs" arise where users buy up a dead token and spearhead a marketing campaign in order to revive a project.
They make money solely by having the token go up and selling into the pump.
Pump dot fun recently announced a way for creator fees to go instead to the CTO rather than the deployer.
What if we made the process completely decentralized and permissionless, allowing for CTOs to earn ETH rather than having to dump tokens?

The Launch

Launched on Base with a Uniswap v2 pool.
Utilized a two-part presale to fund the initial LP.
Wave 1 was gated by FundingWorks NFT holders and could contribute up to 0.5e to the presale guaranteed, with 47.861e contributed.
Wave 2 was gated by donators to Roman Storm's (Tornado Cash developer) defense fund. Users had to donate $100 for a chance to contribute up to 0.25e to the presale, with Phase 2 capped at 47.861e.
45% of the tokens went to presalers, and 45% was paired with all of the ETH raised. 10% of the tokens were held back by us in case the idea really took off.

What Went Right

We raised $85k for Roman Storm's defense fund ($85,487 was donated from 806 wallets between July 12th-July 28th with amounts within a $95-$120 range)
90e in the LP prevented snipers from being able to accumulate too much supply, with the market cap starting around $800,000.
The highest profit trader bought 10e and sold 20e, which I view as a good trade rather than a snipe.
The contract worked flawlessly, from the initial presale to the CTO logic.
We had over 60+ CTOs, with some users earning up to 1e during their time as CTO.
Base ended up tweeting about the project from their main twitter account.

What Went Wrong

Having so much ETH in the initial v2 pool caps the volatility of a token, as it takes more ETH to move the price. A pump dot fun token with this much capital demand would have been around $50m instead of CTO topping at around $2.5m.
We had some slight frontend issues, with users in the presale being on the wrong chain and not forcing the switch to Base. No funds were lost but since the presale filled instantly, some users were upset they missed out since they had to donate $100 to participate.
There was no delay on CTOs. I went back and forth on adding a cooldown, and looking back I should have. Users were not incentivized to push their token because someone could just CTO it back immediately after.
Some of the calculations on creator fees were wrong on the frontend, but within a ~10% range.

Wrap-up

I had this idea for a few months and overall the release went extremely well. This was my most profitable release personally and I believe was the most polished.

Using money from FundingWorks, I was able to hire a designer (Teto) who created this beautiful UI and really took the project to another level.

Looking back, I'm not sure what I would have done differently. The only issue with the project is that it eventually went down and I wish it lasted longer, but that's impossible to control.

I've also come to terms with not being able to push tokens after release. If I put too much gas on and try to tweak after launch, some people will buy just because of my post-launch efforts, and eventually when I stop will be burned.

Whereas I want the idea to hold on it's own with having to champion the project, which is the whole reason I launch a new one each month. It's a balancing act and I hope to find a good balance eventually.