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Golden Handcuffs

Golden Handcuffs
12-01-24•contract

Project Overview

Golden Handcuffs is an ERC20 token on Base, where specific wallets are "handcuffed" with restrictions.

  • When these wallets make their first outgoing transfer, they "break" their golden handcuffs and spawn a new coin contract (BrokenHandcuff) with liquidity automatically added to Uniswap V3.
  • 18 pre-defined wallets (Influencers, KOLs, Thought-leaders) are each sent 5% of the supply.
  • These users can break their Golden Handcuff and cash in at any time, but the transaction will unleash a fury of degens who will now bet on their newly deployed memecoin.
  • Each handcuff had a custom name/ticker. Example: Beeple (0xc6b0562605D35eE710138402B878ffe6F2E23807). If Beeple's wallet ever sold (or transferred) tokens, a token with the name "A Memecoin Deployed By Beeple (OFFICIAL!!)" and ticker "DAILY" would launch at a $100 marketcap.

The Launch

  • Fair Launched by pairing 10% of token supply in a single-sided Uniswap V3 liquidity pool.
  • The remaining 90% was airdropped to the handcuffed wallets.

What Went Right

  • The concept was super simple and digestible. At the time, people were launching tokens on Pump Fun, trading in their reputation for a payday.
  • We played off of this moment by putting it fully on-chain, and public sentiment was extremely positive.
  • A few months later we'd see this exact concept play out on boop.fun, where users had to launch a memecoin to claim their airdrop.

What Went Wrong

  • We should have made a website for the token, as it was just launched right away when the project was finished via a tweet.
  • There wasn't really an incentive to hold the parent Golden Handcuff token. We should have given a claim to Broken Handcuff tokens if you held the OG.
  • No one ever broke their handcuff, so we never got to see the mechanism play out.

Wrap-up

This was a quick one-off idea that we had and wanted to execute after PVP flopped.

I personally view smart contracts as the backend and interfaces like Uniswap as the frontend, but this shows that even building a static frontend goes a long way.

Hopefully one of the handcuffs will break so we can see how it plays out, although there's less incentive now, as the token has gone down significantly.