SPAWN

Project Overview

SPAWN is an ERC20 token concept on Base, launched in protest of "tokenizing everything."

How It Works

• The main SPAWN token, cheekily named "Sustainable Pyramid of Assets Where No One Loses Money, was deployed with a custom Uniswap v4 hook.
• Every time someone swapped through the v4 hook, it would launch another SPAWN token with a random name and ticker.
• These child tokens would have liquidity pools with the v4 hook as well, inheriting the same spawning logic.
• Each generation had a larger creator tax (the original token took 1% of each trade, its children took 2%, their children 3% etc.)
• All of these tokens were mapped on the SPAWN site with an extremely dynamic interface to explore the whole map of tokens.

Commentary

• People on Base/Solana have been trying to mass-launch tokens for the past few months. The only people who win in this environment are those selling the token-slop shovels.
• Money flows in the ecosystem from early participants to late bagholders. With all token launchpads, usually only the first token (or the platform's token) retains any value and the rest are a game of hot potato.
• Base has also reclaimed the word "Based", attaching it to everything they launch. They ignore the "FWOG" token on Solana, but "Based FWOG" on Base gets support from the ecosystem.
• The random names were generated by "(Random Adjective) (50/50 Based or Retarded) (Random Noun)"
• "Creator Fees" are just the new "Tax Tokens," but rebranded.

The Launch

• The token was fair launched by pairing the full token supply in a single-sided Uniswap V4 liquidity pool at around a ~$50k initial marketcap.
• After extensive testing, there were no contract-level or frontend-level bugs.
• We had to rewrite the rendering of the token map once we got above 10,000 tokens, but eventually became smooth again.
• The token ended up organically reaching ~$3M marketcap, before users got bored and rotated to the next meta.

Important Notes

• Since we used a Uniswap v4 hook (Uniswap wouldn't route through the liquidity pair), almost all trades of all SPAWN tokens went through the frontend (Around $5M in volume)
• We deposited creator fees into btc/acc for creators, helping them stack Bitcoin.
• Over 16,000 tokens were SPAWN-ed.
• SpawnerHook is currently the largest Uniswap v4 hook by number of pools to date (as of May 5th)

Wrap-up

This idea was a spin-off of the previous Golden Handcuffs idea. We debated letting users change the name/ticker/image of their token, but figured the idea was already complicated enough.

Keeping track of 16,000 tokens, their marketcaps, and the user holdings across them was quite an accomplishment.

I'm extremely proud of this project, and we ended up making a solid return on time invested (around 8e and 0.1btc deposited into btc/acc)