Clanker v4.1 is around the corner, with a planned go-live date in early September. v4.1 will include two major smart contract level features: descending fee sniper tech and permissionless Pool Extensions. This announcement will focus just on the upgraded sniper tech, including a deep dive into the behavior we've seen on v4, the motivation behind the changes we're introducing, and the mechanism itself.

TLDR:

• SDK and API v4.1 launches will use a descending fee mechanism to increase costs for snipers, benefiting token creators and non-automated buyers.

• Our initial fee configuration will start fees at 80%, which will decay over the first 30 seconds to 5%, after which normal fee behavior will commence. We'll be monitoring sniper behavior and will optimize these values over time.

• The descending fee mechanism will operate in conjunction with the auction on Base and Unichain and standalone on other chains.

The Clanker team believes that this upgrade will help token creators and non-automated buyers have a more level playing field with our snipers.

Clanker v4.0 has been live for around a month, with integration with routers and interface partners nearing completion. Over this time period, we've obtained initial data on the performance and behavior of our Sniper Auction and have identified ways in which we can increase the initial health of our markets. See the live dashboard here and the documentation for the auction here.

We've seen mild but sustained use of the auction so far, with 245 auctions completing over the last 30 days (out of a total of 52,612 coins). The recent daily highest winning bids sit around 0.07 ETH ($300 USD at an ETH price of $4,300) and an average bid size of 0.025 ETH ($100 USD). The bid money is split between the token's reward recipients and the Clanker team at an 80/20 split.

We see larger average swap sizes in the first few blocks that trend smaller over time, with blocks 2 and 3 having an average swap size of 7% of supply and block 10 having an average of 1% of supply. We've had 14 unique addresses participate in the auction and 168 unique addresses participate in the first 10 blocks, with a handful of coins having more than 7 snipers in the first 10 blocks.

Clanker is happy so far with the potential of the Sniper Auction. We think that having snipers pay extra for the right to be the 1st/2nd/3rd to purchase is valuable, but we do not think it is enough. The data suggests that more snipers are interested in buying early than what the auction can accommodate (currently 5) and that the sniper auction itself is doing a poor job of lessening the amount of supply that snipers are purchasing early on—ideally, snipers should not be buying 7% of the supply as their average entry. In order to address these two observations, Clanker is adding a descending fee mechanism to our v4.1 deployments.

In order to make the game more challenging for snipers, token deployments will now have higher initial fees that descend parabolically over time. Deployers are able to specify a starting LP fee (up to 80%), an ending fee, and a time to descend (2 minutes max). Clanker's initial recommended configuration will start effective fees at 80% and descend to 5% over 30 seconds, after which the pool's normal fee behavior will commence.

The fee descends parabolically over the given time following this formula: fee = endingFee + feeRange * (timeDecay / timeToDecay)². On Base and Unichain, the fee descent will start after the auction ends, and swaps occurring during the auction will pay the specified starting fee. On other chains, swapping will start in the block after deployment.

The goal of this change is to make sniping more difficult in two ways: (1) increase the initial cost of tokens for snipers in order to reduce the number of tokens they have available to dump later, and (2) increase the risk snipers take when blind bidding by making their initial capital no longer fully retrievable.

We think that the initial configuration we propose makes sense for a variety of reasons. Over time, Clanker's main token creators have shifted away from memecoins and towards project and creator tokens. If a token is launched for a well-known project or online identity, it's very likely to hit market caps in the millions. Having pools start with higher fees has the effect of having snipers buy in at higher market caps. Clanker's default starting market cap is $40k USD, and with the proposed starting fee of 80%, we're setting the starting price for snipers at a market cap of $200k.

Our intent is to target only snipers with these aggressive fees. We think that non-automated buyers are unlikely to purchase tokens in their first 30 seconds of existence, and we will adjust the configuration if needed. Additionally, DevBuys (purchases made during the deployment transaction) will use a pool's normal LP fee behavior.

We're excited to roll out these improvements to the Clanker ecosystem. The v4.1 upgrade represents a significant step forward in creating token launches that better serve creators and genuine buyers. We'll be monitoring the performance of the descending fee mechanism closely and will continue to iterate based on community feedback and market data.

If you have any questions feel free to reach out to the team!

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