Launched on Farcaster in November 2024 by Alex (@proxystudio.eth) and Jack (@dish), Clanker brings token creation to the social feed. Tag @clanker on Farcaster, give your token a name and ticker, and include an optional photo or gif. Your new token on Base will be deployed and can be swapped in-app or via Uniswap. After only four months, over 166k tokens have been launched via Clanker with $2.45B in trading volume and $18.8M in fees generated.

Tokens can only become more social from here. In the same way that a social app with a built-in mobile wallet (Warpcast) seems obvious in hindsight, so too will launching tokens in the feeds that we scroll everyday. Apps like Interface and Zapper let you follow wallets on Ethereum as a scrollable feed that feels less like a block explorer and more like a neighbourhood block. Data, yes, but people too. The onchain future we’re heading towards looks much more like “swap with a comment” than “set custom slippage” in its culture. We’ve spent years building foundations and scaffolding but now we’re finally seeing the first signs of the building itself: crypto is the world’s greatest massive multiplayer online game and we’re all players.

Perhaps Clanker is token deployment’s vibe coding moment. You can just launch tokens.

How Clanker Works

There are currently four ways to launch a token on Base with Clanker:

• Tag @clanker on Farcaster with a name, ticker, and photo/gif (optional)

• Use the clanker.world frontend

• Use a partner interface like clank.fun or clankpad

• Interact with the Clanker contracts directly

Your ERC-20 token is launched by calling the deployToken function of Clanker’s Token Factory contract on Base. The total supply of this new token is 100B and further supply cannot be minted. You can also specify other quote tokens including cbBTC, DEGEN, HIGHER, NATIVE, ANON, and CLANKER

A Uniswap V3 pool with 1% fees is then created with your new token (e.g. $CLANKER) and quote token (e.g. WETH), with the entire 100B supply deposited into the pool as single-sided liquidity. In other words, the AMM pool will sell the supplied token ($CLANKER) in exchange for the quote token (WETH): market participants put in their ETH and receive $CLANKER in return, and vice versa later on.

Once this pool is created and single-sided liquidity is added, an NFT representing the Uniswap V3 position is minted and then sent to the Clanker LP Locker V2 contract which does not have a method to withdraw the position NFT and is not upgradeable. In other words, the initial liquidity is locked forever and cannot be accessed by the token creator, the Clanker team, or the interface used (if applicable).

Bot deployment flow

Here’s what happens behind-the-scenes when you tag @clanker to launch a token:

• Token creator casts “@clanker deploy a token named Example with the ticker $EXAMPLE”

• Using Neynar, the Clanker frontend (Nextjs) receives the user’s FID and cast body text

• This context is passed to Claude which generates a response and decision tree logic

• The backend API parses this response and if it contains DEPLOY_TOKEN with args, the deployToken function of the Token Factory contract is called

• The transaction data, contract address (CA), and requestor FID is saved in the deployed_tokens table in the Supabase backend

• An idempotency key is also created and stored in the processed_requests table to prevent malicious duplicate requests

• Using Neynar, the frontend passes the response which is posted by @clanker in reply to the token creator, including a clanker.world link and a frame to view the newly deployed token right in Warpcast

Rewards Mechanism

The Clanker rewards mechanism differs from most token launchpads in that creators earn rewards from their token’s trading fees in perpetuity. From the initial Uniswap V3 LP which receives 1% of trading volume in fees, creators earn 40% with the remaining 60% going to Clanker. Until additional liquidity is added to the pool, this means that token creators earn 0.4% of all trading volume. If/when additional liquidity is added, the creator will not earn fees from that LP but will continue to earn 40% of the fees from the initial LP which remains locked forever.

If the token was launched from an interface partner, these splits will look slightly different: 40% to the creator, 40% to the interface partner, and 20% to Clanker. Certain interface partners have also decided to re-allocate a portion of their split back to creators, like Clankpad which offers 60% to the creator, 10% to the channel owner, 10% to Clankpad, and 20% to Clanker.

This optimistic framing is somewhat complicated by the fact that trading fees are earned in [token] and [quote token], meaning that most creators will earn a certain amount of their token along with the quote token (likely ETH). In the end, they will likely consider market selling those earned tokens to fund operations if running some sort of project or simply for profit. Even though potential sell pressure from the token creator remains, Clanker’s rewards mechanism is healthier for long-term sustainability and alignment since creators are incentivized to foster trading volume over longer periods of time. Greater mindshare for the token leads to greater creator earnings.

V3.1 and Clanker’s permissionless moment

Clanker V3.1 was deployed on March 18th and introduced the following changes:

• Permissionless deployments: anyone can now interact with the Clanker factory contract. Creators can deploy directly from the contract and new interfaces can be built on top permissionlessly, no allowlist required.

• Creator vaults: token creators can now vault up to 30% of supply which is only claimable x days after deployment with a minimum of 30 days. This can be used for team and investor allocations, community rewards, and other distribution mechanisms.

• Creator buys: token creators can now buy x ETH of the token on launch. This creator buy happens after the creator vault allocation is sent to the vault (if applicable).

• Expanded social context: the origin of the token deployment (e.g. cast on FC or post on X) can be passed in to an expanded social context schema which is no longer Farcaster-specific and supports X as well as XMTP. This property is immutable and cannot be changed.

• Mutable metadata: token admins can add/update social links and descriptions to the token’s metadata post-deploy, which updates an EAS attestation for visibility in Coinbase Wallet.

Clanker V3.1 does four important things as the team looks ahead to their next major V4 release which will incorporate Uniswap V4:

• paves the way for more apps to be built permissionlessly on top of Clanker’s core contracts

• enables experiments reaching far beyond Farcaster

• greatly expands the tools available to token creators for designing sustainable token launches

• makes Clanker tokens immediately visible to Coinbase Wallet users

Protocol Revenue and Metrics

As outlined in the Rewards section, Clanker receives between 20% to 60% of fees earned by the initial Uniswap V3 LP. This split depends on whether the token was launched in-feed by tagging @clanker (60%), using the clanker.world frontend (60%), or using an interface partner like clank.fun or Clankpad (20%). The transaction to claim protocol fees along with creator rewards can be called by anyone—whether they are the token creator or not—using the collectRewards function of the LP Locker V2 contract.

This will use the collect function of the Uniswap V3 NonfungiblePositionManager contract to collect rewards and then distribute them to the addresses mapped to teamRecipient (Clanker), creatorRewardRecipient (creator), and interfaceRewardRecipient (interface) if applicable:

• creatorRewardRecipient and interfaceRewardRecipient are specified during deployment when calling deployToken in the factory contract

• these can be changed later using the updateCreatorRewardRecipient and updateInterfaceRewardRecipient functions in the LP Locker V2 contract

• teamRecipient is not set during deploy but rather in the LP Locker V2 contract where it can also be changed by calling updateTeamRecipient.

Clanker team rewards are currently pointed at a 3/3 multisig (0x1ea…64ace) which receives initial LP fees when collected for V1, V2, V3, and V3.1 of the protocol. Please note that another multisig is used for V0 of the protocol (0x04F…dd825). At the time of writing, Clanker’s cumulative fees are $18.85M making it the #4 protocol on Base by 1-year revenue and #7 by cumulative fees all-time according to DefiLlama.

Here is a quick overview of Clanker protocol metrics at the time of writing according to their public Dune dashboard:

• 166917 tokens launched: 4289 with v0, 11085 with v1, 27646 with v2, and 123897 with v3

• $2.45B cumulative trading volume for tokens launched on Clanker

• 243,157 total traders of tokens launched on Clanker

• $124.9M total market cap of tokens launched on Clanker (excluding tokens < $100k market cap, < $10k 24hr volume, and < $50k 3-day volume)

• Tokens launched on Clanker with market cap > $1M: Clanker ($61.5M), Bankr ($20M), Based Fartcoin ($17.5M), Debt Relief Bot ($7.5M), Bracky ($3.9M), Based Froc ($3.3M), Native ($3.2M), Dickbutt ($1.6M), Dimes ($1.3M), clank.fun ($1.2M), and Lum ($1.1M)

Stay tuned for part 2 of this deep dive where I will analyze the Clanker project token ($CLANKER) and look into what the data tells us about trader behaviour and token performance in the Clanker ecosystem vs. other launchpads.