If you need a refresher course before we get clanking, take a look at my Clanker V3.1 deep dive here.

Launch overview and parameters

The Faircaster token (ticker: $fair) was launched on Base by @luc on June 26th at 5:48pm EDT. Luc described Faircaster as "an experiment in agent-led capital" that uses its treasury to invest based on social signals on Farcaster. By tracking what top builders ship, fund, and support, the goal for the agent is to provide one-click exposure to the best builders in the Farcaster ecosystem. The token itself was described as a "governance token" where holders are the board and can make decisions to change the rules, shut down the agent, etc. No further details beyond "me + friends" were provided with regards to the team behind the project.

A few days later, Luc provided further details about how Faircaster works under the hood. In summary, Faircaster is a team of specialized agents which are all coordinated by an orchestrator agent. The main tactic used to identify opportunities is tracking casts from users with the "highest network centrality" based on OpenRank scores. These signals are used to inform Faircaster's investment strategy by identifying promising new projects as well as important developments for existing projects.

As noted by Clanker contributor @m00npapi.eth, the deployer configured the parameters of the launch on clanker.world and saved them with a phrase which then triggered the launch:

• Total Supply: Total supply of $fair is 100B, further supply cannot be minted.

• Creator Vault: Token creators can use the vault feature to lock up a percentage of the token supply (up to 30%) for a predefined amount of time (min. 30 days). For this launch, 30% of the total supply (30B) was locked and sent to ClankerVault at 0x42A95190B4088C88Dd904d930c79deC1158bF09D. These tokens will unlock 30 days after launch on July 27, 2025.

• Creator Buy ("dev buy"): Token creators can use the dev buy feature to purchase tokens with their own capital upon launch up to 5 ETH. For this launch, the maximum of 5 ETH was used to acquire ~29.2B $fair which is 29.2% of the 100B total supply or 41.7% of the 70B circulating supply.

Presale controversy

Following the launch, Farcaster users like @sekoweed.eth and @bitfloorsghost.eth pointed out that many well-known accounts were allegedly given private presale allocations of $fair later worth up to $70k+ USD. For many, this seemed counterintuitive because Clanker is widely seen as a way to launch fairly in public and bootstrap capital through trading fees.

However, the necessity of raising capital becomes clear when you consider the nature of the project which is essentially agentic capital allocation. Whether that raise should have happened in public vs. private is the main question at hand, not whether raising capital was necessary.

Although no public details have been shared, it appears that presale participants were approached to send ETH to 0xd20CdCcfD6f2Fd0ce8Aa429fc1097D37aB29AA6B between May 20 2025 and June 26 2025 in exchange for $fair presale allocation. There is a clear pattern visible with several 0.25, 0.5, and 1 ETH payments made by both anon and public wallets tied to Farcaster profiles. Some wallets donated more than once, like @waheed who contributed 5 times for a total of 3.25 ETH worth $8416.58 USD at the time that funds were sent.

Three multisigs also participated: 0x4aB...54280, 0xE93...27B1a, and 0x7AF...A4cd7. They contributed 2 ETH ($4834.88 USD), 2 ETH ($4834.88 USD), and 6.75 ETH ($16,318.13 USD) respectively.

In total, 23 ETH was raised worth $56,915.47 USD at the time that funds were sent.

During the launch (tx), 0xb266343E3484cfE09A68372f295b915b60769289 received ~29.2B $fair tokens from the 5 ETH dev buy and proceeded to distribute the tokens to the addresses that contributed to the presale. You can see the corresponding allocation for 0.25, 0.5, and 1 ETH tiers which received 310.8M, 621.6M, and 1.24B tokens respectively. You can also see the three multisigs which received received 2.48B (0x4aB...54280), 2.48B (0xE93...27B1a), and 8.39B (0x7AF...A4cd7) tokens. None of the ~29.2B tokens distributed were locked or vested, so they were freely tradeable once received.

Tokens launched via Clanker accumulate fees from the locked Uniswap V3 1% LP position created upon launch. Since $fair was launched via the clanker.world frontend, the fee split between the token creator and Clanker is 80% / 20% respectively. At the time of writing, 0xb26...69289 has so far claimed ~11.14 WETH ($33.5k USD) and ~732.73M $fair ($23.8k USD). There are six transactions in total which call the claimRewards function: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6.

Please note that @luc's presale allocation of 463.01M tokens was the only non-multisig allocation which differed from the standard amounts of 310.8M, 621.6M, and 1.24B tokens (or multiples thereof). This surplus of 152,201,614.74 $fair closely matches the first Clanker rewards claim of 152,201,611.46 $fair. As a result, 0xb26...69289 currently holds ~580.53M $fair rather than the total amount claimed of ~732.73M $fair.

Token lockups

@luc posted an update at 5:13pm EDT on June 27 2025 stating that all early investors locked their allocation for 6 months. It is unclear whether this step was taken in response to criticism or whether this was the intended course of action all along. This post also clarified why capital was raised in the presale, stating that "first buyers funded the agent for everyone."

According to @itsbasil, these lockups were done via Hedgey Finance which is a tool for token vesting, investor lockups, grants, etc. At the time of writing, ~26.28B $fair tokens have been locked via Hedgey. Out of the ~29.2B presale tokens, this leaves ~2.9B unlocked at the time of writing. In other words, 89.94% of the ~29.2B presale tokens are locked. If you include the 152.2M extra tokens sent to @luc in the presale total, 89.48% of the ~29.3B presale tokens are locked.

These locks expire on December 27, 2025 at 7am EST. You can verify this by calling the planEnd read function on the VotingTokenLockupPlans (VTLP) contract and entering the token ID of the ERC-721 minted at the time of lockup. This will return a Unix timestamp which you can then convert to your local timezone. So far, 24 tokens have been minted beginning with ID 11 through to ID 34. Previous lockup tokens minted relate to other tokens which are likely tests or unrelated.

Post-launch trading analysis

I have divided the presale participants into two groups based on what % of their presale tokens are locked: Group A (≥95%) and Group B (≤85%).

• Wallet shows the address used by presale participants to lock their tokens, which in some cases may differ from the wallet used to send ETH to 0xd20...9AA6B and receive presale tokens.

• Presale buy shows the total amount of ETH sent to 0xd20...9AA6B in exchange for presale allocation. USD value is calculated at the time the payment was made.

• Presale allocation shows the total amount of tokens received in exchange. In some cases tokens were received at another address and then transferred.

• Tokens locked and % shows the total amount of tokens locked via Hedgey.

• Net tokens bought/sold shows the amount of tokens bought or sold by presale participants. If the number is positive, they bought more tokens than they sold. If the number is negative, they sold more tokens than they bought.

• Net cash flow shows the net profit from token sales minus the amount contributed to the presale. In other words, including the presale buy, did the participant lose or make money? If $fair was traded for assets other than ETH, only the WETH value of the trade was used and subsequent gains or losses were not accounted for in this calculation.

Group A: ≥95% presale allocation locked

Group B: ≤85% presale allocation locked

A few additional notes on the above:

• Only three presale participants have a positive net cash flow: @azflin, @waheed, and 0xbCE...a1311.

• @luc did not send ETH to 0xd20...9AA6B so it is impossible to determine his cost basis (if any).

• Although @sidshekhar only locked 67.26% of his tokens, it is worth noting that he instead decided to distribute them via Noice tipping.

• Presale participants may have bought or sold tokens from side wallets which are not accounted for in the above analysis of public wallets.

• The data above is accurate to the best of my knowledge at the time of publishing but may become inaccurate over time as participants lock/unlock or buy/sell tokens. Please do your own research and form your own conclusions.

Takeaways

Launching tokens is never easy, but here are a few takeaways from the events surrounding $fair:

• There are valid reasons to conduct a presale or private round for your project. An agent that invests needs capital to invest, a point well articulated by @woj. And as mentioned by @six, having control over your cap table is also valuable.

• However, you should disclose this arrangement whenever possible. Otherwise, you risk not being on the same page with the broader community that may want to support your project.

• If you're proud of your early partners they should be a selling point, not a secret. If you're reticent to reveal how you structured the raise, that likely points to flaws that you should address.

• Distribution is valuable, but so is transparency. It is much easier to maintain trust than to rebuild it following a PR fumble. Comms deserves equal prioritization alongside cap tables.

Conclusion

I have done my best to summarize the events surrounding the launch of Faircaster and the $fair token, but there may be missing details or context from the above analysis. Please do your own research and form your own conclusions.

I wish @luc and everyone else involved with Faircaster the very best going forward. Despite some stumbles with the launch, I do not believe that they had any bad intentions and will be following the project closely.

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.

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).

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

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.

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

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.