A token launch with $3M behind it

Our client, whom we do not name here, raised $2M from a major publicly traded New York hedge fund and a further $1M from friends and family. Matthew Jurenka was the lead developer. He wrote the contracts, ran the audit, built a vault holding about $1M of wrapped Bitcoin, and ran the launch on Ethereum mainnet.

$62Mof DEX volume, $40M of it in the first 24 hours.

$317Mpeak fully diluted valuation, nine minutes after the first trade.

1,403wallets traded on day one, across 4,739 swaps.

$3Mraised before launch.

One engineer, three deliverables

The client had a thesis, the capital to back it and a date. They needed a token that would stand up to an audit, a vault that gave the token a floor in Bitcoin, and a launch that did not go wrong in public. We owned all three.

What we built

The token: An OpenZeppelin ERC-20, capped at one billion and burnable. No owner, no mint function, no transfer tax, no blacklist. The verified source on Etherscan matches the deployed bytecode exactly. A token with nothing hidden in it is easier to audit and easier for a market to trust.
The vault: A contract holding about $1M of wrapped Bitcoin. The only way to take Bitcoin out is to burn the token, so every redemption permanently shrinks the supply. Since launch, holders have burned more than half of it.
The audit: We scoped the audit, worked through the auditors' findings as they came in, and shipped the fixes before launch. The client never had to translate between the auditors and the code.

Launch day

The token was deployed on 14 August 2024. Six days later, at 01:20 UTC on 20 August, the first trade went through a Uniswap V3 pool paired with USDC. A smaller pool paired with ETH opened eight minutes later.

Elapsed: T+24:00
Swaps: 4739
Buys / sells: 2919 / 1820
Wallets: 1403
Volume: $39.75M
Last price: 4.29× open

Scrub the day

Volume-weighted average price in black; each dot is one swap, blue for buys and orange for sells, sized by its dollar value. Both pools are included: the main USDC pool and a smaller ETH pool, with ETH at that day's $2,620. 65 trades between 7 and 19 minutes in, bots working the thin ETH pool as it opened, are above the scale and drawn as ticks at the top. Time runs on a square-root scale so the first hour has room.

The same data as a table, by hour

Hour	Swaps	Buys	Sells	New wallets	Volume	Avg price
0	2875	1939	936	1060	$24.27M	5.73×
1	492	260	232	83	$3.59M	8.00×
2	184	107	77	43	$1.36M	8.64×
3	73	31	42	13	$0.51M	8.32×
4	78	35	43	7	$0.79M	7.53×
5	143	77	66	21	$1.22M	6.62×
6	67	37	30	16	$0.58M	6.95×
7	133	96	37	49	$1.10M	7.78×
8	20	11	9	6	$0.08M	8.16×
9	35	13	22	8	$0.13M	8.15×
10	53	6	47	1	$0.52M	7.47×
11	14	3	11	0	$0.03M	6.96×
12	40	16	24	6	$0.62M	6.35×
13	138	84	54	17	$1.17M	5.57×
14	154	98	56	32	$1.69M	4.56×
15	82	31	51	10	$1.21M	4.83×
16	40	30	10	10	$0.29M	4.51×
17	25	11	14	2	$0.23M	4.38×
18	25	16	9	9	$0.13M	4.36×
19	14	1	13	1	$0.07M	4.31×
20	13	5	8	3	$0.02M	4.28×
21	8	0	8	0	$0.01M	4.23×
22	12	2	10	1	$0.05M	4.18×
23	21	10	11	5	$0.08M	4.21×

First hour: The opening trade was a $1M buy at an average of $0.027. Buyers kept coming: within the hour $24M had changed hands, more than half of the whole day, and the price was trading around $0.22, eight times the opening trade.
First 24 hours: 4,739 swaps, 2,919 buys and 1,820 sells, sent from 1,403 distinct wallets. $39.8M changed hands, $38.3M of it in the USDC pool. The price held between $0.18 and $0.24 for the next eleven hours, then eased to about $0.115 by the end of the day.
Valuation: At one billion tokens, the pool price peaked at $0.317 nine minutes after the first trade, a fully diluted valuation of $317M. It stayed above $200M for most of the first six hours, and closed the day near $115M. Third-party coverage described a market cap that went from zero to over $100M in a day.
After day one: Trading kept going. Volume reached $44.7M by the end of the first week and $61.1M by the end of the first month, and has come to $61.9M over the token's life.

How we counted

Every figure on this page comes from the chain. We traced all 14,595 of the token's transfers to find every pool that ever held it: two Uniswap V3 pools, one against USDC and one against ETH, and a Uniswap V2 pair that barely traded. We read every swap event from all three, counted wallets by the address that sent each transaction, converted ETH to dollars with Coinbase's daily candles, and computed the valuation as the USDC pool's price after each swap times the capped supply; the thin ETH pool's bot prints in the first minutes are left out. Volume on centralised exchanges is not included. We quote fully diluted valuation rather than market cap because the capped supply is a number nobody can argue with.

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