In this post I will attempt to look into the realities of anonymous deployment, community contributions, narratives and speculation of the meme token stratosphere, in particular , a new meme named COCO.
Let me introduce you to it. The subject is a pepe turned crocodile. His name is Coco. Hundreds of artists have joined in the efforts to making the character fulfill it’s destiny, and thousands of memes from super simple, to artistic renditions have appeared since coco was born on July 20, 2023.
The intention of the creator, a gentleman living in Europe named Kero, was to create the meme. He publicly detailed his lack of desire to create a currency. Needless to say, anonymous guys who extract value from gambling addicts flocked to the meme, approached him, and decided to make a currency on their own, in a somewhat conspicuous way which initially earned Kero’s trust.
Anonymous Deployment
Lets talk about what an anonymous deployment is:
Someone sends funds to an address from a cex wallet. This obscures the trail of previous money. They deploy a smart contract with the token and then they create a uniswap pool. Then they fund the pool with one eth and the (most of the) supply of the token.
The next step is where it gets interesting. Thousands of bots watch the “uniswap pool spawning address” and as a result they automatically buy large amounts of tokens near immediately. The way this occurs is that these people have an operational ETH node, which parses all of the transactions in real time using an indexer (I wrote one of these programs myself) then they tie this together with some sort of system to ape in based on their personalized criteria.
What I suspect happens during this process is the anonymous deployer also provides many market making services and broadcasts a bunch of these buy transactions in the first block(s) of the pools issuance. The order of purchase can be guaranteed via using services that provide MEV and block stacking and such. But since the addresses are all spawned separately, the result is a large portion of the supply is held secretly by the deployer, which then is sold off in phases as the initial spike peaks and wanes through subsequent cycles until the token is pretty much dead.
Then on top of it maybe during the process a couple other accounts are spawned to gain investor confidence. (ala “marketing wallet”)
During this process people get involved and most get turned off as the price wanes and they write it off to another pump and dump.
Its an algorithm. Invest this much, get some things going on the socials, extract value, reduce position until gone. Save some funds for either a moonbag or rugpull later.
But during this process the anonymous deployer must remain somewhat active in order to spawn confidence in the issued token.
A couple avenues out from here: Should the token actually get traction this type of deployment isn’t ideal because of the fact that the deployer is simply extracting liquidity until its gone. But the traction causes the token to become more of an asset. Then this “Anonymous Deployer” must decide if he wants to remain anonymous, or stay committed to something he really doesn't have time for. That’s when telegram groups and twitter handles start to disappear.
Ive witnessed this a few times myself, and to me its just business. the shady part comes along when the deployer thinks to himself, “I can redeploy this using some whales I know and outweigh the previous pool by throwing a higher magnitude of funds to it, and increase the EV and revenue of the currency altogether.” Further, they can damage the reputation of the existing currency in order to kill it dead by harassing community members and spreading fud in a way that turns people off. Importantly, there is still a somewhat minimal but existing amount of liability if they stay committed to the project as scrutiny for whatever will end in countless dm’s from people trying to DYOR. So the remaining liability is offloaded by deleting the handle and killing the market.
Whats left is a lot of tokens in bagholders hands with no value.
For the record I am not talking about rugpull tokens here which are completely different strategies where vulnerabilities are installed into the smart contract, and then exploited when the perpetrator wishes to drain the eth out of the pools he created.
Public Deployment
Compared to anonymous deployment, public deployment is a more transparent approach to issuing a token wherein the actor deploying the contract is known. This is usually detectable because the wallet which makes the smart contract has a history, or connected wallets also have a history. And a lot of times you can see the kind of money the person has access to by following the transactions.
The deployer is a known person, operating with their full name and public personality. (in this case its probably a team, but someone is assuming responsibility for the token.) With a lot of cases there has been insider deals to raise funds to begin building the project and these people receive tokens in return for their early investment.
These investors usually know the deployer personally.
Many things can happen regarding direction with these public deployments and its kind of out of scope for this article, so I’ll just bullet point it:
- Liability is super high, especially if the product is targeting FATF friendly countries.
- These owners are taking on significant risk being public about their activities including telling people where their office is and other personal info, during public events etc. (For instance there was a person making death threats to Jun of Omise Go at one point — scary stuff)
- In some public deployments, if the scale is there, for instance Tether or Coinbase chain, this type of deployment is necessary.
- If the scale of the project is small, these liabilities are indefensible should legal issues come up and thats why we have anonymous deployers.
So to sum this part of the exercise up, we pretty much have anonymous deployers rolling out things that are small time and not intended to scale, and then we have public facing deployers who show their face to inspire confidence with investors.
The narrative to this point is that the keyword to consider is liability. One must consider liability when issuing these tokens or they risk getting into waters they are not able to navigate and its that simple. So we have an impetus for anonymous deployment.
Im going to shift the narrative now to COCO because everybody loves the coco.
In the previous anonymous deployment section, I detailed pretty much exactly what happened with the COCO eth based currency. Except these anon guys don’t really like wrenches, and Kero was able to successfully (and brilliantly) throw some real wrenches into the plan.
Basically the intention with COCO before any shitcoiners were around was to create a meme, the target market being the pepe ecosystem. What is that? Well you have to understand who Pepe is, im not going to sweat the details there, but did you know that there was an ecosystem on the bitcoin blockchain for pepes as early as 2016? These “Rare Pepes” were the earliest NFT projects and became of great value recently when the Pepe eth token blew up at the top of the last market cycle. The original rare pepe card is going for almost 7 bitcoin at the time of this writing.
Unlike ordinals, the xcp assets are a lot older and an original representation of bitcoin NFT’s, where a link to a json file is stored in the text field of a bitcoin transaction. Then the xcp chain holds and verifies the assets and information based on bitcoin transactions. Sounds kind of like ordinals, except its also been around since 2016. The way it works is you allocate an address with some xcp assets and state a price you are willing to accept for it, and these addresses are known as dispensers, where you put bitcoin in the machine and out comes and xcp asset.
So, during the time of the anonymous deployment of the COCO token on eth, Kero was able to get rarecoco.wtf up and rolling in rapid response.
The COCO currency, the dirty details
As the anonymous deployer noticed what was happening he immediately started taking action to remove references to the rarecocos from the currency, as the liquidity was clearly out of scope from his holdings and extraction abilities. I was given admin rights to the early coco telegram but I was told to avoid any interactions with the rarecoco.wtf in the group. And we all just ignored him because the value of the meme itself is by far of a larger scale than an anonymously deployed shitcoin, and people wanted to see the memes.
So ultimately, he disappeared. A single user began fudding like no other and while I can see his arguments, its like if someone takes on the personal role of fudding like that you must consider any other objectives he may have. Then a couple new accounts showed up and started fudding too, all of which I kind of believe that was an attempt by the anon guy to shut down the token.
Can you call this a rugpull at this point? I don’t know because it just sounds like an ordinary day at the shitcoin factory. I dont like drama, it repels me. We are an advanced civilization and while there are opposing opinions in the world, the proper way to opine is via discussion and not toxicity, which when I see that I also call bullshit. Lets just keep to the facts.
Ultimately I feel like the original deployer of this currency has pretty much played his hand. (and probably resents the bad decisions to fade coco) There are some wallets left that were around near the beginning, (data in a minute) but ultimately my opinion is that the guy has marked it dead and moved along. There are a couple events on the shitcoin calendar, but to be realistic, the amounts involved are somewhat insignificant, when compared to the overall value of the COCO meme itself.
Data: The thing that says it all.
At this point, we have to turn to the data, to see what exactly is going on with the token. Lets look at some of the wallets in the top ten wallets to date. But first, lets acknowledge that holders often split their whale sized assets into smaller batches to obscure their total holdings.
#1 105 T: This is the uniswap pool. Thats a quarter of the supply. Its backed by 5.38 ETH at this writing. It puts the current market cap at 34k since it is the only place being sold. The overall value of the asset will be represented by the balance of eth in that pool. (until v3 pools come along)
#2 28.5 T This is the source of any and all fud at this moment which is actually trivial considering the circumstance and allocations here. It is a trust swap wallet where the “Marketing Tokens” will be unlocked within the next thirty days:
14T due to unlock Sunday, September 24, 2023 6:46:33
will be withdrawn to cocomarketing.eth
14T due to unlock Wednesday, August 23, 2023 7:49:37 PM
will be withdrawan to cococexwallet.eth
#6 12.4 T this is tokens owned by the burn address. In the process of showing his support / or at least self indemnification of liability, Kero burned these tokens, which he paid for with his own eth early in the story of coco.
I have a program that, using the indexer I built allows me to analyze the earliest wallets in the uniswap pool. The result is interesting. Out of the first 214 wallets to interact with the uniswap pool, the total of existing balances for those wallets in particular is 41 Trillion, which is less than ten percent of the supply.
Another takeaway from early uniswap pool analysis is that out of the first 214 wallets to interact with the pool, 191 of them have closed their positions. This is further confirmation to me that most of the earlier market makers have already played their hands and closed out. Further analysis of these wallets could determine which ones are still actively trading COCO, or which ones are inactive stashes of the token. (Maybe I’ll analyze that later but I doubt it.) The result gist on github are these addresses, ranked by balance, feel free to browse the trading history of each, and feel free to single them out and ask questions, I’m all ears.
Although the current total of wallet holders is 562, there are an amount of accounts with lets say less than 5 COCO, which is basically dust. Over 5? There are 381 wallets with balance. To shake some trees earlier I orchestrated an airdrop to 100 holders, which leaves about 280 people who actually went to the uniswap pool and paid their own money to allocate the token, and to this day have not sold.
Check out this awesome tune someone put out — HOT
Summary
Y though? Here is where I will begin to speculate. The memes brought forth by the coco community are amazing. You can’t go to rarecoco.eth and look through series 1 and not acknowledge that there are at least as many artists as there are cards. And the artists are very talented, big name digital artists who participated in projects as early as the rarepepe project back in 2016.
Before the anonymous deployer removed the original telegram group, I was able to recover about 600 meme images and videos created by the community, because well, I saw it coming. Another member, Godder, has made efforts to create a replacement for the telegram and twitter handles.
Eth users have a choice if they want to be a part of the COCO story. They can sell their eth for bitcoin and buy into the rarecoco.wtf ecosystem, or they can speculate on the currency that has been created by the anonymous developers. Either avenue has pros and cons.
For the sake of speculation, I feel as if time will heal any wounds related to the currency in its current embodiment, and what we have here is a currency that has been deployed anonymously but has a strong community of support and also a powerhouse for meme generation.
Meme coins typically peak at market tops, and at that point I think people will have long forgot the drama that ensued in that last couple weeks, as parties fought for intellectual property. (which ironically, there is none)
Rare Coco: rarecoco.wtf
Kero on twitter: twitter.com/KeroNFTs
Community Twitter: twitter.com/thecocoethtoken
Community Telegram: t.me/TheCocoEthToken
Rare Coco Telegram: t.me/OFFICIALRARECOCO
Eth contract Address: 0xE6DBeAdD1823B0BCfEB27792500b71e510AF55B3
Chart: On Dextools
Personal disclosures:
I hold almost 20 Trillion COCO on eth. a quote from a friend: “I dont plan to sell until I can buy an island”. It costed me a lot and yes I am defending my ass(et).
My primary objective with the COCO token is to not let it die, by maintaining a strong community to eliminate copycats.
A secondary objective is to keep a good strong user count and mentor users who want to contribute to the ecosystem.
Third, I will act as a human and cool people off when they get frustrated when number dont go up after 12 hours or otherwise need psychological support.
