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While Pump.fun shattered records and set the standard for meme coin creation, it has glaring flaws. Token Mill aims to fix these problems, and add additional functionality.
This piece is a guest post by Blocmates. Blocmates is an invaluable crypto news and educational resource that offers clarity in the often complicated and jargon-filled crypto space. In this article, Blocmate’s Gaz introduces Token Mill, a much needed competitor to Pump.fun.
What is LFJ’s Token Mill? A Beginner’s Guide
Fundamentals-first crypto traders are pulling their hair out and grinding their teeth off with copium as the entire market becomes a glorious shitcoin casino.
While many seeth away on the sidelines, continuing to midcurve their way through the madness, some have made the pivot and taken note of a great Soros saying: “When I see a bubble forming, I rush in to buy, adding fuel to the fire.”
Wise words.
Much of this current meme coin mania has been sent into the stratosphere by platforms like Pump.fun that quickly managed to find elite product market fit and smash all historical revenue records.
Pump.fun’s $100 million in revenue in just 217 days made it the fastest-growing application in the history of crypto, and up-only stats like this are bound to attract some competitors.
Source: Defillama
In August, Justin Sun launched Sunpump, the first fair-launch meme platform on the Tron network, as a direct competitor to Pump.fun.
The flagship Tron meme, $SUNDOG, pumped hard but has since pulled back to just north of a $200 million market cap at the time of writing.
Despite the Tron network seeing some serious increases in user activity and revenue as a possible result of Justin’s efforts, Sunpump has not come close to outperforming the venerable Pump.fun.
It is clear the degenerates call Solana home.
Source: DefiLlama
So what is Token Mill?
Around the same time that Justin Sun launched Sunpump, another platform was brewing with the same intention of creating competition for the seemingly unstoppable Pump.fun.
@cryptofishx, co-founder of the Trader Joe (LFJ) platform, announced the juicy details on the 23rd of August in the tweet below.
The concept was simple: give creators more control over their tokens, minimize the chances of snipers gobbling up all the supply, and prevent rugs from wrecking the hopefuls who ape in with dreams of lambos and super yachts.
With the Token Mill platform now live on Solana and the potential to make a huge dent in the token creation world, it’s probably worth a humble ape’s time to read on and find out what this new protocol is all about.
The ins and outs of Token Mill
Token Mill is a Bonding Curve Automated Market Maker (BCAMM) that allows its users to create new tokens, lock tokens, and trade them. It aims to address the issues that are currently rife in the shitcoin casino.
Issues such as honeypots, transfer taxes, unrestricted minting, and the extra layer of research that we left-curved, redacted gamblers must do to protect ourselves in speed-running to financial freedom and firing our bosses.
One of the major selling points of this new platform is the ability for token creators to design the parameters of their tokens with a high level of flexibility, which opens up a world of possibilities for new launch concepts.
To launch a token on Token Mill, creators will follow a series of steps:
- Create the token from a template
- Customize the bonding curve to their requirements
- Transfer the ownership of the token
- Send tokens to the bonding curve
- Lock the initial purchased tokens for the creator
- Enable trading of the token
Let’s take a closer look.
What are the Token Mill templates?
Token Mill provides a range of secure and audited token templates for creators to begin the launch process.
This gives everyone involved a sense of security and trust that the contract does not contain dodgy code that will leave them high and dry when the chart nukes to zero in a single one-minute candle.
Having these templates means that all involved can rely on the security of the underlying contract and rest assured that any vesting periods or locks will play out exactly as intended.
The standard token templates will be ERC-20 and have a range of properties, including immutable max supply, fully minted at creation, 6 decimals, and basic user inputs like token name, supply, and the token owner’s address.
The token creator can also decide on any vesting periods and unlock cliffs that might apply.
This leaves more time for creators to focus on the other flexible aspects of the tokenomics involved in creating a coin worthy of Murad’s list.
Bonding curves
Anyone who has spent any time in the Pump.fun trenches probably has a half decent understanding of what bonding curves are and the role that they play in the launch process.
If not, then the simple way to understand a bonding curve is as a formula that dictates the price of the token at a certain circulating supply. In other words, how much does the price move as more tokens come onto the market.
Token Mill puts its own spin on bonding curves and by doing so gives more power to the token creator and an added amount of safety to the degens who pile in.
Because tokens cannot be pre-minted before the trading begins, token creators can only purchase part of the initial supply and the cost of doing so is determined by the price point on the bonding curve.
This mechanism has been put in place to reduce the amount of spam launches we have seen on other platforms in the past months.
The flexibility of Token Mill’s bonding curves allows for the use of any pricing function as long as the successive points along the curve are increasing.
This means that the token creator themselves can define the curve as they wish by choosing the size of price points along the curve.
In other words, the larger each price point defined by the creator, the more accurate the curve is but more gas will be needed to fill each point along the curve.
Token Mill recommends that a price point size of 10 is more than enough to create an accurate pricing function, as seen in the diagram below.
As the demand for tokens rises the relationship between the price-capital supply curve dictates how many tokens are released as price goes up. The parameters of this relationship can also be set by the token creator and decide how sensitive the price of the token is in comparison to the demand.
Yes I know, this all seems a bit confusing for the average degen who just wants to launch a shitcoin and have a laugh with their mates.
For this reason, Token Mill has a number of generic function templates that can be customized at will by the creator.
These templates give the options of linear, quadratic, exponential, power and logarithmic price points and therefore provide a huge degree of flexibility to token builders to get as creative as they can imagine with their tokenomics.
Creators can also define the difference between their tokens’ bid and ask prices and dictate how much of the tokens purchased (ask price) are sent to the bonding curve (bid price).
This is known as the bid and ask curve.
For all the nerds out there a full overview of all the mathematical wizardry behind these bonding curve formulas can be found in the Token Mill Whitepaper. It’s probably worth getting your head around if you intend on creating the next 10,000x shitter.
Token Mill’s bonus features
On top of all the flexibility that comes with the token templates and bonding curves, users can also choose from a variety of additional bonus features that might make the difference between reaching escape velocity or disappearing into the depths of the Dexscreener graveyard, never to be seen again.
Fees
With the concept of spreads between the bid and ask price fresh in our minds it makes sense to cover how purchase fees are decided by the creator.
Simply put the purchase fee is the spread between the bid and the ask. It’s that simple.
What is particularly cool is the variety of ways these fees can be distributed, which leads us into the next couple of additional features that creators can implement into their token recipes if they wish to do so.
Staking
Yes, token creators can opt to add staking functions to their tokens and this includes the staking of locked tokens.
Again staking allows for maximum flexibility in design and the percentage of fees allocated to stakers is decided by the token creator.
The fees allocated as rewards to stakers are funneled to them continuously and can be claimed in real time. No vesting period or lock-ups apply to staked tokens, so stakers can un-stake and stake at will.
Referrals
What would a shitcoin casino be without the ability to shill to your friends and family? There is truly nothing so brilliantly degenerate as using Grandma as exit liquidity.
Token Mill allows for the option of referral programs to be added as an extra incentive layer so that your loyal army of holders can spam the replies and earn themselves a pretty penny for doing so.
Any token holder can be a referrer and the process is as simple as connecting your wallet and generating the referral codes. Once armed with the codes these referrers will earn themselves 50% of platform fees which equates to 10% of total fees.
How to create a token on Token Mill
We arrive at the point you’ve all been waiting for (or skipped to): how to launch the next billion-dollar meme coin and retire your entire bloodline for generations to come.
There are two options here depending on your technical level, patience and needs.
Mill-Tard mode
For those who just want to send a token live as quickly as possible and begin spamming referral codes across the worldwide web, Token Mill provides a left-curve friendly Mill-Tard mode.
In Mill-Tard mode a creator doesn’t need to understand the complicated mathematical formulas involved in designing the perfect bonding curve.
Simply punch in the URLs to all your socials, give it a name and a description and fire it off straight into the trenches.
Creators will need to make an initial purchase of tokens and decide their cliff and vesting periods but that’s not exactly rocket science.
Mill-Brain mode
For those right-curvers out there Token Mill has the sophisticated Mill-Brain mode.
Mill-Brain mode allows creators to set the parameters for their bonding curve either based on the provided templates or tweak them to their hearts’ content.
Fully customizable curve parameters are accompanied by customizable fee components that enable the creator to set up their token in a way that they think will enable the cult-like following that all the best tokens require to reach their maximal potential.
For a full overview and a more in-depth breakdown of the launch process jump into the Token Mill docs and begin your journey to meme coin promised land right away.
Closing thoughts on Token Mill
If there is one thing we can probably all agree on it’s that there are just so many spammy, rug, honeypot coins hitting the market these days and navigating the trenches has become a real minefield.
Long gone are the days of a few protocols to place your bets on and the sheer amount of tokens in existence is nothing short of mind blowing.
At one point Pump.fun was averaging 13,450 token launches per day, which is nothing short of ridiculous. Luckily or unluckily, 98% of these tokens never complete their bonding curve process and actually launch onto Raydium.
Token Mill looks to improve the state of the shitcoin market by introducing the mentioned mechanisms to make it a safer place for all.
The customizable features of the platform make it a place that could be used for more than just memes and one should probably keep an eye out for tokens that have slightly more utility coming to fruition on there.
On this point it is worth mentioning that tokens launched on Token Mill will be fully defi compatible, opening up a world of opportunity outside of just number go up.
Taking on a first mover like Pump.fun is no easy challenge and metrics have shown a slight slowdown in token launches across the board over the past few weeks so Token Mill may be somewhat late to the party.
Time will tell if they can find product market fit and steal some of Pump.fun’s revenue share.
As with any sector, competition is always a healthy thing and the fact that Token Mill has a very strong team in a very strong niche makes them one to keep a close eye on.