FLOKI'S EARLY DAYS
Floki's start can be traced to the following Elon Musk tweet on June 25, 2021:
nitter.app/elonmusk/status/…
Shortly after, a developer launched the initial "Floki" token. This developer claimed that the token has a 10% tax, 5% of which goes to holders as reflections and 5% of which goes to a "dev wallet" to develop and grow the project.
It didn’t take long before the community realized that there were two problems with this token, however:
1. The contract was perpetually inflationary, and the reflections users were getting was due to new supply being minted. It was so bad that the token supply increased 14-fold in less than two weeks.
2. 100 percent of the 10% tax on the token was going to the dev’s wallet. Worse still, the dev refused to use these funds to develop the project and was spending it all.
At this point, I was just a Floki holder. Albeit one with a following on Twitter; I had written about "Floki" and my thesis for its long-term potential. I had clear disclosures in my thread about the dev's interactions and made it clear that people could lose 100% of their funds.
After seeing these red flags, and as someone who believed in the project’s long term potential, I messaged the dev and asked him to fix these bugs and not disappoint the community. He ignored me. I then messaged UniswapDetective (UniswapD) who was the most high profile holder of the token at the time and had demonstrated good knowledge of crypto/DeFi through his threads prior to that time. I alerted him about the red flags and suggested a community takeover to save the project.
He led this takeover and brought on a dev named "Marvin" to relaunch the project.
At the time UniswapD had brought on a group of people who contributed funds to provide LP towards this revival. I was in this group, as was Petabyte. This was the first attempt at a revival.
I repeatedly requested that a multisig be used for these funds owing to the behavior of the first dev. My entreaties fell on deaf ears. I privately messaged Petabyte to use his influence to push for a multisig but he didn’t and basically said he trusted UniswapD and that’s enough; this was the general sentiment among the community admins trying to pull off the first revival.
There were a lot of red flags with Marvin-led relaunch attempt:
1. My adamant proposal to use a multisig for the relaunch funds was ignored.
2. Marvin had no online footprint whatsoever and everyone trusted him “because UniswapD trusted him”.
3. I opposed the idea of asking people to send tokens to a swap wallet for liquidity extraction and suggested using our own funds (as community admins) for the relaunch and LP, airdropping users based on a snapshot, and getting reimbursed after the project's success. This was ignored, and the message asking people to send their tokens to a swap wallet was put out while I slept. This swap wallet also wasn’t a multisig. The fact that many people were sending tokens to a swap wallet aggravated the inflation bug and it was later realized that the bug made it impossible to swap the tokens anyway.
4. Hours before the first relaunch attempt, Marvin proposed a deviation from what UniswapD had communicated to the rest of the team. Specifically, he suggested dumping the tokens people had sent in for the swap in phases and urging the community to repurchase tokens in order to “extract more liquidity”. This was very dangerous in light of the above red flags and would have been catastrophic for the project. I opposed this but was mostly a lone voice.
Petabyte was initially in favor of this dangerous plan, until I DM’d him the following:
In essence, Petabyte ignored my warnings about the red flags. Then Marvin rugged the funds and disappeared, and I woke up to the following message from Petabyte:
Here is the voice message from Petabyte in the above chat:
drive.google.com/file/d/1qMJ…
TLDR: He concluded that "It's game over" for Floki after Marvin rugged.
Since I had noticed the red flags with Marvin (and warned repeatedly about it, but was ignored), I had established contact with another dev
@themoontography as a backup plan.
So when I woke up to see the above messages from Petabyte and messages from others after Mavin rugged, I sent Moontography the following emergency message:
Moontography got to work immediately and helped launch the new contract which was successful.
At this point, Marvin had rugged 100% of the funds UniswapD, Petabyte, myself, and others contributed to provide LP for the first relaunch. Many also had completely given up on the idea of there being a Floki again, since it had rugged twice at the time.
I liquidated the majority of my liquid crypto holdings at the time, paid off Moontography for his dev work, and provided 100 PERCENT of the funds for the relaunch LP.
Here’s my chat with
@AstrologyCrypto at the time, where I provided details of the exact tokens I liquidated and how the funds came to be:
Below is the blockchain TX I used to add initial LP for the successful relaunch:
etherscan.io/tx/0x27c6ed1549…
(cont'd)