A number of projects have launched a points system in the last few months, it has become a way to attract liquidity to their dapps or their chains. Many airdrop farmers take it as a signal for an upcoming airdrop which is not always the case. Lately, the game has shifted from farmers farming the projects to the projects farming the farmers to their advantage.
The playbook is simple and very effective
- Launch a points/XP/referrals system
- Let the airdrop farmers come to you
- Run the programs for several months or even years
- No need to make any commitment for any future airdrop
- Drop some useless off-chain points or XP
I was watching all this and simply couldn't resist when @lens posted about points, so I created a simple token on base network and made this post about it.
I made a mistake while typing the second line about distribution, I was supposed to write "Next 9 people get 1 billion POINTS each" but instead I wrote "Next 9 people will get 10 billion POINTS each". I even sent those POINTS to the people who commented on my post.
I saw a lot of interest from everyone for a meme coin on lens, @jessyjeanne immediately created a TG chat and we started discussing about the token. @dydymoon, @nelsonrodmar, @0xzelda, @punkess, @alexhirsu and @mesutgulecen also joined the TG channel. @dydymoon told us that the someone already launched a token called POINTS on farcaster and we should not use the same name. So, we started thinking of another name, pointless came to my mind immediately and we created a poll on lens to decide on the name.
People seemed to like the name pointless as it had some fun element to it. Then I started looking to redeploy the token with the new name, I decided to drop the token to everyone with a lens handle. I was figuring out everything as we go, how to take a snapshot, how to distribute token to 125K wallets. I thought of creating a claim site but that would take some time to build, so I decided to just send the token to everyone. I tried a number of tools to take a snapshot and finally got this tool to work the way I wanted.
I figured out that the OpenZeppelin ERC-20 standard token contract was the best suited as it was supported across all platforms and was secure as well. So, I created the token using OpenZeppelin token contract. I didn't have much experience with solidity before, so I just deployed it on base using remix IDE.
Then I started looking for a tool to distribute the token to 125K wallets. I tried a number of tools and the one tool that seemed to work gave me the following estimate lol; 55 ETH to distribute the token
I started looking for another tool and found this tool which had a VIP plan for 1 matic for a day and I can make unlimited transactions using the tool. So, I decided to deploy pointless to polygon which was a good decision because lens is also on polygon but I wasn't thinking that far anyway.
I created the distribution csv with 125K addresses and their allocations and just dumped that csv into the tool which obviously barfed at that big file. I tried to break it up into 2 files, nope, 4 files, nope, 10 files, nope, 20 files, nope. I got down to 2000 addresses per file but it still didn't work, I reached out to their support and they said they have ever only tested with 200 addresses in one batch. I tried 500 addresses in the first batch and the transaction got stuck, I waited for it to go through for 5 minutes but no, so I decided to replace that transaction with another one with the same nonce. I sent another transaction and it seemed to have worked. I thought I would go and check a few addresses to see if the tokens showed up there but I saw 2X tokens on all the addresses. I had messed up the first batch lol. I was thinking how do I fix that? The only way was to redeploy the token and just forget about the previous one lol
So, I created a second pointless token and started running the batches again. I figured out that I need to set the gas fee to "Aggressive" on each transaction for it to go through as quick as possible. It still takes 15 full seconds on polygon for a transaction to confirm lol
The first batch was sent, I tried using 600 addresses in the next batch, that was sent too, next I tried 700 addresses in one batch, that was sent too, I tried 800 next, nope, it failed, I tried 750 in the next batch, sent, so I finally figured out that I could send a max of 778 addresses in one batch. I was continuously pumping transactions for 6 hours to finish the distribution. Some of the transactions would take longer to confirm or get stuck and I made one mistake where I sent the batch twice, so a few people (around 770) got 10M pointless rather than 5M pointless each.
The distribution was done and I made another post to announce that but some people already saw the pointless token dropped to their address and I saw some comments about it.
I was relieved that I have completed the distribution, I launched a pointless meme competition right afterwards. I made a number of memes myself too lol. It was so much fun that day.
I didn't intent to add liquidity but wanted the community to take a lead. @sidetalker created a pool with 2 matic and I felt obliged to add to that pool, I started with 200 matic and pointless started trading. People started dumping their 5M pointless for ~5matic and everyone seemed to be happy about it.
Alex Hirsu suggested we create a partyDAO and raise funds by selling DAO memberships. So, I created a partyDAO for pointless and used the default membership price of $5.75 per memership. A few people joined the pointless DAO. I was thinking for rewarding DAO members with 20M pointless tokens each for each membership minted which was around $15 at that time. We have now deprecated the pointless partDAO in favor of snapshot so that all pointless token holders can participate in the governance when we need to take serious decisions.
I knew the liquidity was very low, so decided to add 600 matic more to the pool after a couple of days and then came the big rug. Someone who got 10B pointless just dumped it all and drained the pool completely, he couldn't sell all of his pointless. I was a bit upset and DMed him but found his response funny.
pointless had crashed 100%, there was some buying but the liquidity was around $20. I added some more liquidity to keep it going but then I thought about the reward for DAO, 20M pointless was nothing at that price so I decided to increase it to 1B pointless for each DAO membership.
@punkess created a lens handle for pointless but I wasn't able to use it because it was just a handle and I needed to create a profile as well to use it. We created @pointless_wtf on X as well and did a pointless christmas giveaway too.
@punkess suggested we enable pointless for paid collects and tipping on lens and create a utility for the token. I liked the idea but didn't know how to do it. I checked the lens source code on github and figured out that the lens protocol maintained a whitelist at the contract level. I misread the contract code, probably it was lens v1 code where only the governance address can run the contract to whitelist a token for paid collects. So, I created an LIP to whitelist pointless on the lens protocol level. @paulburke responded on the LIP that token whitelisting was permissionless and anyone could run the contract code to whitelist a token and he did that for pointless.
So, pointless was whitelisted for paid collects on the lens protocol level but I soon realized that the frontends maintained their own whitelists. So, I had to go and raise pull requests for each frontend if it was OSS or request to the devs to whitelist pointless. I was checking each frontend whether they allowed pointless and I found that @Kaira was not maintaining a separate whitelist. So, it was possible to create posts collectible with pointless on the @kaira frontend. I made an announcement about that on lens. It was day when new lens invites were given out. I asked @zkjew to send me an invite to create a profile for pointless and @pointless was born on the same day.
I was happy about it but then came the surprise that I least expected, $pointless went up 3000% overnight, the LP was at 3K with 15K traded in 24 hours. $pointless started getting attention. The TG channel became active again and @dydymoon suggested we rebrand pointless to align better with the lens garden theme.
So, $pointless was rebranded. A number of bot accounts also woke up and started selling $pointless aggressively. I too realized that out of 125K lens profiles, only 5-10K were active and there were some sybil accounts that got the aidrop from a number of addresses. These sybils and their bots wake up and start selling 5M pointless airdrop whenever $pointless is trending on DexScreener with good volumes.
After about 9 days, @dankshard noticed that @hey too whitelisted $pointless. So, now it was possible to use $pointless for paid collects on @hey too. Because @hey doesn't maintain a separate whitelist for paid collects and tipping, so it was possible to use $pointless for tipping as well. Later I realized that it was possible to use $pointless for super follows as well on both @hey and @kaira.
I was checking other frontends too to see if they supported $pointless. I tried @fireflyapp and found another nice feature. The feature is the ability to create a LuckyDrop for your followers whereby you can allow your followers to claim a fixed amount of tokens by interacting with your posts.
So, here we are, @punkess likes to call it HFSP - have fun staying poor coin and I say I have programmed $pointless to get rugged repeatedly because of the sybils that got the airdrop. There is hopium in the air for $pointless and we are purging those bots with every pump, 1000s of them at a time. The core contributors are trying to find creative ways to increase liquidity for $pointless. Community members are coming forward to add liquidity(read about @papajams 20 day $pointless experiment here). $pointless price may be pointless at the moment but it will continue to be a fun community coin. So, have some pointless fun staying poor getting rich steady lads.
Update: $bonsai has been launched on lens and it has taken the lens meme game to the next level. $pointless can claim victory here
