Story Behind $SGT Launch
Everything you need to know in the past 24 hours during the SGT launch
Thank you all Squidos for joining us in the SGT (3,3) launch on 31st Oct. Your support is unbelievable and we are grateful to have such an amazing community.
We have received concerns about the $SGT liquidity pool on BabySwap and the initial mint price of $SGT in the launching process. Such as:
- Why had the token and protocol contract addresses, as well as the website not been released before launch, though they were created hours ahead?
- Is it true the team set up the pool hours before launch for inside trading to gain profit?
- Why the initial mint price was not 3 USDT as you stated in the announcement?
- Are there any pre-minted SGT tokens and if so, who owns them?
In this article, the team will stay transparent and tell you what exactly happened in the past 24 hours during the SGT launch.
Q1. Why had the token and protocol contract addresses, as well as the website not been released before launch, though they were created hours ahead?
Yes, the contracts were created hours before the launching time, as there are lots of debug settings to be managed, just to make sure that the launch will start at the exact time as released. Also, the SGT needs an initial liquidity pool on Babyswap to have the SGT/USDT LP contract address.
The token address, LP and main contract addresses are inter-connected. That’s why, the token’s contract, the LP on Babyswap and the main protocol contracts have to be deployed together.
We did not release those contract addresses, as well as the website to the public before launch. The intention is, on one hand, to prevent players from manipulating the SGT price on BabySwap before the launch time; on the other hand, that since smart scientists can trace the tokens’ address and the information behind the website to the main contracts and start interaction much earlier than before, we need try to make everyone stand on the same starting line.
Q2. Why did you start the liquidity pool several hours before the launch, and why couldn’t you build the SGT/USDT liquidity pool at the announced launch time?
Many Squidos were aware that there was a Dapp testnet before the launch. We tested smart contracts as well as front end scripts and made adequate modifications constantly. The deployment on mainnet was treated with extreme caution with no bug or flaw allowed.
As known to Squidos, our contract is applying SGT-USDT LP tokens to mint SGT and for the rewards provided for stakers, the creation of the LP pool on BabySwap is a must for the contract to survive. A small pool was created just for the creation of the main contracts. Therefore, the initial pool with only 100 SGT and 2000 USDT was built on BabySwap at UTC 07:18, a few hours earlier than the launch time. And the initial price was 20 USDT/SGT as publicly notified.
TXHash of the birth of the liquidity pool:
https://bscscan.com/tx/0x5c4192e97ef75a8ac9d9044bc3c5a020a0933ef1c6a2ff9d52000680b632ca46
But a small pool was not enough to discourage the bots’ attempts, different from our expectations. After the pool was created, though nothing was released to any parties, several ‘bots’ buyers were monitored, keeping blindly purchasing from the pool and the price was pushed up accordingly. Though only hundreds of USDT was transacted, the price movement was significant in such a small pool.
Conventionally, this is called a ‘blind’ purchase as bots are programmed to buy whatever a new token on a DEX and try to sell when liquidity increases to gain some profits. However, it’s also a high-risk strategy if they encounter the Honeypot traps on different DEXes, these bots will definitely lose their money. This is a kind of common practice on chains with lower gas costs like BSC.
Later and before the launch time, we added the planned liquidity to this pool at 12:47 UTC, about 2 minutes later than what we were supposed to open this pool (12.45 UTC). At that time, the price of SGT was around $87 USDT, already higher than $20, which was announced to the public.
824 SGT and 71,707 USDT were added to the USDT/SGT pair on Babyswap. It led to additional costs than our original design, but we still committed to setting up this pool and opening it immediately to the public.
It also led to the result that there are some additional idle SGT left behind, which confused some Squidos as the ‘Large Unknown SGT Holder’.
https://bscscan.com/tx/0x0d1e8723cf9037a170755597ba5cc77740b831aa21b71dc39222118926128047
Similar Bot attacks happened on the ‘minting’ contract and pushed up the minting price a bit. After the SGT pool was open to all as scheduled, everyone was trading at an equal stand, only with a price higher than planned.
Moreover, we have to deploy the main smart contract hours earlier beforehand, as the staking APY can only show up after the first Epoch. Without the APY information, it will confuse the users. This can only be achieved by an early deployment. A lot of OHM forked projects didn’t pay attention to this detail. Squid God team intends to offer the best experience to our community, and we have to deploy the mint contract one epoch before.
Therefore, there is no ‘inside trading’ that the team pumped or dumped SGT price to manipulate for profit. Those TXHashes and on-chain data are public for anyone to check and we are sure that these shreds of evidence are more convincing than just oral explanation.
Thank you very much for your time and the story continues.
Q3. The initial mint price of SGT was supposed to be $3 but I found the mint price was much higher than $3, why?
As explained in the Squid God Launch Story Part 1, the team has to deploy the contracts hours earlier before the scheduled launch time. And the initial mint price was programmed to be exactly 3 USDT.
This is the mint contract information. https://bscscan.com/address/0xBEFf88671cfa710FD0E13D36F743711E2a50fe81
After deployment,
A short while after deploying the ‘mint’ function contract, we monitored multiple ‘bots’ calling this contract and trying to mint SGT. We are certain that none of the contract information was divulged to others, and the only thing that these bots could do was to ‘guess’ the parameters. These guesses led to many failed transactions and only very few passed through.
Records are shown in the capture below.
Those bots were continuously ‘taking shots’ every few minutes, and to protect the system, we have no way but to pause the mint function at UTC 10:55. (Also please note that we have no control of the LP contract, and those transactions in Babyswap cannot be paused).
https://bscscan.com/tx/0x6df65f6136b71305fa3a3c6377d6e6b290702438388388320ff20fcef3b8f097
We re-started the ‘mint’ function at UTC 12:51, nine minutes before the announced launch time.
https://bscscan.com/tx/0x88891c6d63fbe00e0ff56da2e4adfad07bff07edfd8f0abdca64a17dfe5614b3
However, since these fully equipped bots were still holding there in position, we could not prevent these bots from interacting with the contract to mint SGT by script. In the blockchain world, code is law, and those good programmers always take advantage of their technical capabilities. What we can do is to try everything we can to protect those non-tech background players and make the launch as fair as possible.
Also, failed transactions have been encountered by many users when minting SGT in the first hour after launch. This is because when one was trying to interact with the contract, you were actually competing with hundreds of other attempts, at the same designated minting price. And the minting price was constantly updated as the transactions were processed. If the real minting price fell out of the slippage range, the transaction would fail.
Right now, the frequency of contract calls in the protocol is stabilized and the system is giving a reasonable APY to the stakers.
Still, the security of the whole Squid God system is our priority, and our developers are monitoring and auditing each component continuously, and acting to be the guardians for every player in this game, a fair game!
Q4. SGT token price was once pumped very high, more than $2,000. Did the team sell the initially minted SGT for profit and dump the price?
NO.
SGT applied a fair launch model, without any VCs, pre-sale, ICO, IDO or even whitelists. The team does not hold any pre-allocated SGT tokens. But to kick over the contract and initial liquidity, the team applied funds to get the protocol started through ‘cold boot’.
What it did was, on one hand, to set up the initial liquidity pool on BabySwap, and on the other hand, to stake some SGT to roll out the big wheel of the Squid God system. Otherwise, the whole protocol could not get started, and the parameters would not be displayed properly. Here right now, all initially minted SGT are managed by contract at
https://bscscan.com/address/0x0cA3D94b3B83c97d4628a5250a71192c62769B2D
Most importantly, not a single SGT token was sold.
We are also certain that till now, the whole team has not gained any benefits from building Squid God Finance. On the contrary, the team spent their own money starting the game, though we could have easily made some money from pre-sale, IDO or VC investment. We just want to give our players a fair game to play.
The Squid God team is a group of DeFi enthusiasts, developers, observers, and community builders. We are excited about the delicacy of the OlympusDao’s mechanism and re-innovate it to be the Squid God on BSC.
Q5. Are there any pre-minted SGT tokens and if so, who owns them?
Yes, there’re. In the game of Squid God, initial SGT as the liquidity starter is critical to driving the whole system running.
Some projects did IDO to sell the first batch of tokens and some did whitelist within a small group of users, but Squid God wants a fair launch model. We did not pre-sell SGT tokens. Instead, we pre-minted the first batch of SGT and put into the system for two purposes: 1) to set up the initial liquidity pool on BabySwap and 2) to put some into the staking pool to form the initial APY stats, and all of the remaining SGT are laid in the contract address as mentioned above.
Since right now, the whole system is running smoothly and all figures are displayed properly, it’s time we undo all these pre-minted SGT as designed before. We are certain that they are nothing but the ‘keys’ to get the Squid God protocol started.
We promise that 100% of these SGT tokens will be burnt within 48 hours from now. This is Rule No.1 when we originally designed the SGT token launch!
We will release the transaction details with the on-chain hash later when it is done.
Thank you for your support and stay tuned.
