Tokenization opened markets to anyone.
Before it, making something tradable took permission: a listing, or a company behind it. Tokenization removed that step. An idea becomes a coin straight away, and anyone can hold it on the same terms as everyone else.
We built that market, all of us who launch, trade and call coins on chain.
Vitalik Buterin wrote that people come to coins like these hoping the price goes up, for the sense that anyone can take part, and for plain fun, and that the appetite for fun is worth working with. We agree, and fix keeps all of it.
how it tilted
Anyone can still come in, but people no longer come in at the same place. Advantage has moved from what someone did to where they stood. We call that position, and three forces handed it the market.
The first is the platform cycle. Chris Dixon described how a platform first attracts users and builders on good terms, then, once its growth flattens, turns to extracting from the same people. His answer was rules written in open code that the operator can't change.
A launchpad whose terms live in its own config is on the same curve. Fees appear, partners get better terms than users, and rules change after people have committed.
The second is the ordering game. In 2020 a Paradigm team tried to rescue about $12,000 in tokens stuck in a contract, and split the rescue across two contracts so nobody would notice. A bot picked it out of the pending transactions and took the funds within seconds. On chain, anything profitable that can be seen is taken by whoever is already watching.
A year earlier, Flash Boys 2.0 measured bots bidding fees against each other for a place in front of ordinary traders, and named the value taken by whoever orders transactions: MEV. It found that onchain trading had not delivered the fair markets it promised.
Flashbots described that value as a cost that lands on users who rarely see it.
A new coin's creation is the most visible chance of all. It goes to the wallets already waiting in that block, and they hold the coin before anyone else can see it exists. Mert said in 2025 that the sniping and sandwiching of coins launched on Solana has to end, and that launching on chain is still a circus that keeps serious teams away.
The third is the information gap. ZachXBT traced how everyone around one token knew something its buyers didn't: the team knew the unlocks, the market maker knew its positioning, OTC buyers knew their cliffs. Retail saw only the price.
Promotion carries the same gap. In one check of 160 promoting accounts, about 155 had not disclosed that they were paid.
Mert described where that leaves the people who follow: whoever got rich early collects followers who believe they will get rich too, and those followers become the exit.
The code still treats every wallet the same. The market around it no longer does, and people enter the trenches assuming they are someone's exit.
why the fix is on chain
Nick Szabo described what a blockchain buys with its inefficiency: social scalability. A market of strangers can grow only as far as it stops depending on trust in whoever runs it, and a root administrator who can alter anything grows more fragile as strangers and value pile up. A blockchain replaces that trust with computation anyone can check.
Vitalik Buterin asked for those values back: open participation, credible neutrality, and applications that keep working after their developers are gone.
Rules only replace trust if people can read them. Shaw argued in October 2026 that smart contracts should never be closed source, and that closed programs had somehow become normal on Solana. He counted more than $40 million drained over the past year from private contracts with critical flaws, the kind that people and AI can find and report once the code is open.
A better operator would only put the same structure in different hands, and the cycle would start again. A stricter policy would need someone to enforce it. So the fix goes into the rules, and once a coin exists we step out of its life. Trading needs no keeper, and anyone can checkpoint and settle a call.
built from the ground up
The four rules are small, and they only hold if nothing in a coin's life sits outside them.
A launchpad that runs on someone else's AMM, or hands its coins to someone else's pool when they graduate, inherits that platform's fees, its keys and its terms. In Chris Dixon's platform cycle it is a complement: when the platform underneath turns to extracting, every coin on top pays for it. Whatever such a launchpad changes is a layer on extraction it doesn't control.
So we built the market itself. The curve, the pool, the fee, the price record and the calls are one program we wrote, down to its integer money math.
No coin is handed to another venue, no outside config can reach it, and the four rules hold from a coin's first trade to its last.
no fair launch
"There is no such thing as a 'fair launch' in 2021." Cobie wrote that in July 2021.
Hasu had already shown why. Launches called fair kept early doors: a mining asset the team already held, a faster miner kept private, insiders reading the code before everyone else. The DeFi launches of 2020 changed the tools and kept the same game.
Vitalik Buterin later gave a test for words like this: an argument that can support any conclusion carries no information. "Fair launch" has become that kind of argument.
So we don't ask fix to be called fair. We built it to be credibly neutral, in the sense Vitalik Buterin set out in 2020: a mechanism that favors no one, built so that anyone can see that from its design without trusting the people who made it.
His tests, applied to fix:
Nobody is named in it. There is no allocation, no partner term and no list of who may launch or call. The creator is a wallet like any other.
Anyone can check it. The program's source is public, a coin's terms are readable in the coin, and every trade, claim and graduation leaves a receipt.
It has few moving parts: one program, one fee with four lines, four rules.
It doesn't change under anyone. A config change reaches only coins that don't exist yet, so it can't be aimed at anyone already holding one.
what fair means
Fair here means what you get is decided by what you did, not by where you stood. It does not mean everyone wins.
Markets keep their winners and losers. Paradigm's MEV and Me separates the arbitrage that corrects a price, which is a market doing its job, from the extraction that harms the person trading, and points out that an application can design away the extraction it creates. That is the scope of fix.
A creator earns from the trading of the coin they made, for as long as it trades. A caller earns when the people they called come out ahead. A trader earns when their read was right.
four rules
What fix changes is small. Everything people come for stays, and four rules change, on a market we built for them.
A coin can't be bought in the block it is created in, by anyone.
A coin's terms are written into it at creation and never change.
Every trade pays one fee, the same for everyone, with every line on the receipt.
A caller is paid only when the people who followed came out ahead.
The entries after this one take each rule in turn, starting with what stays the same.
fix the tokenization.