The loop
Y Combinator publishes a list of things it wishes someone would build, and founders apply against it. That list is one of the most useful documents in startups. It is also written by about a dozen people, once a year, and you need an invitation to act on it.
We run the same loop with two changes. The list is written continuously by whoever shows up. The money comes from memecoin trading fees instead of a fund.
Every coin launched here sets our treasury as its creator when it is minted. That is written into the mint transaction itself, so it cannot be changed afterwards, by us or by anyone else. From that moment, 0.3% of every trade in that coin goes to a vault only the treasury can open.
Speculation is the tax base. The board decides what it gets spent on.
Nobody involved has to be altruistic for this to work, which is the point. The trading was going to happen somewhere. This way it pays for something.
The board
The board is a list of things that should exist, written by whoever shows up. Vote on the ones you want. Apply to the ones you could build. The treasury reads that page before it pays anyone.
A good request is specific about the problem and quiet about the solution. It describes something you personally tried to buy and could not find, and it leaves a builder room to disagree with you about how to solve it.
A bad request is a product spec with no evidence that anyone wants it. Those sit at the bottom of the board, which is exactly where the voting is meant to put them.
Funding
Grants are paid in SOL, from the treasury wallet to yours, in public. We take no equity and no tokens. There is nothing to sign, no side letter, no pro rata. If it works you owe us nothing. If it does not, you still owe us nothing.
- Seed, 5 SOL. Enough to stop taking contract work for a month.
- Batch, 25 SOL. A quarter of runway for two people.
- Lead, 100 SOL. Kept for requests the whole board wants solved.
Size follows the board, not the pitch. A request sitting at the top with real support behind it can carry a real grant. One posted yesterday with four votes cannot. We do not promise money that is not there yet, which is why the treasury figure on this page is the live on-chain balance rather than a target.
Launching a coin
It takes about two minutes and one signature. You give the coin a name, a ticker and an image. We pin the metadata, build the mint transaction, sign it with the mint’s own key, and hand it to your wallet to pay for. You can take the first buy in that same transaction, at the opening price, before anyone else can trade it.
What you get is an ordinary pump.fun coin. Same bonding curve, same aggregators, same migration to the AMM when the curve fills. The one difference is the creator field, which points at the treasury instead of at you.
So the trade is simple. You give up the creator fee stream. In exchange you launch somewhere that has a reason to keep caring about your coin after day one, because its fees fund the thing everyone here is actually interested in.
You can also launch a coin against a specific request on the board. That ties the coin to the thing it is meant to pay for, and its fees are earmarked toward that request.
The treasury
One address, published, permanently. Fees build up in a vault that only the treasury key can sweep. Swept SOL sits in the wallet until it is granted out. Every payment is a transaction you can open in an explorer.
We are deliberately boring with it. The treasury does not trade, does not provide liquidity, does not buy the coins launched here, and holds nothing but SOL. Its only job is turning fees into grants without anyone having to trust us about the number in the middle.
Questions
Can you change where the fees go later?
No. The creator address is set when the coin is minted and there is no instruction to change it afterwards. That is a property of the program, not a promise from us.
Do I need to launch a coin to post or vote?
No. Posting, voting and applying need a connected wallet and a signature. There is no transaction and no fee.
Who decides which requests get funded?
The votes set the order. We pay from the top down, to applicants who look like they will actually ship, and we publish every payment. If we ever fund something out of order, you will be able to see that we did.
What happens if my coin goes to zero?
Most of them will. That is true of every launchpad and pretending otherwise would be silly, so buy accordingly. The fees a coin generated on the way up stay in the treasury either way.
Are you affiliated with Y Combinator?
No. We think their loop is the right one and that it should not require an invitation. That is the whole connection.