TREBUCHET

[ 01 ]The constraint

A classic AMM pool (the x·y=k kind, still what most launchpads graduate into) needs equal value on both sides. Put your whole supply in, and the pool prices each token at the SOL you deposited divided by the supply. Deposit little SOL and you've launched at a tiny market cap with every token for sale at that giveaway price. Want to open at a meaningful valuation? Then match it with real capital — a million-dollar launch needs half a million in SOL sitting in the pool. Nobody has that. So a whole industry of hacks grew up around pretending to.

[ 02 ]The hacks

Presales raise the matching capital from buyers before the pool exists — and hand them tokens below the launch price to sell into it. Token taxes claw value back from every trade to fund what the pool couldn't. Vesting and locks hide most of the supply so the visible float looks small, then release it on a schedule the market dreads. Bundling means buying your own token in the launch block to push the price up — paying fees and slippage to yourself for a chart that was never real. And the blunt version: just put up the capital, and hope the launch earns it back. Each of these costs money, trust, or both, and each one exists only because the pool demanded a 1:1 deposit.

[ 03 ]What changed

Concentrated liquidity — Uniswap v3 on Ethereum in May 2021, Raydium CLMM on Solana — lets a liquidity position live in a price range instead of across all prices. And a position placed above the current price needs only the token side. No SOL. No 1:1. You can put supply into the pool at 2×, 5×, 10× the launch price, on-chain, visible, fully tradeable — and it doesn't sell until the market actually gets there. That single property dissolves the constraint every hack was built around. It has been sitting in plain sight for years; launch tooling almost entirely ignored it and kept graduating tokens into x·y=k pools.

[ 04 ]What it means for a launch

Real supply control, at launch, without hiding anything. You choose the opening market cap and how much is for sale there — a 10% float at open if that's the scarcity you want. The bulk goes into bands you place — more at 4×, more still at 10×, the biggest tranche at 25× — and if you leave space between bands, a thin full-range base connects them so the pool is tradeable at every price. That base can be a handful of tokens; its only job is to make sure there is never a hole. Between 4× and 10× only the base trades, so the price has to earn its way across. Each band is a commitment to sell at that price and not before. Supply isn't locked away in a wallet holders have to trust; it's in the pool, where anyone can see it and nobody can move it early. The bands are the raise, paid by real buyers at real prices as the token earns each step. No presale, because there's nothing to pre-sell. No tax, because the pool funds itself. No bundling, because the price is where you placed the supply, not where you bought it up to. And no capital sitting idle: supply above the launch price costs you zero SOL to place.

[ 05 ]What Trebuchet gives you

The main position is the full-range base. Trebuchet checks your bands for gaps and, if there are any, requires the base to hold at least one token — so a pool can never be configured with a hole in it — and warns you when the base is thin enough that price will move sharply between bands. The ladder option builds bands on top of it for you — a supply percentage spread across rising price multiples — or you set each band's range and share by hand. A support position places a buy wall beneath the launch price with a depth you choose. The main position is the tranche live at opening, sliceable so Fee Keys can be split among a team. And every one of those positions is locked with Burn & Earn — so the supply control isn't just a plan, it's a commitment the chain enforces, and the fees from every band still come back to you.