headstones for the mechanisms that were tried — on pump.fun, on its rivals, and inside garlic's loop — and the exact way each one died.
the flat sell-tax
tax early sells to punish dumpers. the vamp routed the sale through a fresh
address it also controlled. the tax fell on the honest holder who panic-sold once; the vamp,
who sold constantly, engineered around it.
fixed dumping · fed the bundler, who never sells from the buying wallet.
the trading delay
hold trading for N blocks after launch so humans can catch up. but a bot does not
experience waiting. the delay only removed the noise of early human buys, letting the vamp time
its entry more precisely, not less.
fixed nothing measurable · fed the sniper, now better-aimed.
the per-wallet cap
limit how much any one address can buy at launch. one vamp became forty wallets
funded from the same source an hour earlier. the cap is a rule about addresses; the vamp has
infinite addresses.
fixed single-wallet whales · fed the bundler and the sniper ring.
the whitelist
only pre-approved wallets may buy early. the slots became the target. bots farmed
the criteria for weeks, and a secondary market sold the spots. the crowd that earned nothing got
in last.
fixed the open free-for-all · fed the serial farmer.
randomized start price
start at an unpredictable price so snipers cannot pre-size. but on-chain randomness
is visible to anyone reading the same state, and a vamp with perfect information reads the seed
the moment it lands — before the human does.
fixed naive fixed-price snipes · fed the informed sniper.
dev vesting / lock
lock the creator's tokens so they cannot dump. the creator vested — and also
bundled thirty percent into other wallets at block zero that were never subject to the lock. the
lock secured the supply the vamp had already decided not to use.
fixed naive dev-dumps · fed the bundler.
the ticker registry lock
reserve a ticker so no two tokens share it. the clone registered a lookalike
character, or added an invisible space, or used a different unicode block. the string was unique
to the machine and identical to the eye.
fixed exact-string collisions · fed the clone.
proof-of-human gate
require a captcha or liveness check to buy early. solved-captcha services cleared it
for a fraction of a cent each, run by actual humans in a farm. the gate proved humanity, and
humanity was for sale.
fixed pure headless bots · fed the funded vamp, who bought the humans.
sealed-bid / commit-reveal mint
hide bids until everyone has committed, then reveal together, so no one can
front-run. but the reveal transaction itself is visible in solana's mempool, and the vamp
front-ran the reveal. the front-run just moved one step later.
fixed opening-price front-running · fed the reveal front-runner.
dynamic fee curves
raise fees when activity looks toxic to make extraction unprofitable. the drain
simply had to clear a higher bar, and on a launch that pumped, it did. the fee taxed the honest
buyer too, and the vamp priced it in.
fixed thin-margin extraction · fed any drain larger than the fee.
migrate the whole venue
move graduated tokens to a controlled AMM to capture value in-house. the venue
changed; the vamps opened accounts on the new venue by lunch. moving the market does not remove
the three properties that make extraction structural.
fixed value leaking to external AMMs · fed every mask, relocated.
the graveyard is not a list of bad ideas. most were good ideas. it is a proof-by-exhaustion that
patching masks does not close the hole. that is why garlic is still running. how it decides what to
bury next is in /system.