The Beginning
It was a long time coming…. but we did it. SideKick Finance finally launched it’s community-driven project on June 3rd. We followed in the footsteps of others before us and launched via a fair launch mechanism dubbed “Market Generation Event”. Instead of icky pre-sales, we believe a fair launch where everyone can get in at the same price is the way to go. With a preset amount of tokens available, this can be a good judge of market sentiment towards your project as the more BNB contributed, the less tokens are dispersed.
After one week with little to no marketing and near zero paid promotions, we raised 1060 BNB!!! It took another 48hrs after the MGE ended… but we successfully launched on PancakeSwap on June 12th, at a price of $0.02 and about $2.2 million market cap! We want to humbly thank all supporters and contributors to our first MGE. Without the support of the community, we don’t exist…so the dev’s truly appreciate it all. One way we plan to show appreciation to contributors is by commemorating the first MGE with special NFT’s that will have tons of perks in our network and others too. (DETAILS TBD)
Approx. Raised in USD at time of MGE
What went wrong?
As a 10 year software developer veteran, I’ve been apart of many high risk production deployments. This was by far the highest risk and most stressful of any I’ve encountered.
We tested our ERC-31337 deployment probably 100 times. We tested mainly on bsctestnet. When we thought about launching on Matic Network, we tested on matic mumbai testnet. We even ran a full test on matic mainnet to test a mainnet deployment of the token. The one thing we didn’t test was a bsc mainnet deployment. This was the cause of the first issue.
When we deployed Thursday night, by all accounts everything went successfully. Tokens were distributed, staking enabled, and liquidity was added to PancakeSwap. The problem was all liquidity was added to the old V1 Factory/Router. We forgot to replace the init-hashcode and change two addresses. All in all, the deployment and scripts worked and we could have allowed everyone to use / trade V1. But.. V1 has a big glaring popup telling people to not trade it when going to the site. So in trying to keep in line with our core values we just couldn’t let the user experience suffer and allow that. Thankfully, ERC-31337 allows us the flexibility to fix mistakes. Immediately once realizing the mistake we removed all liquidity from V1 PCS. Besides some tx fees, all the BNB was saved.
After discussing and getting some advise from the creator of ERC-31337 itself (@ProfessorKronos), we decided to try and save the MGE and redeploy the required contracts and add liquidity to v2, while keeping the MGE contract, contributions and token intact and unchanged. We updated addresses and contracts and the next day we were able to successfully redeploy.
The final step was adding new liquidity with our same token to V2. This is where our next mistake occurred. After the longest week of my life, and very emotional rollercoaster, instead of using our script to add liquidity.. I manually used bscscan and wrote in the wrong number, adding basically 0 bnb with all of our token supply. Immediately someone was able to arbitrage $sk and supply was rekt for about $7.35 (View Here). This was a pretty crushing blow, and immediately we realized we would have to redeploy everything.. clean start.
Talked with Professor again and we were able to redeploy the token the right way, on V2 success…yesss. Except we made one more mistake😅 . After we created a new MGE event, we thought a good thing to do would be to put extra bnb into the pool so there were more funds raised. But when there is limited supply, the more funds raised (if not your funds) means less supply for everyone. We tried to fix this by redistributing ref points from the devs to other contributors but it ended up causing more problems then not. We should have just waited until after MGE, kept everything the same and pumped token with BNB or sent tokens directly to staking contract to distribute. We’ve airdropped everyone that’s sent in their address to make amends.
Ok, so after all that we released the token and everything was fine right? Well there was an extreme amount of fud in channels and because of our mistakes we wanted to make sure our long-term contributors that believe in the project didn’t get screwed. We will always try to act in alignment with our core values; longevity not short term pump and dumps is our MO. So our core founding team decided to artificially lower the price before opening up trading to the public.
- It gives contributors a reason to not give into emotions and dump at the low as their will be a penalty
- If contributors still want to dump they can, but if there was any kind of extreme fud or run on liquidity, they wouldn’t be able to take as much with them.
We were very clear about our intentions to support long-term holders and act in a way that promotes long-term growth and passive income. We believe we acted in the best way we could to that end. We do realize the power of ERC-31337 and decisions like this will be turned over to the DAO and certain contracts time-locked as well. Holders of $SK will soon be able to vote with $SK to decide these things.
Main Site:
Buy on PCS:
Staking Page:
DefiWatcher:
