Next-Generation Token Mechanics

Focus pioneers many new crypto-native ways for creators to monetize with crypto. This section explains its advanced token launch mechanics, but in later sections we'll discuss tipping, subscriptions, unlockable content, paid DMs, and more.

Today, meme tokens have generated tens of billions in market cap, and hundreds of billions in volume, but the platforms to launch them and trade them are woefully immature. Focus was designed from the ground up, over the past two years, to take token trading to the next level, and to add a much-needed social element to it. It is built by the creators of BitClout, arguably the original meme token platform, and improves significantly on all platforms that have emerged since.

Tokens have on-chain profiles. The first thing to understand about Focus is that all tokens have on-chain profiles, stored on the DeSo blockchain, like this one. This allows token creators to set a description, but it also allows them to make posts, gain a following, show off the assets in their wallet, etc... To see any token's profile, simply navigate to focus.xyz/{username}, eg focus.xyz/JianYang (no contract address required).

User-identifiable globally-unique tickers. Today, finding the right token on a DEX is an awful user experience, often requiring users to copy-paste contract addresses into search bars. What’s more, users frequently get tricked into buying a “doppleganger” token that looks like the real one, but that was actually created by a scammer who steals their funds. Imagine if, instead of identifying tokens by contract addresses, every token had a unique ticker, username, and description attached to it fully on-chain. This is what the DeSo blockchain enables, thanks to its fully on-chain social features. You’ll never have to enter a contract address to find a token on Focus: The name of the token is the ticker, vastly improving the user experience and solving the doppelganger problem, especially when it comes to listing new tokens. On DeSo, the core team has reserved dictionary words and some common short usernames; if you would like one for launching your token, please DM @nader on Focus.

Order-Book DEX and Third-Party Liquidity. BitClout is known for popularizing the "bonding curve" mechanic for launching new tokens, which was subsequently adopted by friend.tech and pump.fun. However, bonding curves are vastly inferior to order-book exchanges because they do not allow for third parties to place resting orders on the book. To use an example, imagine one person wants to dump 100k of a meme coin while another wants to buy it. On a bonding curve, the first person would have to dump on the bonding curve, nuke the price, and then the other person would later have to come in and re-pump it with their buy. In contrast, with an order-book DEX, the first person can simply enter a limit order at a particular price, to be hit by the second person whenever they see it. To put it another way, bonding curves are not good at "storing" third-party liquidity in the way an order-book can. Building and refining the order-book DEX powering Focus took years, but now that it is ready, no other platform can compare in terms of liquidity provision. What's more, liquidity is arguably the most important component to consider when deciding where to launch your token, making Focus years ahead of the competition on one of the most important axes of competition.

Configurable Order-Book Automated Market-Makers (AMMs). If one were to launch a token directly on an order-book exchange, a question would arise as to how people will buy it. For example, if the creator doesn't put any sell orders on the book, how are people going to get the token in the first place? Focus solves this problem using a novel Order-Book AMM concept that every token creator can configure to their heart's content. The Order-Book AMMs on Focus allow token creators to configure an array of sell orders that will act as an "order-book bonding curve" to distribute their token to the initial buyers. In addition, like a non-order-book bonding curve, funds raised by the AMM are then used to place bid orders slightly underneath the initial sell orders. You can imagine that Focus has "discretized" bonding curves into distinct orders on the book. This gives token creators all the benefits of the original bonding curve approach, with no trade-offs, while adding all of the benefits of an order-book DEX, like the ability to add third-party liquidity. All while being completely configurable by the token creator, something neither BitClout nor pump.fun supported (but which was highly requested when we launched BitClout). We discuss more about Focus's AMMs and how important they are in a later section.

Trading Fees to Creators. Today, if you launch a token on an existing platform like pump.fun, the only way to make money is by dumping a withheld percentage of the token supply on your holders. This is a terrible experience for both token creators and holders. With BitClout, we saw first-hand that the single biggest reason people shied away from launching tokens was "I don't want to dump on my followers to make money." Yet new platforms like pump.fun still suffer from this same exact problem (as we saw with Sam Lessin's recent launch of Jelly Jelly on pump.fun). Focus completely changes the game for creators by allowing them to earn a percentage of trading fees, rather than monetizing through dumping on their followers. Focus works by paying half of all trading fees to creators, a quarter of all fees to the person who referred the creator (growth incentive), and a quarter of all fees to buy & burn $FOCUS tokens. This allows a creator to make money through the volatility of their coin, without ever having to dump on their followers. In fact, if they prefer, a token creator can make millions without ever even owning a single one of their tokens, let alone dumping them!

Multi-Chain Liquidity Aggregation. Today, if you launch a meme token on Solana, for example, only people who have liquidity on the Solana blockchain can trade it. You're leaving out people who have their money on Ethereum, Bitcoin, and other blockchains for no reason. Focus is the first platform where token traders can trade using funds from multiple blockchains in seconds. Simply deposit USDC-ETH, USDC-SOL, or your favorite native token (SOL, ETH, BTC, DESO, etc...), and you can instantly trade any token launched via the platform. With this functionality, Focus can potentially unlock liquidity for token creators from less-accessible chains like Bitcoin. If you really think about it, it makes no sense to launch a token directly on a single chain when you can aggregate liquidity across all supported chains (currenntly BTC, ETH, SOL, AVAX, SUI, and DESO, with more coming).

Un-Ruggable Tokens. Today, it is extremely hard for a trader to check the safety of the token they're purchasing. For example, it is extremely hard on Solana to determine whether the creator of a token is capable of, for example, minting infinite tokens to themselves that they can then dump on their holders. Focus engineers its token mechanics from the ground up to support what we call "un-ruggable tokens." Simply put, every token has a set of parameters that make it impossible for the creator to harm the integrity of the token if they're locked. These properties are supply locking, trading fee locking, revshare locking, and transfer status locking, and they are clearly visible next to every token's social profile on Focus. In addition, a token creator can lock their own allocation of a token and vest it over a period of time, fully on-chain thanks to the DeSo Blockchain's advanced token-locking features.

Trading Fees to Referrers. Focus doesn't just pay trading fees to creators, it strategically allocates trading fees to maximize the growth of the platform. In addition to creators earning half of the trading fees, a quarter of the trading fees is allocated to whoever referred the creator. This means that if you refer someone who launches a highly successful token, you could earn millions just for the act of telling them about the platform. Of course, a savvy creator can simply refer themselves to keep 3/4 of the fee instead of half. But we found with BitClout that many creators were often getting a lot of help from someone else in setting up their coin, so this mechanic provides a very natural and "default" way to compensate those behind the scenes.

Trading Fees to Buy & Burn $FOCUS. Other platforms like pump.fun charge trading fees, but those fees go directly to the developer, which is pure rent-seeking extraction. In contrast, Focus allocates 100% of its trading fees, which are currently set to a quarter of all trading fees, to buy & burn its $FOCUS token, which you can read about in the Tokenomics section. This allocation of fees allows anyone to share in the growth of the platform by simply owning the token.

Pre-Sale Auctions to Prevent Bot-Sniping. A problem that both BitClout and pump.fun had and still have today is that people who get in super early to a coin get in at a lower price than people who come later. This is by design, but it results in a "race" whereby popular coins are always sniped by bots because the bonding curve prices their coins too low at the open. Focus is the first token platform to completely solve this issue, and it does so using a unique, and frankly extremely fun, pre-sale bidding mechanic that essentially operates as an initial first-price auction prior to the launch of the coin. The way it works is anyone can place a bid on the order-book DEX before the AMM starts up, then when it starts it will simply execute its sell orders against the bids on the book, going from highest to lowest. This not only completely eliminates the advantage bots have over humans, but it also creates a surplus for the AMM that can either be distributed to the creator or used to buy & burn $FOCUS (or both). And did we mention it's extremely fun...

Token Revshare. Although most tokens are launched as pure memes, Focus is the first platform that enables the possibility for something more. On Focus, token creators can set a configurable revshare percentage, where a percentage of their revenue on Focus will be used to buy & burn their token. This revshare percentage represents the first possibility for "fundamental value" applied to meme tokens, and presents great potential for the expansion of the space.

Normie-Friendly. If you've ever used an app like BitClout or pump.fun, you know that it's not exactly inviting to a normal non-tech-savvy person. Focus is the first platform that bridges the gap between crypto and the mainstream by making it not only extremely easy to onboard onto the app, but also easy to use the most advanced features like token creation. Focus achieves this by always choosing sane defaults for everything, while maintaining full configurability. In addition, the availability of Decentralized Social features and monetization can keep non-trader users engaged without compromising on the most advanced trading aspects of the platform.

Integrated Decentralized Social Features. Meme tokens are inherently linked to social media, and this is something that is drastically under-appreciated by existing platforms like pump.fun. Imagine if every token and every trader had an optional element of social reputation attached to their on-chain wallet. Focus is the first trading platform to enable this by integrating the DeSo Blockchain's advanced Decentralized Social features, and it's not a gimmick; the minute you use it, you come to see just how important these features are to the meme token ecosystem as a whole. People don't just trade on Focus, they also post, engage, and DM each other, allowing for the creation of new social patterns around tokens (with all content stored fully on-chain, and end-to-end encrypted where needed). There has never been something that merges money and social media in quite the same way as Focus, and we're very excited to see the ramifications of ths convergence.

Other Ways to Earn. In order to attract the widest audience possible, Focus allows any user to monetize through crypto subscriptions, crypto-unlockable content, crypto-tipping, paid DMs, and much more, all of which can revshare back to one's token. This allows traders to maximally engage with one another, but also opens the platform to the possibility of mainstream adoption. Again, it's something you just have to feel for yourself by using Focus, but once you experience what it's like you'll never want to go back to a traditional social network, let alone a stand-alone token trading platform. The Focus platform charges a 10% fee on all other monetization features, and 100% of that fee is used to buy & burn $FOCUS.