HOGL Medium Article:
Hello, for those that don’t know me, I’m the dev of HOGL, my real name is Sean. HOGL is over 2 months old as a project and in our short time in this space I have come to realise a lot of common themes and issues arising. Some things we have no control over and others we do. Below I will be calling out some issues I have noticed with a popular platform as well as providing you with a complete update of HOGL and what is coming next for us, keep reading to the end as I have a big update regarding a launchpad.
Pancakeswap V2 migration
Firstly, we will be migrating over to pancake swap V2 over the coming weeks, with this migration will be a complete upgrade to HOGL’s contract alongside some much needed tokenomics changes. Fear not, everything is completely safe as is, however Pancakeswap is phasing out V1 so we have to make this change at some point, I feel now is a good time to do so. How does a migration work you might wonder? Firstly, we will be taking a snapshot of all tokens and performing a 1:1 airdrop to our new contract, then we take the BNB out of the old LP to add to the new one and continue trading as usual. Our new contract will be given to all of our exchanges prior to launch so everything runs smoothly.
Updates to our tokenomics will be as follows:
Current: 1% Burn / 1% Redistribution = 2% Slippage
New Updated: 1% Burn / 1% Redistribution / 4% Liquidity Tax = 6% Slippage
Adding in the LP% tax will also keep our LP extremely healthy when whales decide to sell. It’s an important update for us to do if we want to keep growing at a healthy rate.
More details will be announced prior to our contract upgrades and pancake swap migration. I must stress that if you sell your tokens before we migrate you won’t receive airdropped tokens.
NFT Marketplace
Rest assured, our NFT Marketplace has not been abandoned, we are still actively working on bringing this to life, when the alpha version is ready for release I will share it with you guys. For now, please read the remaining of this article, I feel it’s important for the future of HOGL.
Below I’m going to list out common issues we have in our space that have become more apparent overtime.
Prominence of Rug Pulls in DeFi
A ‘Rug Pull’ is a relatively common scam in the DeFi (Decentralised Finance) space, essentially, following a significant price increase, the developers withdraw everything from the liquidity pool and drive a token’s price to zero (CoinMarketCap, 2021). There are several key indicators to look out for when spotting a rug pull, but often it happens without giving the investors chance to do anything about it.
‘Rug pulls’ are something we’re all familiar with, unfortunately they’re synonymous with the DeFi space we’ve all grown to love. According to blockchain analytics company, CipherTrace ‘DeFi “rug pulls” and exit scams made up 99% of all crypto fraud schemes in the second half of 2020’ (Decrypt, 2020). These fraudulent activities are threatening the future of DeFi, even members from collectives such as War On Rugs, who were supposed to improve the space via proper auditing of smart contracts have allegedly taken part in rug pulls:
Prominent cryptocurrency influencers, such as ‘Ken the Crypto’ even offered a $10,000 BUSD bounty for the doxxing (revealing of personal information) of the ‘War on Rugs’ guy, Shappy (KenTheCrypto, 2021).
Even the Google Trends result show that more and more people are searching for the term ‘Rug Pull’, these scams are threatening our space, they prevent it from being taken seriously and something must be done.
Bots in DeFi
Rug Pulls aside, there are other issues at play within DeFi, issues that can be fixed and if we, as a collective decide to do something about it we can save this weird and wonderful area of finance.
Bots are a problem, we’ve all been there.
As developers, we spend hours a week getting everything perfect for a launch; checking and double checking contracts, growing our telegram groups, creating marketing material and paying through the nose for advertisements. You release the contract address to your audience to let them know it’s safu and bots take advantage.
As consumers, we spend hours checking a specific telegram, filling in whitelist forms and shilling to everyone about a new project we’re excited about. We count down the hours, minutes and seconds until launch until that timer hits 0, and you check the chart.
A huge green spike followed by an even bigger dump, one individual destroying a project that developers have put weeks of work into.
Bots have the ability to scan for the exact moment the liquidity pool is added to a token, buying before any ‘real’ consumer has had the chance, this means that as soon as the general public has the opportunity to buy they are just ‘pumping the bag’ of the bot who bought at the cheapest price possible, this needs to stop. We can create ways and methods to combat this, but its on the developer of the project to implement.
Presale Platforms
As of now, there are three primary methods of presales & ICO’s in the defi space, Unicrypt, DXsale and hosting a private presale. Private presales are often scary for consumers, going against one of the golden rules of cryptocurrency, never connect your wallet to a website that isn’t trusted. This leaves us with UniCrypt and DXsale
This is a technologically innovative space and as such bots are almost accepted in cryptocurrency as an aspect of DeFi which is wrong. There shouldn’t be a bot tax on launch, a common thing I hear in prelaunches is ‘the bots out, lets buy’. How has it come to this?
The Starboy contract was deployed on the 14th of May, 2021. The launch was hyped, there were thousands of telegram members, everyone begging for whitelist, the team did an amazing job on the promotional material making cinema quality animations. They did everything right, until…
A bot had been programmed to take advantage of the mechanics on UniCrypt finalise, to explain it in simple terms, in a single transaction the bot managed to both finalise the presale and buy a huge amount of the circulating supply. The bot’s wallet was tracked and it made off with $1.4 million from that play alone. The project was decimated. The same day the bot also ruined another project for $800k, and has repeatedly ruined more projects launched via Unicrypt since, this should be a very easy fix for Unicrypt, the contract the bot uses has been decompiled by our devs and the reason it is so powerful is because it calls finalise and buys in the same transaction, it is impossible to beat it with the current Unicrypt finalise function.
A whole launch completely ruined, weeks of hard work down the drain and thousands of angry telegram members shouting RUG at the developers who genuinely wanted to build a solid project.
The worst thing about this? The exploit is easily fixable. The bot went on to attack several projects that night and made around $2 million in a single night. Not only does this tarnish the reputation of developers, but it makes people hesitant about the DeFi space, in order to grow as a collective we must take action to ensure we are taken seriously.
The other most commonly used website for presales/ICO’s is DXsale. This platform is relatively straightforward to use but it is not without its issues, the layout is clunky. The ‘search’ function has been ‘coming soon’ for at least 3 months and they recently removed the option to filter for ‘pending’ launches. Not to mention the design of the UI.
But these issues pale in comparison to the biggest flaw in DXsale, they take 2% as a fee for allowing developers to launch on their platform, which is understandable, nothing in this space is free.
But dumping this 2% on a brand new project is unacceptable. This platform is designed to get new projects off the ground, not dump on them. For example In the early days of HOGL, DXSale dumped a staggering $16000 within its first days, this is unacceptable.
This is the address of the DXsale wallet that sells relatively irresponsibly on projects that launch via their platform:
https://bscscan.com/address/0x548e03c19a175a66912685f71e157706fee6a04d
How are these our only options?
HOGL LAUNCHPAD PLATFORM
HOGL has been a trusted project in this space since its inception on the 20th of March 2021. We are here to change this space for the better, I have poured my heart and soul into the project since launch and have been part of several campaigns to better the DeFi space.
Today, we are incredibly excited to announce the development of HOGL’s very own presale launch platform. Right now there is not enough competition for this market. HOGL will be similar to DXsale with lower base fee’s than DXsale/Unicrypt and the fee’s will also be locked in vestments to ensure projects can thrive without early sell pressure from the launchpad thats supposed to be helping.
We will also be implementing rewards for people who hold HOGL, more details will be provided soon. Currently it is likely we will allow a partial payment in HOGL that will be burned.
HOGL has already onboarded multiple developers to work on this project over the coming month. It will be a clean, modern, safe, direct competitor to DXsale. Our aim is to do everything they have done, but bigger, safer and better.
We want to make sure that DeFi is here to stay, with such limited options for launchpads, those that are prominent are easily able to take advantage of both developers and consumers, HOGL’s launchpad is aiming to be everything that these platforms cannot be. We will also work with developers to come up with solutions to help combat bots on launch. HOGL doesn’t do anything by half measures, you can rest assured that this platform will be a true safe space in DeFi
We will be transparent, trustworthy and do our best to ensure that new projects not only have the opportunity to launch, but the opportunity to thrive. We believe we owe this to the DeFi community and are 100% committed to seeing it flourish.
Hold On — Good Luck.
Sean
References:
DECRYPT, 2020 Defi Rug Pulls Were Crypto’s Top Fraud Scheme In 2020 [online] available at https://decrypt.co/55787/defi-rug-pulls-were-cryptos-top-fraud-scheme-in-2020-ciphertrace Retrieved 27/05/2021
COINMARKETCAP, 2021. Rug Pulls [online] available at: https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/glossary/rug-pull#:~:text=A%20rug%20pull%20is%20a%20malicious%20maneuver%20in%20the%20cryptocurrency,run%20away%20with%20investors'%20funds.&text=Rug%20pulls%20thrive%20on%20DEXs,unlike%20in%20centralized%20cryptocurrency%20exchanges.
Retrieved 27/05/2021
Fairmoon (2021) 19/05/2021. Available at https://twitter.com/fairmooncoin/status/1394831046198251527?s=20 Retrieved 27/05/2021
KenTheCrypto (2021) 21/05/2021. Available at https://twitter.com/KenTheCrypto/status/1395579530752913410?s=20 Retrieved 27/05/2021
Google Trends (2021) Rug Pulls 2020–2021 [online] available at https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=rug%20pull&geo=GB Retrieved 27/05/2021
