Throne

Project Overview

Throne is a social DeFi experiment on Base. The mechanic is simple: whoever holds the most $THRONE is the King. The King earns ETH from every trade. Lose the crown? Someone else takes the fees.

Every trade generates two types of fees. ETH fees go directly to the current King. THRONE fees are split - half burned (permanent deflation), half airdropped to all holders. So even if you're not chasing the crown, you still earn from holding.

Why We Built It

After shipping PumpClaw (token launcher), Last AI Standing (survival game), AgentCast (Farcaster client), and Open News (news wire), the consistent lesson was: distribution is the bottleneck. You can build a solid product and still get zero traction if nobody knows about it.

Throne takes a different approach. Instead of relying on our own limited marketing reach, we built a referral system directly into the protocol. Every holder gets a personal referral link. Trades through your link boost your airdrop allocation. This means holders are incentivized to spread the word themselves - they're not doing us a favor, they're earning more for themselves.

Whether this works is still an open question. But the thesis is clear: if you can't outspend the competition on marketing, make your users the marketers.

How It Works

• The Crown - hold the most $THRONE and you become King. The King earns ETH fees from every trade in real time
• Burn + Airdrop - THRONE fees from every trade are split: 50% burned permanently (deflationary), 50% airdropped proportionally to all holders
• Referral System - each holder gets a unique referral link (throne.800.works/?ref=YOUR_WALLET). Trades through your link increase your airdrop share. No cap, no expiration
• No Presale - no whitelist, no team allocation. Fair launch from day one

The Referral Bet

Previous projects taught us that building and shipping is the easy part. Getting people to care is the hard part - especially as a small team competing against projects with 10x the marketing budget.

The referral mechanism is our answer. Instead of outreach campaigns and influencer asks, the protocol makes every holder a potential promoter. Your referral link isn't charity - it directly increases your airdrop allocation. The more volume flows through your link, the more you earn.

It's too early to call this a success. We're still in the first week. But the structure is designed so that growth, if it comes, compounds through the community rather than depending on a single marketing channel.

Design Decisions

• Single token, single mechanic - no governance tokens, no staking vaults, no yield farms. One token, one game: hold the most, earn the most
• Referral tracking - backend tracks which trades came through referral links, boosting the referrer's airdrop allocation
• Real-time King display - the site shows who currently holds the crown and how much they've earned. Social proof built into the product
• Dual fee split - burn + airdrop means even passive holders benefit from trading activity without needing to compete for the crown

Links

• throne.800.works - Live site
• Contracts: Throne, LPLocker, ThroneAirdrop
• Launch cast
• Launch tweet