Modular launch infrastructure
Every launchpad lets you pick a name. Frontier lets you pick what the market does.
This is the capability the rest of the product is built around, so it is worth being precise about what it rests on. Every Frontier coin trades in a Uniswap V4 pool, and every one of those pools carries a hook: a contract V4 consults at each step of a swap, able to decide what the trade costs and to act around it. Hooks are what made V4 different from every AMM before it, and they are what a creator configures here.
The hook is not written by the creator. It is deployed by the protocol, audited, identical for every coin, and it delegates the interesting parts to extensions the creator selects at creation.
Three sockets, and what fits in them
| Socket | The question it answers | Slots per coin |
|---|---|---|
| Fee | What does this swap cost? | 4 |
| Observer | What should happen because this swap happened? | 4 |
| Recipient | Where does the creator's income go, and what happens to it there? | 1 |
Four fee blocks stacked in an order the creator chooses, each seeing what the previous one decided. Four observers notified after every settled trade. One recipient, which can be a wallet or a contract that acts on the money. That is a wide space of behaviour from a small number of parts.
What it already makes possible
The blocks shipped today are deliberately ordinary, because they are the ones most coins need:
- a fee that follows volatility, cheap when the market is calm and expensive when it is not;
- a flat fee, for a coin whose traders value knowing the number;
- a sniper tax that starts as high as 50% and decays over a declared window, so buying in the first seconds is not worth it;
- discounts for chosen wallets, periods or holdings;
- a staking vault, which pays the people holding the coin out of the creator's own share;
- a fee split the creator sets, anywhere from all of it to liquidity providers to almost none;
- and next out of the catalog: a lottery funded from the creator's share, buyback and burn, a fee splitter, and whatever anyone writes after that.
Combined, those already produce markets that did not exist before: a coin that protects its opening minutes and then trades cheaply forever, a coin whose entire creator income is paid to whoever stakes it, a coin generous enough with liquidity providers that outside capital wants to sit in its pool.
A coin as a component
Everything above is still described in terms of money, which undersells the system. The three sockets do not only accept fee logic:
- an observer is handed the fact that a trade settled, and the fee it paid, and can call any contract with it;
- a recipient is any contract the creator names, receiving the coin's income as it arrives;
- a fee calculator can read state from outside the pool before answering.
A coin's market therefore has an interface other contracts can plug into, in both directions. That is what turns a coin from a thing people buy into a component something else is built on:
- a game whose prize pool is funded by its own coin's trading, distributed to players in proportion to the fees they paid, with the draw running on its own;
- an application that charges its own users a reduced fee to trade its coin, and everyone else the normal one;
- a protocol whose treasury, insurance fund or buyback contract is wired straight to the fee stream, credited on every swap without anyone triggering anything;
- a coin that reacts to its own history, an observer accumulating milestones such as its age or its number of distinct traders while a fee rule reads them and steps the fee down permanently as the coin proves itself.
The coin stops being the product and becomes part of one.
The catalog is open
None of those examples requires a new version of Frontier. The interfaces are public and permissionless: anyone writes a block, deploys it, and any creator can point a coin at it. Nothing has to be approved by us for it to work on-chain, and nothing has to ship in an app release for a creator to select it.
That is where the space stops being enumerable, and it is the reason the catalog is built to grow rather than to be complete. What exists today covers what most coins need; what comes next is written by whoever needs it.
One thing to plan for: a coin's blocks are bound at creation. Wiring a coin into an application is a decision made when the coin is created, not a connection added later.
The limits that make it usable
An open extension layer is only acceptable because the hook bounds what any block can do. No extension can stop a trade, hold anyone's funds, push a fee past 10% outside a declared sniper tax window, or touch the protocol's share and the share promised to liquidity providers. A block that fails is skipped by the pool contract on the swap where it fails, automatically, with nobody to notify and no switch to reach.
The app lists coins whose blocks have been reviewed and marks the ones running anything else. The chain accepts both; only the presentation differs.
Safety constraints is the full list, Extension system is how the sockets work in detail, and Developers is where writing one starts.