$RED, what really happened?

Firstly I would like to apologize for the shitshow and explain fully transparently what happened with $RED.

The Plan:

We have wanted to make a coin since we first implemented profiles on our website in 2021, right now we thought was a great opportunity to do it during the bull market, inspired by BOME we saw a lot of NFT projects around our size jumping in and we decided to go through with it.

Instead of launching a meme coin, we wanted to create a 'culture' token with exciting utility and turn it into a creative hotspot on SOL.

In general, we saw SOL as the first chain out of ETH we would like to expand and get more people to experience what we do, more precisely we planned to launch our web3 printer dApp to enable artists to print physicals natively on SOL.

On top of that we aimed to also document SOL culture and historical events through our cover art as we do on ETH with the Redlion Gazette and giving it a twist where we create an infrastructure with AI for people to be able to launch their own magazines on SOL easily.

Before the launch:

We hardcapped the presale to $1M which is a reasonable raise for our size we didn't aim to raise more and shit goes out of hand. Also, we wanted the supporters to have upside potential.

We created 2 test tokens and did extensive testing, we had every detail nailed down to the tee, Pool - Burn - Multisend, and it all worked as intended, we then processed refunds that were over the hardcap and Multisend worked perfectly.

• Why 50% was set aside from the presale?

I would like to address that the language on the presale tweet wasn't as clear as we thought, we were raising 50% for the token and 50% for the development of what I mentioned above.

The thread I made about it yesterday was more clear on the use of the funding. On hindsight this is what enabled refunds though.

• Why we launched the pool before airdrop?

The reason we didn't do sending first and then LP is that anyone would have been able to create a pool and that's risky, our goal was to ensure a healthier trading environment from the start to all presale holders, sadly that backfired when we failed to fully fulfill the airdrops timely.

What went wrong:

Token launched, created a market, provided the LP, and burned it, so far so good and as fast as possible to start the airdrop, and here's where things took a left turn, while Multisend worked perfectly with the refunds earlier, with the airdrop, some of the transactions failed and some went through.

After this, we had to create a CSV with only the addresses that didn't get anything and the correct allocation, Solana does not show failed tx data so we had to make sure everything was straight and it required a lot of work under heavy fire where excitement turned into fud instantly.

We stayed up all night fixing it, once we had a new list we had to try a new approach than the first attempt, breaking it up to 85 different CSV files so we would stay on top of failed txs, however we had to allow ample time between each tx to avoid double sending.

After all the tokens were airdropped, we decided to proceed with refunding 50% of the presale

50% SOL refunded. 50% burned liquidity.

• What happens now?

As detailed above we had some ambitious plans for $RED development on SOL, we will adjust those ideas into something creative and fun we can do with the coin, with some exciting tokenomics too, we truly believe that every challenge also presents an opportunity.

We have been consistent with our work and our mission throughout the years and this hasn’t changed because of a wobbly launch Only way from here is to keep moving forward with the same passion.

Final Thoughts:

We tried to do something new, we did everything we could to rectify the situation as fast as we could and we never intended for the launch to turn out like that, shit happens... lesson learned now.

What matters now is how we steer the ship and step up as a community.

I would like to send my love and appreciation to all the Redlions who were with us during these challenging times and supported us through the night.