In the beginning…

So back in 2024 I got interested in how to make a memecoin, not to make money or scream wen Moon but from a technical point of view, I wanted to know how it worked because put simply I didn't understand.

So one evening I had some time to research and decided to give it a go, I downloaded Ubuntu and started messing around and before I knew it I had created WhiskCoin (WSK) on Solana. I chose it as a nod to my dog who I used to debug with on walks when doing my development work and troubleshooting code. It was surprisingly easy to do, I then struggled to make it immutable with Ubuntu so switched to Smithi which allowed me to use an interface rather than use a console. As I still didn't really know what I was doing I didn't add a website or socials or even a good description just "Fun token to help me learn blockchain technology" which fit what I was doing. Why Solana? why not? it was easy and for me doing an experiment low fees and fast transaction won I already held Solana personally as well which helped my decision.

So what do you do with 100 Billion WSK just sat in my wallet…. I had no idea of how it became tradable or any of the pitfalls etc so I then started digging into this. I quickly started to understand the mechanics having a background in Tradfi previously. After some research I decided to put some into a pool on Raydium paired to Sol at 0.25% fee. I wont lie I felt incredibly proud seeing the first buy and incredibly sad seeing the first sell I think this is pretty normal in this space for first time devs.

So now WSK was at 3k MC (amazing I know lol) and I had a ton of supply I started to lookup what I like to refer to as the memecoin playbook. What was everyone else doing to make these things a success? Now again I wasn’t looking to make millions far from it I wanted to try to make something safe and easy for people like me to move from CEX to DEX as an experiment. It worked nicely for people who trust me a few friends bought after I explained how it worked and this was nice. Again it was educational for me and I was never promising a return just spitting facts.

When it inevitably didn't take off it put a damper on my experiment a little as volume helps with experimenting or so I thought. I added a second pool on Meteora at 1% to see how Meteora worked and if it was easier than Raydium and what I saw truly opened my eyes.. Arbitration happened. Now for those who don't know 70% I think of trades are executed by bots on Solana or that was the rough number when I looked it up. Arb bots are the ones that caught my attention their job is to balance pools and scrape a profit so if they can buy $1 in pool A and sell it for $1.01 in pool B they will and take the small profit. This happens a lot and I really do mean a lot and I noticed it got me fees, this is important for later.

As retail didn't come here I did something I now consider to be distasteful I started bullposting on X….. Now I have nothing against hype projects in the main but there are far too many rug pulls, pump and dumps cabals etc and fomo is the death of intellect it stops you from doing research and due diligence as there is a clock on your decision. I didn't like this aspect but tried to build an audience, I did start with some educational posts which was more my style how to check for locked liquidity and so on and so forth. However looking back at this period I feel it was a mistake to go to socials so early I should have carried on building and researching.

Now the mistakes themselves, I tried to post daily gm and gn posts lots of memes invites to the community got some shillers got posts retweeted by large accounts. All of which was cringeworthy to me and the sheer amount of people trying to rip me off or get me to pay them for some service was insane. There are good actors out there and I still chat to a few who supported me shout out to @RAnimetrixxxxx who has supported the project and always been interested in discussing the mechanics and what I want to achieve.

These discussions actually encouraged me to find my niche as it were, I said before I worked in Tradefi I am also an experienced analyst and currently work as a consultant. With this experience I started diving deeper into how to protect against pump and dumps as this was my main concern at this low MC, and this is when the project really changed shape. I stopped looking at this like a degen or crypto enthusiast and started looking at it like a consultant with a problem to solve and real constraints.

From here it turned into a proper rabbit hole, spreading liquidity across different pairs, testing fee tiers, building a bot to automate fee harvesting and reinvestment, learning the hard way why DLMMs are genuinely scary on a memecoin, and eventually running three separate automated bots each with their own wallet and their own job. I made a properly expensive rookie error along the way as well, ask me about the time I forgot to cap a bot's spending and it burned an entire runway in about 5 minutes. But the short version is it worked, fees started funding buybacks, buybacks started funding liquidity and liquidity started funding more fees.

That's really the shape of this whole thing, a passion project, an education experiment into complex liquidity management on a memecoin, built by someone who genuinely didn't know what he was doing at the start and figured it out by breaking things in public. I will add to this properly over the next few posts, how I picked the pools, how the bots actually got built including that 1 SOL disaster, why stable pairs turned out to matter more than I expected, and why external capital sources like JitoSOL and the engine pools ended up being the real unlock.

To be clear this is not an advertisement to buy said memecoin there is no promise of a return and this is not financial advice. To be crystal clear this is an experiment not an investment if you decide to buy off your own back you could lose all the money you put in.