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Merry MenMerry MenMerry Men

Community takeovers

“CTO” in meme land is when the original dev disappears (or hands off) and the community takes the coin over. Because Merry Men tokens are inert and liquidity is locked forever, there is nothing on-chain a dev can rug. What a creator actually owns is exactly two rights, and both are transferable independently:

Right Where it lives How it moves
Page control (image, description, socials) Off-chain metadata, write-gated by signature Voluntary handover or holder petition
Fee stream (creator’s share of trading fees) On-chain: LpLocker creator field transferCreator → acceptCreator (two-step, voluntary)

A CTO’d coin shows a CTO badge with the takeover date and mechanism. Note that neither right includes any trading power: there is no privileged control over the token or its liquidity to grant.

Page control (off-chain steward)

Section titled “Page control (off-chain steward)”

The coin page’s controller is the recorded steward, or else the on-chain creator. Control moves two ways.

Voluntary handover

Section titled “Voluntary handover”

The current controller signs a message naming the new steward. Signature only, no transaction. Once handed over, further handovers are the steward’s to make, including handing control back to the creator.

Petition (abandoned coins)

Section titled “Petition (abandoned coins)”

For a coin whose creator has gone silent, holders can petition to install a steward:

  1. Open: any holder (balance > 0) signs to nominate a steward. One live petition per coin.
  2. Back: holders sign to back the nominee. Weight is not captured at backing time.
  3. Veto: the controller can kill the petition at any time with one signature. A veto is proof of life: if the “abandoned” creator can still sign, the premise fails.
  4. Finalize: permissionless, allowed only after a 7-day veto window. Each backer’s current on-chain balance is weighed against 5% of circulating supply (total supply minus the pool’s locked side). Pass → the nominee becomes steward. Short of threshold, the petition stays open until it expires at 30 days.

The petition design resists abuse:

  • Hostile takeover of an active coin: the veto window kills it for free.
  • Sybil: weight is balanceOf, not wallet count.
  • Flash-acquired weight: balances are read at finalize, so weight must be held to the tally; selling after backing removes it.
  • Replay: every message binds token, chain, and a timestamp; back/veto also bind the specific petition.

Fee stream (on-chain)

Section titled “Fee stream (on-chain)”

The creator’s share of trading fees is an on-chain right on the locker: transferCreator(tokenId, newCreator) then acceptCreator(tokenId). It is two-step so a mistyped or non-signing address can’t strand the stream; proposing address(0) cancels a pending transfer.

This moves fee routing only: no path to the position NFT was added, so the liquidity-custody invariant is untouched. It is voluntary only by design: putting hostile seizure of a fee stream on-chain would be a larger trust surface than it is worth.

Selling the fee stream

Section titled “Selling the fee stream”

The same two-step handover powers a fee-stream marketplace: fixed-price sales of the creator fee stream for ETH. It is escrow-free: the seller stays the creator (and keeps earning fees) while listed; a buy re-validates live locker state, flushes accrued fees to the seller, and re-proposes the buyer, who finishes with acceptCreator. Stale listings can only revert, never mis-deliver.

The marketplace (FeeStreamMarket) is live on mainnet. See Contract addresses.

Deliberately out of scope

Section titled “Deliberately out of scope”
  • On-chain or governance seizure of the fee stream.
  • Steward rights beyond page metadata (no trading powers exist to grant).
  • Off-platform socials: an X account cannot be transferred by the protocol; the steward just updates which links the page shows.
Section titled “Related”