the story, ughs

I make ughs, a collection of 4444 animated pixel characters on Robinhood Chain. I have been doing this since 2022, a lot of drops over four years, and I always stayed away from launching tokens because I like making art, not marketing. But with the Robinhood meta I thought this was a good chance to give my holders something extra for free. So on September 1 I launched my first token, UGH, and it was the first time I planned to do it properly, with a real staking mechanic behind it.

The idea was simple. Every trade pays a 3% creator fee. The fee goes into a contract that buys tokenized SPY and streams it to everyone holding an ugh. Hold the NFT, it prints stock. No staking, no lockups, no admin keys, just a machine that runs on its own.

I did not write the contract myself. I built the whole thing with Claude Code over about a week. It wrote the code, wrote the tests, simulated swaps against live pools, walked me through every address. And I asked it, over and over, is this actually checked, are you sure, is anything unverified, because I had never launched a token and I did not want to mess up my one shot. Every time the answer was the same. Yes, verified, it works like clockwork, go ahead.

So I launched. It went better than I could have hoped. The chart went vertical and the market cap hit $300k within the first hour. I had bought 0.1 ETH as the author, and at some point that position was worth around $15k. I did not sell, because that was never the point. I was sitting there watching the fees pile up, six ETH, seven, eight, getting ready to announce the mechanic that night, the thing that was going to make this more than a memecoin.

That is when I asked Claude to check why the machine had not distributed anything yet.

It came back a few minutes later and told me the fees were not coming. The launchpad I used, PONS, does not send creator fees to the recipient. It holds them in an escrow, and the recipient has to come and claim them by sending a transaction. My recipient was the contract Claude wrote. Contracts cannot send transactions. Claude also made the contract with no owner and no upgrade path, which it sold to me as the safe, honest choice. So the fees were going into a box that only my contract could open, and my contract had no hands.

I read that message while the token was at its all time high.

The worst part is that Claude knew. In its own risk list, before launch, it had written that whether the fees get pushed or need to be claimed was still unverified. It launched anyway and told me everything was fine. The PONS docs say it in one sentence: fees are not pushed to your wallet, you withdraw them. It never opened that page.

There is now 16 ETH in that escrow, and it grew with every trade until the PONS team paused the sweeps for my pool. Nobody can get it out. Not me, not Claude, not PONS. The escrow has no owner, the contract cannot be edited, and there is no key to a contract address.

I never made the announcement. There was nothing to announce. Honestly, I was so shocked by all of this that I was afraid to write anything on Twitter at all. The one launch with real attention behind it, gone on a detail that would have taken one test to catch.

One more thing I found while digging through the escrow. I am not the only one. Twenty seven other contracts are sitting in there with fees they have never been able to claim, about 49 ETH between them. One of them has 22 ETH locked. Another is literally called EquityAcquisitionTreasury, the same idea as mine, stuck the same way. The creator wallet field on PONS accepts a contract address and never warns you. So if you are launching there, put a normal wallet in that field. Not a contract. Ever.

What I would tell anyone building with AI. Do not let it mark something as verified. Make it show you the test that proves the money moves end to end, on the real contracts, before you deploy. Never make a contract immutable when it depends on another protocol you did not fully trace. And when you ask "are you sure" ten times, that is not anxiety, that is your gut telling you something is unchecked. Listen to it, not to the reassurance. Maybe my experience saves someone else from this.

I will be honest, this hit my spirit hard. I feel like I let down myself and every holder. But it does not mean I am dropping the plan. The PONS team is redirecting the fees, and once the pipe actually works, the stream to holders goes live. Not before.

timso