Every so often, someone I respect in this space sends me a message that boils down to the same question, phrased a hundred different ways. You've spent months writing about Bittensor. You read subnet contracts, you pull chain data, you interview builders. So what exactly are you doing launching a token?
It is a fair question, and I would rather answer it first than have it answered for me.
I write about this ecosystem for a living, in the loose sense that anyone in crypto "makes a living." I have covered subnets that shipped real products, subnets that shipped decks with token contracts attached, and at least one project whose product was live while its network was, charitably, a costume. Through all of it, I kept running into the same asymmetry. The tokens that do something mechanically interesting get launched with no explanation, no website, no accountability, and no memory. The projects that explain themselves beautifully often have nothing underneath the explanation.
This project is my attempt to close that gap, from the side I actually stand on.
Most memecoins are a restaurant with no kitchen. There is a menu, a cash register, a line of people at the door, and absolutely nothing cooking. The entire product is the belief that more people will join the line.
Earlier this year, a token appeared on Solana that did have a kitchen. It took a 3% fee on every transfer, converted that fee into TAO, and distributed the TAO to its holders. The mechanic worked. It worked well enough that the token found hundreds of holders and real volume, entirely on the strength of the mechanism itself.
And that is all it had. No website. No documentation. No explanation of what TAO was, why it mattered, or what the holder was actually receiving. No way for a newcomer to verify a single claim without already knowing how to read a Solana transaction. The kitchen worked, and nobody could see it.
I kept waiting for someone to build the scaffolding around that mechanic, because it is one of the more honest designs a token can have. Nobody did. So I stopped waiting.
Let me walk through the mechanism in plain English, because this is the part that most launches deliberately leave vague.
Vermilion launches on a bonding curve on Solana, through Stonkfun. A bonding curve means there is no presale and no insider allocation window. Everyone who buys, buys from the same curve, at a price set by how much has been bought before them. I buy from the same curve as you do.
On every transfer of the token, a 3% fee is taken. That fee is not paid to me. There is no creator fee in this design at all. The fee is converted into TAO (the Solana representation of Bittensor's native asset, contract address taoC6xyv2v8tDLcev4uaGUgV4vdQsWJrGft2kcBRrBY, bridged via LayerZero), and that TAO is distributed to the people holding the token.
The causal chain looks like this: more trades → more fees → more TAO → more holders receiving TAO → more people who, perhaps for the first time, actually hold and understand Bittensor's asset.
If the curve raises 85 SOL, the token graduates into a liquidity pool on Raydium, and trading continues there with the same fee mechanic. At graduation, the accumulated SOL and the remaining supply are seeded into the pool, and the liquidity is locked (burned). There is no liquidity to pull. There is no rug to pull.
One clarification that matters, because the language in this space is sloppy. Many tokens are described as "paired with" an asset. That only means the asset is what the token trades against, the way a stock trades against dollars. It does not mean holders receive dollars. Vermilion is not merely paired with TAO. Holders are paid in TAO. Those are different sentences, and the second one is the entire point.
I hold approximately 5% of the supply, acquired in a single public dev buy at the bottom of the curve, in one transaction, visible to anyone. The transaction hash is on the site. There is no premine, no second wallet, no allocation that appears later under a different address.
[At launch, this section carries the exact figures: the amount spent, the tokens received, and the transaction signature.]
I control the website, the writing, and nothing else worth mentioning. I cannot mint more supply. I cannot freeze a wallet. I cannot change the 3% fee. Those authorities are renounced, and the receipts are on-chain where you can check them rather than take my word for it.
There is a difference between "trust me" and "here is the address." This project is built entirely out of the second one.
I cover this ecosystem skeptically, and I would be a hypocrite not to turn the same light on myself. So here is the honest case against this token, stated as plainly as I can state it.
It is still a memecoin. The 3% mechanic produces TAO rewards, but it does not produce a floor under the token's price. If trading volume dries up, the rewards dry up with it, and what remains is a token whose value is whatever the next buyer thinks it is. The reward stream is real, and it is also not protection. Those two facts have to be held at the same time.
The rewards are only as good as the asset they are paid in. If TAO itself has a bad market, holders receive an asset having a bad market. The mechanic converts trading activity into TAO; it does not convert it into stability.
And the deepest version of the criticism: launching a token at all, however clean the design, feeds the same attention casino that burns most of the people who walk into it. I have written about that casino. I know exactly what the house edge looks like from the inside, and I know that no amount of transparency changes the fact that most memecoins go to zero and take someone's rent money with them.
I am not going to tell you that this one is different because I say so. I am going to tell you what is different about it, show you the receipts, and let you decide whether the difference matters. That is the same standard I hold everyone else to, and it applies to me twice over.
[To be filled at launch. This section carries the three-bucket record, on the record:
Verifiable on-chain: the 3% transfer fee; the conversion of fees into TAO; the distribution of that TAO to holders; the dev buy and its size; the absence of a creator fee; the renounced authorities; the locked liquidity. Each a transaction or a contract state you can check without trusting me.
What I am telling you (and you are trusting me on): that I have no hidden wallets; that my stake is the single disclosed position and nothing more; that I intend to keep the creator fee at zero permanently; that I will not sell my position before graduation. The first two are checkable in principle and painful to fake in practice, but they are claims about absence, and absence is hard to prove. I state them knowing my name is attached to them.
What nobody can promise you: the token's price; the volume it will attract; the value of TAO tomorrow; whether any of this works as a project rather than as a mechanism. The mechanism can be verified. The outcome cannot. Anyone who tells you otherwise about any token, including this one, is selling you something.]
Here is the thing I actually care about, and the reason this project exists at all.
Vermilion is not another memecoin. We are a community of TAO investors whose job is onboarding people from outside the ecosystem. The token is the entry point, and the website and the Discord are the destination.
The website is a knowledgebase. It hosts a plain-English "What is Bittensor?" page (the origin, the thesis, validators, subnets, incentives, dTAO), my existing articles, and over time, per-subnet pages with links to the projects themselves so you can go see them directly. The goal is that someone arrives because they heard about a token that pays TAO, and leaves understanding what they were just paid in.
The Discord is the living part. It is where people who have been in the system long enough guide the ones who just walked in. Where to claim your first reward. What to read first. Who to ask. The community is not a chatroom attached to a token; the community is the point, and the token is how you find it.
One design detail I want to be deliberate about. We renounced the authorities that touch the money (supply, transfers, the fee). We kept the authority to update our branding and links, because a dead brand can't refresh its face and a living one does. The money keys are gone. The design key stays, as a commitment that we're still here, still iterating, still building.
The simplest way to launch this would have been anonymously. New wallet, new handle, no history, no reputation at risk. That is how most of these are done, and there is a reason for it: anonymity is free insurance against failure.
I chose the opposite, for one reason. A named founder is the only collateral that cannot be faked on-chain. If this project fails, or worse, if it succeeds by deceiving anyone, the cost lands on the same name that sits on months of published work about this ecosystem. I am not going to pretend that is a small thing to wager. It is the whole wager.
My reputation is not a feature of the token. It is the escrow.
But I want to be clear about the handoff, because it matters. My job was to build a token that buys and distributes TAO, to add liquidity to it, and to onboard new users. From here, it is in the community's hands. I hold the original ~5%. I can't control the price action or what happens next, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. The project's own account will carry it forward from here; my name stays attached to the minimum. This is not my token to run. It is the community's to keep.
This is a Solana token that converts 3% of every transfer into TAO and pays it to holders, launched on a bonding curve with no presale, no creator fee, and one disclosed ~5% position, by a writer who covers Bittensor and put his name on the launch because the mechanic deserved scaffolding and nobody was building it. It is not a promise, a floor, or a reason to spend money you cannot lose. It is a mechanism you can verify, attached to a website that will teach you what you are being paid in, and a community of people who have been in the system long enough to guide you, whether or not you ever buy a single token.
The kitchen door is open. Watch it work, or walk past. Both are fine.