The Trench Thesis

The venues got rich. The trenches didn't.

Why we built a place to trade any Solana coin and launch new ones that is built to pay the people who carry a coin: the creators who build them, the holders who hold them and the bagworkers who bring the buyers. Written to be held against us.

1. Where we are

One launchpad makes roughly four in five new Solana coins, and in August 2026 it made nine in ten. On a busy day it mints twenty-five to thirty-five thousand of them, and fewer than two in a hundred ever graduate. On its bonding curve it keeps 0.95 of every 1.25 percent traded; the creator gets 0.30. Since October 17, 2026, trades placed through its own app and website pay another 0.45 percent on top. Holders are paid only when a creator gives up their own fees to them. In July 2025 it said an airdrop was coming soon. Sixteen months later it has not come.

In October 2026 it brought on a trader as a creative partner and ran an ad announcing it. A coin minted seventy-eight seconds before the ad sent every creator fee to an address bearing the trader's name, and its three-hour-old deployer bought seventy-nine percent of the supply. Two days later a second coin, promoted with a post its co-founder reposted, peaked near fifteen million dollars; about thirty minutes later the post was gone and the coin fell more than ninety-five percent. Within days the launchpad was offering two and a half million dollars to the groups that made the most profit trading over two weeks.

The terminals most traders use charge about one percent a trade and keep most of it. The most generous cashback programs hand back up to about a third of the fee, usually less.

None of that is a secret. The trenches know it, say it every day, and keep trading there anyway, because that is where the bots index and the volume lives. That is the whole moat: not the product, the habit.

2. What we believe

The fee belongs to the people who generate it. A trade happens because someone built the coin and someone else believed in it loudly. The venue is plumbing. Plumbing should take a plumber's cut and pass the rest on, on a schedule written down before the first buy, with a receipt for every trade that shows where its fee went.

Reach is real, payroll is poison. A KOL with talent and an audience earns what the chain pays them for being early and being right. The moment a venue pays a face to shill, every call from that face is an ad and every holder is the product. We will never sponsor a launch, never pay a KOL, never run a prize pool for whales. Not as policy. As a rule we would have to break in public. Bagworkers are not payroll: anyone can be one, nobody is picked, and what they earn is set by a public formula from the buyers and traders they actually bring.

Trust is a contract setting, not a badge. Any launchpad can print a green checkmark. We would rather remove the rug button. Locked liquidity, vested creator supply, revoked authorities, and a fee curve that makes sniping the first block a losing trade are things the program enforces, not things we promise.

Everything we claim must be checkable by a stranger. Our pool configs are public accounts on Solana. Our score for any coin, including ours, is a public API, and its hit rate against real outcomes is published as each outcome window closes, bad numbers included. Our reward schedule is a published formula with on-chain payouts. Where something is held by Trench rather than enforced by a program, we say so. If you cannot verify it, we have not said it.

3. How Trench works

Trading any Solana coin

Trench is a trading terminal for every Solana coin, not only the ones launched here. Coins from every launchpad sit in one feed next to Trench coins, scored the same way.

• CustodyNone. You connect your own wallet, or use the Trench wallet created with your account, and sign your own trades. One-click trading approves a signer that can only swap Trench coins on their curve into your own wallet; it has no size cap. Sell orders on other coins and event exits use a separate signer with sell-only access, and everything it signs lands in your own wallet. Either one is revoked in one tap.
• FeesCoins from other launchpads: half a percent to Trench, or a quarter to Trench and a quarter to the bagworker who brought you, plus network fees. Trench coins: the pool fee described below, and Trench adds nothing on top. Trades route through Jupiter. When a coin trades on a Meteora pool, Trench also quotes that pool directly and goes straight to it only when that leaves you with at least as much, counting Meteora's referral share, which then comes to you. When Jupiter's direct route cannot build a trade, Jupiter's Ultra router carries it; Jupiter then keeps a fifth of Trench's half percent and may add its own fee. The trade screen shows every fee line before you sign.
• What comes backOn a Trench coin's bonding curve, the trade's referral slot names the bagworker who brought you (after the first ninety seconds) or, if none did, your own wallet, so Meteora's referral share of the fee goes to them or to you in the same transaction. When Trench routes a graduated Trench coin or another coin straight to its Meteora pool, the slot names you. When a trade earns a backrun rebate, the rebate goes to the wallet that signed, not to Trench.
• ReceiptsEvery trade is listed on your Bags page with what it cost (pool or platform fee, network fee, any tip, any Jupiter fee) and what came back (referral share, rebates), read from the transaction itself.
• SendingTrades Trench sends go out through Helius MEV Protect, which keeps them away from validators flagged for sandwiching; trades carried by Jupiter's Ultra router use Jupiter's own protection. The fast lane, a paid tip to land faster, is off unless you turn it on.
• FollowFollow any Solana wallet and see its trades live, with Buy same on each one. Trench does not copy trades for you. Event exits can sell for you when a coin's dev sells, any of its top ten holders dumps, a linked wallet cluster sells, or the coin migrates (Trench and pump.fun coins).
• Sell ordersOn any coin, including a Trench coin that has graduated, a sell can wait for a market cap you set, a take profit, a stop loss, a trailing stop or a new all-time high, and then sell a quarter, half or all of what you hold. Prices are read every five seconds, and a trigger has to hold on two reads in a row (three on the way down) before it fires. The sell routes through Jupiter and is refused if it would return less than seventy-five percent of Jupiter's own quote. Orders last seven days. On a thin pool a stop can still fill far below where it was set. Trench coins still on their curve keep their own orders.
• Trench ScoreA free read of any Solana coin, graded A to F: authorities, holder concentration, who bought in the creation slot, linked wallet clusters on the bubble map, whether the top wallets share a funder, anything modified in the coin's settings, where the liquidity sits, and the creator's dev record. Coins under 50 holders or under 24 hours old are graded B at most. A coin whose dev is graded Rugger is graded D at most, and a Serial dev with half or more of three or more checked coins falling ninety percent within a day caps it at C. It runs on our own coins too. Its hit rate against real outcomes is published at /score/accuracy as each outcome window closes. Tag @ATrenchLyfeBot under a post on X and it replies with the coin's Score card and says how it found the coin. A browser extension shows the score next to Solana addresses on X and trading sites; it can be downloaded at /extension. Paste a dev's wallet at /score to see their dev record.
• PerpsOn the website only, outside the United States and regions Hyperliquid restricts: leveraged longs and shorts executed by Hyperliquid from an account only you control, funded from Solana through the Relay bridge. Trench adds 0.05 percent per filled order on top of Hyperliquid's own fee. Signed orders pass through Trench's server for an eligibility and fee check and are forwarded unchanged. An account that shows a US signal, or that connects through a VPN, proxy or hosted server, cannot open perps; if it already has positions, it can only close them. Withdrawals go straight to Hyperliquid and the bridge, so a restriction never holds your money. Trench coins are not offered as perps; a coin needs deep, hard-to-move liquidity before a perp on it is safe.

Launching on Trench: what the program enforces

Every Trench coin is created against one of a few public on-chain configurations, listed below. These rules are not a terms-of-service page. They are what the Meteora Dynamic Bonding Curve program will and will not allow for a coin created with those config keys.

• LiquidityAt graduation, one hundred percent of the pool liquidity is permanently locked, half to the creator's position and half to Trench's. Nobody, including us, can withdraw it. Fees from that locked liquidity are still paid out.
• Creator supplyEvery Trench coin sets aside five percent of its supply for the person who created it. They cannot touch it at launch. It stays locked inside the program until the coin graduates, then unlocks slowly on a fixed schedule written into the coin before anyone buys:
  
  The cliff. For the first three days after graduation, nothing unlocks. Zero. The creator cannot sell a single token from their allocation during the most fragile window in a coin's life, when the new pool is thin and everyone is watching.
  
  The vest. Starting on day four, one thirtieth of the allocation unlocks each day for thirty days. That is about 1.67 million tokens a day, roughly 0.17 percent of total supply. A creator who wants to sell can only ever sell a small slice at a time, so there is no single moment where five percent of supply hits the market at once.
  
  What it looks like. For a coin that graduates on day 0: days 1 to 3, 0 percent unlocked. Day 4, 3.3 percent of the creator's allocation. Day 18, half. Day 33, all of it. The creator can always hold instead of claiming; unlocked is not the same as sold.
  
  The schedule is enforced by the Meteora program, not by us. We cannot shorten it for anyone, including ourselves. (Changed November 2, 2026, before any coin graduated: thirty daily unlocks instead of ninety, and a three-day cliff instead of seven.)
• Anti-snipeThe trading fee starts at thirty percent in the first second and decays to one percent over ninety seconds. A bundle that buys the first block pays the community for the privilege. A creator's dev buy made inside the launch transaction skips the anti-snipe fee and pays the normal one percent.
• AuthoritiesMint authority, freeze authority, and metadata are immutable from the first block. Supply cannot be inflated, wallets cannot be frozen, the ticker cannot be swapped.
• FeesA one percent base fee on the curve after the anti-snipe window and on the graduated pool, plus Meteora's volatility fee, which can add up to a fifth more in fast markets. Of every fee, the Meteora protocol takes twenty percent; that is the one cut we do not control, and we say so here. The other eighty percent splits evenly: forty to the coin's creator and forty to the platform share, which is paid out under the reward formula below. Per one hundred dollars of fees: forty to the creator, sixteen to holders, twelve to bagworkers, twelve to Trench, twenty to Meteora. Half of Trench's twelve goes into the coin's Diamond Hands Pool (below). After graduation the same split comes from the two halves of the locked pool position: the creator's half pays the creator, and Trench's half pays the platform share once Trench claims its fees. Meteora pays four of its twenty to whoever is named in the trade's referral slot (see What comes back, above).
• Early-dev curveA creator's first four Trench launches use a separate public config that gives the creator eighty-five percent of the non-Meteora share on the bonding curve instead of half. Per one hundred dollars of curve fees: sixty-eight to the creator, twenty to Meteora, 4.80 to holders, 3.60 to bagworkers and 3.60 to Trench. The creator's 0.68 percent of each trade is more than double the incumbent's bonding-curve creator share of 0.30 percent. After graduation, these coins split pool fees like every other Trench coin. Launches are counted per account; from the fifth on, the standard config applies, unless the creator's dev record is Clean. A creator whose dev record is Rugger gets the standard config from the first launch (from November 8, 2026).
• RevivalRetired November 8, 2026. Trench no longer revives old coins. The one revival coin that launched ($AMC, revival #2) was cancelled before graduation: no claims will open, and its fifteen percent reserve stays locked in the coin's curve.
• GraduationAbout eighty-two SOL raised on the curve (about sixty-nine on the revival configs, whose reserved fifteen percent is never sold on the curve), then an automatic migration to a Meteora DAMM v2 pool. A two percent graduation fee is split evenly between the creator and Trench's partner wallet.

Config keys, verifiable on any Solana explorer. Standard: 9PyXvyqQBoe9xjjLDqeB8woM6v5qrvpus97ZMWRDKK5Z. Early-dev: GqidKBkT5ugdUWvdxK3FirCLJLxLe2Qp2PSioWub91hH, identical except for the creator's share on the curve. Revival: GB9p15j35diJ3xHjNwzxDSELV6tXG2DSA9sUVrrmX3vG and 3mixEKenerKcakcfidFB566DX3M9A5AMjp6fKVoVix2G, the same two recipes with fifteen percent of supply held back; revival is retired, and they stay listed because the one coin launched on them is still a Trench coin. Kept for the record: CFpVRygVsp2SmYWJThMjUZhGBe7rtZWWnwbDarTPRTG7 hosts one test coin; BdnnYbzBzecZptnpuTNQDD6v2VQUvKYLDgTVeBoFoyHA was never used.

Launching on Trench: what Trench decides and holds

These are Trench's rules, not the program's. They run on our servers and wallets, every move those wallets make is public, and the coin page shows the data behind each one.

• Dev recordEvery creator is graded New, Clean, Serial or Rugger from their launches on Trench and the major Solana launchpads, with wallets linked by first funding and by a shared Trench login, so a fresh wallet carries the old history. The grade sets the launch terms: Clean keeps the early-dev curve on every launch, Serial and Rugger get one launch every twenty-four hours, and Rugger gets the standard config from the first launch and cannot add a Dev bond. A label holds until the numbers clear a wider margin, so a dev near a line does not flip back and forth. Trench Score stops a coin's grade at C when its creator can withdraw the pool's liquidity, unless the dev record is Clean, and at D when the dev is Rugger. The feed can hide coins from Serial or Rugger devs. Labels are automated readings and can be wrong; a dev who disagrees can send the wallet through Feedback for review.
• From a postAnyone can launch a coin from a post by sending it to the Trench bot on Telegram, or by replying @ATrenchLyfeBot launch $TICKER under a post on X. When the post is someone else's, twenty percent of the creator's fee share is held for the person who posted it until they sign in with that account and claim it. Per one hundred dollars of fees on a standard coin that is eight to the poster and thirty-two to the creator; on an early-dev curve, 13.60 and 54.40. Not claimed in ninety days, it goes to the coin's holders. This share is held by Trench's claim path, not by the program, and the coin page shows any amount a creator claimed outside it.
• Dev bondOptional. A dev who adds a Dev bond hands the coin's creator role to the Trench bond wallet (GyLfAcEjr3Z7VbXa1tW6kTeDAWXvWaJ22kd4BFHNEcrt) in the launch transaction. For thirty days Trench collects the creator fees, sends the dev fifty percent of each collection in the same transaction, and holds fifty percent as a bond. On day thirty the bond and the creator role go back to the dev. If, during those thirty days, the dev's linked wallets (the launch wallet, wallets it funded or that funded it, wallets sharing its funder, and wallets that bought in its launch block) sell or move more than half of the coins they got, at least half a percent of supply, or remove any liquidity, the bond, any of the dev's fees Trench still holds, and the creator fees until day thirty are credited to holders pro rata, claimed like any other reward. This is a custody arrangement, not a program rule. A Dev bond does not make a coin safe; it makes one kind of dump cost the dev. Holders share only what the bond holds. It is not insurance and will not cover all losses.
• Diamond Hands PoolEvery Trench coin has its own Diamond Hands Pool, one public Solana address shown on the coin page. Half of Trench's own thirty percent of the coin's platform share goes into it, with any dev pledge sent to the Pool and any SOL anyone sends to the address. It pays the coin's holders at graduation and at a one-hour average market cap of $1M, $10M, $100M and $1B, or after ninety days if no milestone is reached, by tokens held times time held inside the window. No wallet cluster takes more than fifteen percent of a payout, what nobody can take stays in the Pool, and every payout vests over seven days. The same wallets are left out as for holder pay. Paid by fixed rules: at a milestone or after 90 days. Not a prize and not a promise of profit. It is not the prize pool section 2 rules out: it pays every eligible holder by the same weights, not the biggest traders. The milestones are levels the rules check, not price targets. Trench holds the Pool address and only Trench's Pool service signs for it; every payout is a public transaction.
• Dev pledgeOptional and public. A creator can pledge ten, fifteen, twenty or twenty-five percent of their creator fees to the coin's Diamond Hands Pool or to its holders' daily pay. It is locked for thirty days: it can be raised any time and lowered or ended only after that, and every change is shown with its date. To enforce it, the pledge turns on only after the creator hands the coin's creator role to the Trench bond wallet. From then on only Trench's bond service collects the creator fees, and each collection sends the pledged share on, then any share held for the original poster of a coin launched from a post, then the rest to the creator, in the same transaction. When the pledge ends after the lock, the role goes back to the creator. The coin shows "Dev pays holders" with the percent.
• AirdropsCreators and holders can airdrop a Trench coin they hold to its holders, to holders of another coin, or to their own list, with filters that skip launch snipers and fresh buyers. Their wallet signs every transfer, Trench never holds the tokens, and every drop is public on the airdrop ledger.

Who gets paid, and how

Holders. The platform's share of trading fees on every Trench coin is split three ways: forty percent to that coin's holders, thirty percent to its bagworkers, thirty percent to Trench. It is a fee rebate, not interest, and Trench shows no APY. The holder share is divided each day, by Eastern time, by tokens held times hours held times Hold Age, read from hourly snapshots: one times for new tokens, rising in straight lines to one and a half at a day held, two at three days and three at seven days. Each hour counts at the lower of the two snapshots around it, so buying just before a snapshot and selling just after earns nothing. A sell uses up the newest tokens first, a transfer out counts as a sell, and tokens a wallet receives start at age zero. Each day's pay vests seventy-two hours after it settles; selling before then forfeits the same share of the unvested pay to the holders who stayed. Pools, programs, the coin's creator, the dev cluster, launch snipers and bundlers, exchange wallets and Trench's own wallets are excluded, and a wallet needs at least 0.1 percent of supply to count. The full rules are at /rules/holder-rewards, and each settled day's ledger is posted on chain as one Merkle root, in a memo from the partner wallet, that anyone can check any wallet's rows against at /api/v1/earn/proof?wallet=<wallet>&day=<YYYY-MM-DD>. Rewards are claimed to a linked wallet and paid in SOL. Every settled day and every payout signature is public on the rewards ledger (raw data).

Bagworkers: how Trench knows who moved a coin. A bagworker is anyone with a Trench account who turns on bagworking and shares their own link: a coin link like trenchlyfe.fun/r/yourname/coin, or the general recruit link trenchlyfe.fun/r/yourname. Nobody applies and nobody is picked. Posts, likes and follower counts are never counted. The chain does the counting:

1. The link. When someone opens your link, their browser remembers your name for seven days. If they open another bagworker's link within 24 hours, the first link keeps them; after that the newer link wins, until they sign up or trade.

2. The trade. When they buy a Trench coin on its curve through Trench, after the first ninety seconds, your name rides inside the trade itself, in the referral slot. Anyone can see it on an explorer. The buyer pays the same price either way, and Meteora pays you its four percent of the pool fee the moment the trade lands.

3. The daily coin share. Each day, the bagworker share of a coin's platform fee goes to bagworkers in proportion to how much their buyers are still holding, checked every hour. A buyer who sells stops counting the hour they sell. You are paid for bringing holders, not volume.

4. Your traders, for life. A trader who signs up or makes a first trade within seven days of opening any of your links is bound to you for good. From then on you earn 0.12 percent of every trade they make in a Trench coin, on its bonding curve or in its graduated pool, wherever they place it (Trench, Axiom, GMGN or a bot: Trench reads every trade on its pools from the chain), and 0.25 percent of every trade they make on another coin through Trench. The trader pays nothing extra; it comes out of fees Trench already collects. On a Trench coin it comes from that coin's bagworker share first, then holders, then Trench, and never exceeds the fee the coin earned that day. On another coin it is at most half of Trench's fee on that trade.

Guardrails. You cannot refer yourself, the coin's creator cannot be referred, Trench's own wallets do not count, and a trader whose wallet was funded from the same wallet as yours, or that funded yours, does not count. Trades in the first ninety seconds, the anti-snipe window, do not count. For the daily coin share, each buyer counts for at most what they bought through your link, capped at 0.25 percent of supply; you must hold the coin yourself, at least 0.05 percent of supply or half a SOL's worth; and one bagworker takes at most thirty percent of a coin's daily share. That cap is permanent. Anything not earned goes to that coin's holders the same day. Lifetime pay has no per-bagworker cap. Everything settles daily, by Eastern time, and is claimed like any other reward.

Creators. Forty of every hundred dollars in fees on their coin, sixty-eight on the curve for early-dev and Clean creators, half of the graduation fee, and their vested supply. Creators claim their fees on chain whenever they want, except while a Dev bond holds the creator role, and can split them with collaborators.

4. What we will not do

We will not launch a platform token to pump our own fees. We will not run buybacks funded by the people we are supposed to be paying. We will not promise an airdrop. We will not take a creator's fee share hostage behind a dashboard. We will not list a coin on our front page because someone paid us to. If any of that changes, this page changes first, with a date on it.

5. What is live and what is not yet

Live (as of November 9, 2026): trading any Solana coin in one feed; launching on the configs above; Trench Score and the dev record; fee receipts, the referral share to traders and rebates to the signer; the reward distributor, the daily bagworker share and lifetime pay for bagworkers; following, event exits and sell orders on any coin; perps on the website outside restricted regions (the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, the European Economic Area and sanctioned countries are restricted); creator airdrops; the Dev bond; holder rewards rules version 2 (Hold Age, seventy-two hour vesting, the Diamond Hands Pool on every Trench coin and Dev pledges, from November 8, 2026); launching from a post on Telegram and X; the Trench Score bot on X (@ATrenchLyfeBot); feed filters that hide coins from Serial and Rugger devs; and Trench on Telegram: a public channel, a chat, a bot that posts launches, graduations and big buys, and a Mini App that opens Trench inside Telegram.

Not yet: no real Trench coin has graduated or settled a rewards day, so the rewards ledger shows only our own test coins and nothing has been paid out yet. The score accuracy page updates daily and shows a rate only for outcome windows that have closed: the first one-day windows close on November 8 and the first seven-day windows on November 14. The iPhone app is in testing and not yet on the App Store. The browser extension is not yet in the Chrome Web Store; it can be downloaded from our site. Buying SOL with a card through MoonPay is built and runs in test mode until MoonPay approves it.

Next: a public index of who bought before they posted and who posted before they bought. Bagworkers from the trenches advise us unpaid: early access and a name on the wall, no pay, no token.

6. How to hold us to it

Read the configs. Score our coins. Check any trade's receipt. Read the score accuracy page on the days it is wrong. Watch the partner wallet and the bond wallet. If a Trench coin ever rugs in a way this page says it cannot, post the signature and tag us. We will answer in public or we deserve to lose the trenches. That is the deal.

Sources for section 1

• Launch share, daily launches and graduation rate: Bitquery, A year of Solana launchpads; pump.fun graduation rate analysis.
• Fee split on the curve: pump.fun's published fee table, github.com/pump-fun/pump-public-docs. App and website fee from October 17, 2026: TokenPost.
• Holder rewards from creator fees: KuCoin News.
• The airdrop: Protos.
• The October 2026 partner coins: The Defiant; Cryptopolitan via Cryptonews.
• The co-founder's repost and the trading competition: Protos.
• Terminal fees and cashback: trenchfees.com and each terminal's own fee page.

Changes to this page

v2.4, November 8, 2026. Graveyard revival is retired. Trench no longer revives old coins. Revival #2 ($AMC) was cancelled before graduation; no claims will open, and its reserve stays locked in the coin's curve. Revival launches are off the live list.

v2.4, November 9, 2026. The Dev bond now holds fifty percent of the creator fees for thirty days, up from twenty-five; the dev receives the other fifty percent as fees are collected. Bonds started before this date keep the split they were set with. Dev bond rule version 2.

v2.3, November 8, 2026. The Diamond Pot is now called the Diamond Hands Pool. Same rules, same addresses, same rules version.

v2.2, November 8, 2026. Brought up to date with what is live. The Trench Score bot on X and launching from an X post are live. Added sell orders on any coin, the Rugger cap on the Score, the once-a-day launch limit for Rugger devs as well as Serial ones, and the feed filters for Serial and Rugger devs. The Diamond Pot row now uses the fixed rule wording and says only Trench's pot service signs for the pot. The Dev pledge row says the pledge starts only after the creator role is handed over and that a poster's held share is paid before the creator's. The holder paragraph adds the lower-snapshot rule for each hour, age zero for tokens a wallet receives, and where to check the daily proof. The fee row says half of Trench's share funds the Diamond Pot and how the graduated pool splits.

v2.1, November 8, 2026. Holder rewards rules version 2: holder pay weighted by Hold Age and vesting after seventy-two hours, the Diamond Pot on every Trench coin, and the optional Dev pledge. The Diamond Pot row says plainly why it is not the prize pool section 2 rules out.

v2, November 8, 2026. Rewritten now that Trench trades any Solana coin, not only its own launches. Section 1 updated to current figures, with sources. Program-enforced launch rules separated from what Trench decides and holds. Lifetime bagworker pay now stated for graduated pools as well as the curve. The early-dev share stated for the bonding curve, where it applies. Perps location rules added. Status rewritten to say plainly what is live and what is not yet.

v1, November 2, 2026. First published. Dated changes made between November 2 and 8 are recorded in the changelog.