Due to a mistake during deployment, the 3rd Airdrop (August 2025) is not possible, so everyone (myself included) will ⅓ less New PKT.
I have been working on the PKT project for almost 6 years, and even as the price has reached all time lows over and over and over, I have continued to push the boulder up the hill because of the people who believed in me. Perversely, I never even sold an appreciable amount of my coins. I’m not much of a “trader” and I’ve always said to myself “if I’m selling now then why am I here?” But even so, I still feel a moral responsibility to the people who did commit resources (one way or another) because of their belief in me.
Since 2022, the PKT project has suffered from a situation of one entity controlling over 50% of the total mining power. This was made worse by the fact that the operator of that mining project threatened on numerous occasions to roll-back blocks and otherwise cause chaos for the blockchain. Over and over it was suggested that he must eventually realize his actions are harming his own assets, but over and over he proved that he didn’t care.
I spent much of the year 2023 focused on building an election system that would use delegated voting to replace the flawed Network Steward, and in early 2024 that project reached its completion. The community at large was largely supportive, and the Network Steward committee accepted a project to pass along funds to whoever was elected by the new voting system. But the terrorist mining pool operator declared that he was going to unilaterally blacklist wallet addresses to freeze their funds.
This was the turning point at which I realized something absolutely had to change, and whatever we did would have to be done in total secrecy so that the blockchain dictator could not take revenge on those supporting it. Spring of 2024 was an exciting time, filled with brainstorming. What we came to was the elegant solution of an Airdrop. We would launch an entirely new token and gift that token to people based on how much legacy PKT they had in their wallets at a particular time. This allowed us to make a clean exit from the legacy PKT project, bringing all of our friends along with us. In the event that somebody wanted to continue the old PKT project, there was really nothing preventing them from doing so, but they would no longer hold power over us.
Deployment Day
Deployment day (or perhaps D-Day for short) was not only one of the most challenging days, but also one of the strangest days I can remember.
It started with me drinking my morning coffee and making a couple of transactions. I custody funds for Anode and Routie so on occasion I am asked to make a transfer. That morning I started my secure device and launched the wallet, as I had done literally hundreds of times before. I prepared the transaction commands and double-checked them, as I had done literally hundreds of times before. I posted the transactions to the network, as I had done literally hundreds of times before. But for the first time in the history of me using PKT, the transactions went missing. They didn’t fail to confirm, they just disappeared.
I checked my peers, suspecting perhaps I was connected to malicious nodes, but the peers I was connected to were run by highly regarded community members - one of my peers was even a node run by me! I closed and restarted the wallet, forcing it to connect only to my node, and I re-posted the transactions again and they went through, but this would be only the first in a day of one-in-a-million events that I struggle to explain without looking beyond the physical.
The plan for Deployment Day was to launch with a small amount of liquidity, check that the launch had gone well, and then enlist a market maker in bringing the rest of the liquidity in while letting price discovery happen naturally. However at the last minute, we received expert advice that we should instead bring all of the liquidity at once. Being new to this space, I was inclined to accept that advice, but that turned out to be a mistake.
Most of Deployment Day was spent checking, double-checking, and triple-checking the configuration for the deployment, and the plan, while waiting for everyone to be ready for a coordinated release. The plan was to deploy about an hour before the public event, just long enough to check that the deployment was correct. But the market maker has issues getting ready, and an hour turned into 30 minutes, and then 15 minutes, and finally the event was just beginning and the deployment hadn’t started.
Finally, we decided we just had to do it, market maker or not. This was where the second freak incident of the day took place. We had deployed numerous times before, both on testnet and also multiple tests on mainnet. But this time, the deployment script decided to crash. Later on, it was identified that the deployment requests were not waiting for a block to complete so it was possible for them to land in the wrong order - but this bug slipped past multiple professional developers and testers. The token, liquidity pool, and LockBox all deployed, and then the script crashed.
But because we had deployed all of the initial liquidity at once, the token immediately began trading. I was on a call with a smart contract expert and I was already late for the event, and it was at this point that I did something that I should not have done - I went off the plan, and I tried to edit the deploy script to skip the first two steps and only do the rest.
The script was not meant to be run in parts, and there were variables which were not set - something I did not have the time or focus to properly notice. I edited the script, ran it again and it did one more step before crashing, and I edited it again to skip that step and fix the issue that crashed it, but in the heat of the moment I didn’t hit save before running.
1,266,383,720 PKT was sent to the Yield Vault. Twice.
That ^C
was the moment my heart sank.
I immediately began discussing with the solidity expert if there was something we could do to turn it back, but the contract had no escape hatch and the token was already actively trading. There was nothing I could do except join the presentation. As I was preparing to go live, the man who contributed the liquidity said to me “You may not believe it, but God has a plan” and after everything that happened that day, those words really stuck with me.
I’m told that I looked like a living human being during that presentation, I felt like a zombie.
The Yield Vault is a contract which gives out yields to the Executor so they can be distributed to the people staking and running infrastructure. The amount of yields that it gives out perfectly matches the amount of coins yielded by the original PKT blockchain, complete with the 100 day decimations. It also has an additional 365 million PKT allocated to those who stake the LP Token. But most importantly, none of its logic depends on how many coins it has, so the additional 1.266 billion PKT that was accidentally sent there will never be yielded. It’s effectively burned.
The additional 1.266 billion PKT that was accidentally sent there will never be yielded. It’s effectively burned.
After the presentation was over, I could barely even look at the deploy script again. I updated the server and opened access to the airdrop signer app, but there were no coins in the airdrop contract so anyone trying to use it would get a failed transaction. There are a total of 3,787,165,551 PKT worth of claims in the Airdrop, plus 563,534,048 PKT meant to go to the exchanges and 100,000,000 that was intended for marketing.
The first thing I did was to send 1 billion coins to the Airdrop so that it would begin functioning. The Airdrop does not need all of the coins to work, but if it is undercapitalized then it could eventually run out. I hadn’t done the math of where the coins needed to go, but I knew I could safely send it 1 billion. Then I put aside the exchange coins so that they would receive everything, and I paid the 100mn to the marketing fund. After this I put 262,388,517 into the Airdrop so that it would have 1,262,388,517 PKT, exactly enough to pay out every possible claim in phase 1. At this point I was left with exactly 1,241,309,993 PKT, just 21,078,524 short of the amount needed to fully capitalize the second phase of the airdrop.
When we designed the New PKT project, we wanted everything to be as similar as possible to the legacy PKT project, right down to the 100 day decimations. As a result, the Yield Vault begins it’s yielding on an even decimation date, i.e. July 19. Because this was from before the date of the deployment, there were some “past yields” that could be claimed by the Executor. At this point the Executor was still the deployment address so I invoked a claim and was awarded 29,982,286 PKT, exactly 8,903,762 PKT more than was needed to capitalize the 2nd phase of the Airdrop. That 8,903,762 was then sent to the bot which sends out the yields.
Where we are now
Until just a few hours ago, there was a lot of uncertainty about what we were going to do. Some people suggested we should re-deploy everything, put everyone back to square one, and allow them to start over. After thinking deeply about this, I decided that the only way forward was to follow our plan and trust in God’s. Everything that went wrong for us was something where we deviated from our plan, so I became convinced there would be no cure found in further deviation.
I am not normally a religious person, I believe things that I can see with my own eyes. But the events of the past two days have shown me things that I cannot explain rationally. Why did the deploy script crash this time only? Why was the amount lost almost precisely equal to the amount of the 3rd airdrop? And what actually happened to those transactions on that morning?
As of right now, the plan is that the 3rd phase of the airdrop will be disabled. Letting some people claim their 3rd phase while others may not have claimed their 1st or 2nd would be unfair to people who don’t pay attention and only discover the project later. We may as a community choose to migrate again to a different contract so that people can have their last third, but without a terrorist mining pool, that is a decision we can make together and in the open.
It’s been a bumpy ride and I thank everybody for hanging in there. We’re just have to keep following our plan, and trusting God’s.