What it is
Barnacle is a launchpad on Solana where every coin is priced in another coin instead of SOL. A barnacle latches onto a whale: you buy $SHELL with $BARNACLE, not with SOL. Every trade pays a 1% fee in the whale's token, and the biggest slice of the platform's share of that fee is burned from the whale's supply. Every barnacle that trades makes its whale a little scarcer, without whale holders lifting a fin.
The words
| Whale | A host coin: a pump.fun coin (or a barnacle, for nesting) that barnacles can latch onto. |
| Barnacle | A coin launched on a whale and priced in it. |
| Latch on | Launch a barnacle. |
| The Hull | The register of whales, ranked by how much of them has been burned. |
| Scrape | The keeper's run: claim the fees, burn the burn share, pay the treasury share. |
| Cemented | Graduated: the curve moved into a pool whose liquidity is locked for good. |
| Depth | How many barnacles deep a coin sits. A pump.fun whale is depth 0; a barnacle on it is depth 1. |
| Beached | A whale that's stopped taking new barnacles for now (thin liquidity, stale prices, or moving to its pool). Trading carries on. |
Buying and selling
A barnacle has no SOL pair, so SOL reaches it through its whale: SOL → $BARNACLE → $SHELL. The site shows every hop and every fee before you confirm, then asks your wallet to approve one swap per hop. Each hop is quoted again right before you sign it and spends exactly what the hop before delivered, with a minimum-out set by your slippage (0.5%, 1% or 3%; 1% by default). If a later hop fails, you keep what the earlier hop bought, and the widget offers to retry or sell it back.
Selling a barnacle returns whale tokens. The widget then offers a second step: sell the whale for SOL. If you already hold the whale, you can buy a barnacle with it directly and skip the first hop.
The whale leg trades on pump.fun's curve or on PumpSwap once the whale has graduated there, at pump.fun's own fees. The barnacle leg trades on Meteora: a Dynamic Bonding Curve, then a DAMM v2 pool once cemented. A thin whale warning appears when the whale has little liquidity or when your trade would move it a lot.
Fees and the scrape
Every barnacle trade pays 1% in the whale's token, on the curve and after cementing. That fee is split like this:
| Share of the fee | Goes to | How |
|---|---|---|
| 20% | Meteora | Its protocol fee, kept automatically. |
| 24% | The barnacle's dev | Paid natively by Meteora: the creator fee on the curve, then the dev's own locked LP position. Claim it from Mine. The keeper never touches it. |
| 40% | Burned | Claimed by the keeper and burned from the whale's supply with a plain token burn. |
| 16% | The treasury | Claimed by the keeper and paid to the treasury wallet. |
Put another way: after Meteora's cut, the platform's share is split 50% burn / 30% dev / 20% treasury.
The scrape runs every 10 minutes. For each whale it claims the platform's fees from every curve and from the keeper's locked positions, skips anything below a dust threshold, burns the burn share in one transaction, and pays the treasury share once it's worth sending. Each of those transactions is written to the Log (with its signature) before it's sent, so a crash or a retry can never count a claim twice. Claims happen whatever the pause switches say.
Latching on
- Pick an active whale ($BARNACLE, the root whale, is preselected), a name (up to 32 bytes), a ticker (1–10 letters or digits) and an image. Image and metadata go to IPFS; the metadata's website is the barnacle's page here.
- Every barnacle is 1,000,000,000 tokens with 6 decimals, no mint authority, no freeze authority, and metadata that can't be changed.
- An optional first buy, paid in the whale's token, goes in the same transaction that creates the pool, so nobody can buy before you. It carries a 2.5% launch fee on top, in the whale's token, to the treasury. No first buy, no fee.
- The first launch on a whale waits about a minute while the keeper sets up that whale's pool configuration (its one Meteora config).
Meteora configs are public, so anyone can create a pool on one directly. Those pools still feed their whale exactly the same way; the site lists them marked latched off-site. They skip the launch fee.
Whales
Anyone can register a whale in the Hull. It has to be a pump.fun coin trading against SOL (on its curve or on PumpSwap), or a barnacle below the depth cap, with at least 20 SOL of liquidity. Its mint has to be plainly burnable: no freeze authority, no transfer fee, no transfer hook, no permanent delegate, no extension other than metadata, and no live mint authority.
A new whale warms up: every minute the keeper prices it from its pool (and Jupiter's price API on mainnet) and takes the median. A reading that jumps more than 25% from the last one is clamped. The whale takes launches after 5 agreeing readings within 10% of each other. Later, a whale is beached (no new launches) while its liquidity is under the floor, its readings go stale, or it's moving from its curve to its pool.
Cementing
A barnacle's curve graduates when it holds the lower of 40 SOL worth of whale tokens or 20% of the whale's supply. That target is fixed in whale tokens when the whale's config is set up, using the median price from its readings. The whale page shows it in whale tokens and in today's SOL, and the SOL value drifts with the whale's price. The supply cap keeps graduation reachable on small whales; on a pump.fun curve, 40 SOL worth can be more than every token holders own.
When a curve completes, the keeper migrates it to a Meteora DAMM v2 pool (anyone could, and Meteora only does it automatically for a few quote tokens). That pool also charges 1% in the whale's token. 100% of its liquidity is permanently locked in two positions: 70% held by the keeper (its fees feed the burn and the treasury) and 30% held by the dev (claimable from Mine). Nobody can withdraw that liquidity, ever. Any surplus from the last buy is split the same way.
Depth
A barnacle can become a whale for other barnacles once it has the liquidity. Its fees then burn it. Depth is capped at 2 for now: a pump.fun whale (0) → a barnacle (1) → a barnacle on that barnacle (2). A depth-2 barnacle buys through three hops: SOL → whale → barnacle → barnacle.
Trust model
This MVP is custodial for the platform's share of the fees. One wallet, the keeper, is the fee claimer on every whale's config and holds the locked LP positions that belong to the burn-and-treasury side. It claims those fees, holds them for a few moments, burns the burn share and pays the treasury share.
- What the keeper can't touch: the dev's share (Meteora pays it straight to the dev), the pools' reserves, and the locked liquidity (it can never be withdrawn by anyone).
- What it's allowed to sign: fee claims, burns from its own account, payments to the treasury, config creation and migrations. Every transaction passes a guard that refuses anything else before it's signed.
- How you check it: every claim, burn and payment is on the Log with a link to the chain, and Stats shows a live custody check: what the keeper holds against what it still owes to the burn and the treasury.
- If the keeper key leaked: the fee claimer on each config is fixed when the config is made, so future platform fees on existing configs would be exposed until they're moved to new configs. Devs' money and pool reserves would not.
- Pauses: the admin can pause new whale registrations and new launches. Scrapes, graduations and dev claims can't be paused.
The plan is to replace the keeper with an on-chain program that claims, burns and pays in one permissionless instruction.
Risks
- Memecoins are extremely volatile and usually go to zero. A barnacle also inherits its whale's price moves: if the whale halves, so does the barnacle in SOL.
- Buying through two or three hops pays two or three sets of fees and price impact. Thin whales move a lot.
- A graduation target is fixed in whale tokens, so its SOL value changes with the whale.
- The keeper is custodial for the platform's share (see above). The pause switches only stop the site; pools on public configs can be created directly.
- Images and metadata are pinned through pump.fun's IPFS endpoint, which could change or be blocked.
- This is software. Programs, SDKs and RPCs change; things can break. Nothing here is financial advice.
FAQ
Why can't I buy a barnacle with SOL directly?
Because it doesn't have a SOL pool: its only market is against its whale. The site does the SOL → whale step for you as the first hop.
Where does my dev share go?
It stays on Meteora in your name: as the creator fee while the barnacle is on its curve, then as your locked LP position's fees once it's cemented. Mine shows it and claims it all in one wallet approval.
Can the burn be faked?
No: it's a plain token burn from the keeper's account, and the whale's total supply on chain drops by exactly that amount. Each burn on the Log shows the supply before and after.
What happens if I close the page mid-launch?
If the transaction was signed, this browser remembers it and finishes listing the barnacle next time you open Latch on.
Why is a whale "beached"?
Its liquidity dropped under the floor, its price readings went stale, or it's moving from its pump.fun curve to its pool. It stops taking new barnacles until it's healthy; everything already on it keeps trading.
The numbers
Live from the site's config (devnet values).