Launchpad (design)

Architecture

Token-2022 transfer hooks, what they cannot do, and the gap that has to be designed.

The foundation already exists#

This is not a proposal for technology that has to be invented. Solana's Token-2022 program has a transfer hook extension: a mint can name a program that must run on every transfer of that token. Solana's own documentation lists the use cases it was built for — custom fees, allow and deny lists, custom transfer events, and tracking.

token transfer
      ↓
  Token-2022
      ↓
  transfer hook extension
      ↓
  custom program
      ↓
  execute the rule

  if the hook fails, the transfer fails

That last line is the whole security model in one sentence, and it cuts both ways. A rule cannot be skipped — but a broken rule stops the token moving at all.

The gap nobody should paper over#

A Token-2022 transfer hook fires on transfers. Uniswap v4 hooks — the model Hookr builds on — fire on the lifecycle of a pool: before and after a swap, on liquidity added, on liquidity removed. Those are not the same thing, and the difference is exactly where a naive port would break.

Needed for	Uniswap v4 hook	Token-2022 transfer hook
Knowing a transfer is a buy	Given by the callback	Not given — a transfer is a transfer
Knowing a transfer is a sell	Given	Not given
Reacting to liquidity changes	Given	Not visible at all
Reading the price of the swap	Given	Not available in the hook
Charging a fee on any movement	Possible	Possible
Allow and deny lists, caps, cooldowns	Possible	Possible, and natural

So the honest statement is: we cannot translate a Solidity hook into Rust and call it done. Half the catalogue — transfer rules, access rules, caps, cooldowns, burns on transfer — maps directly onto Token-2022 and could be built on it today. The other half — anything that needs to know a buy from a sell, or to react to a pool — needs more than the extension gives.

The shape that closes the gap#

Three pieces, in increasing order of how much has to be designed:

Piece	Job	Where the difficulty is
Token-2022 extensions	Everything that is genuinely about a transfer: rules, caps, lists, per-transfer fees.	Low. This is what the extension is for.
A router the pools trade through	Gives swap semantics back: it knows direction, size and price, and can call hooks before and after with that context.	Routing is only honoured if trades actually go through it. A trade routed around it must still be safe, never silently fee-free.
Hook runtime and registry	Resolves a token's stack, enforces the fee ceiling, meters usage per hook for hook mining, and isolates one hook's failure from the rest.	Compute budget, account limits, and making sure a bad hook degrades instead of bricking a token.

Designing for failure#

Because a failed hook fails the transfer, failure handling is not a detail to add later:

Hooks are metered. A hook that exceeds its compute or account budget is cut off at the stack level rather than being allowed to fail the transfer.
Reward hooks never run inline. Distribution is queued and settled separately. A payout failing must not stop someone moving their own tokens.
Blocking hooks are a separate, audited tier. Only rules whose whole purpose is to refuse — deny lists, lockups — may fail a transfer at all.
Every token publishes its stack. Which hooks, which versions, which parameters, and whether any of it can change. A buyer can read what the token will do to them before buying it.

What carries over from what already works#

The launchpad is new, but it does not start from nothing. Four decisions that the live marketplace already proves are carried over without change:

From the marketplace	Into the launchpad
No custody	Fees and rewards move between wallets and programs. The platform is never the holder of anyone's money.
Signed terms	A launch is signed over its exact configuration — supply, hooks, parameters — so what the wallet showed is what deploys.
Ownership check	Becomes the balance check that access hooks use to gate a utility.
Moderation	Reports and takedowns apply to hooks as well as products. A hook that harms its users is delisted.

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