The thesis.
Every token is a bid for attention. Most of them spend their attention on marketing and hope it turns into a price. This one skips the middleman: it sells the attention directly, and the price is public.
The most visible surface a token has is its name, its ticker and its logo — the three things every wallet, chart and explorer repeats a thousand times a day. Attention Markets puts those three things up for sale. Whoever burns the most $ATTENTION owns them, and is paid for owning them: one percent of every trade, for as long as the name stands.
Naming rights are the oldest attention market there is. Stadiums have been renamed for a fee since the sixties. This is the same trade, at the speed of a block. THE SHORT VERSION
Two things make it different from a billboard. The bid is paid by burning the asset itself, so every purchase of attention makes the supply smaller. And the buyer does not merely get seen — they get paid for being seen, out of the trades their name attracts. The name is a billboard that pays its owner rent.
From the market to the contract
Why the brand is not the name
The token's name is the product being sold, so it cannot also be the brand — it will be $SQUID one week and something else the next. Attention Markets is the market. The names are what it sells.
One contract, many names.
Most tokens are frozen at birth: name, symbol and logo are fixed the moment the contract is deployed. Attention Markets deploys with those three fields left open — mutable metadata that the contract itself rewrites the moment a bid is burned. Everything else is as immutable as any token on the chain.
What never changes
What changes
Change the name and you have not touched a single balance. $SQUID, $ATTENTION and whatever comes next are the same asset at the same address.
How a name is bought.
Anyone holding $ATTENTION may buy the name. The purchase has three parts, and the contract enforces all of them.
1 · The bid
To buy the name you burn $ATTENTION — send it to the void, permanently. The amount is the attention price, shown live on the front page — the same for every sale, whoever made the last one. Nothing burned ever returns: the supply shrinks with every name the market buys.
2 · The lock
The burn renames the token on the spot: the new name, ticker and logo show the moment the transaction confirms. Then, for two minutes, they are locked: no rival can buy them away. The lock exists so that no one can flip the name in the same breath as a trade, and so that every name gets its time in the light.
3 · The sponsorship
The buyer's address is the Sponsor from that same moment: half of the attention fee on every trade is credited to it, in ETH, to claim whenever it likes. There is no term. The sponsorship ends only when someone else burns the bid, once the lock has passed.
The attention fee.
Every trade of $ATTENTION pays a 2% attention fee, split down the middle: one percent to the house, one percent to the sponsor. The pool itself takes the fee on every swap — in ETH when someone buys, in tokens when someone sells — and each side claims its share whenever it likes. There is nothing to stake. Until the very first name is bought there is no sponsor, and the full fee rests with the house.
Where the liquidity comes from
The pool was seeded with tokens only — 98% of the supply and no ETH — as one position from the launch price upwards. Buyers bring the ETH. That position sits in a vault with no function to take it out: the liquidity is locked by construction, and the price cannot fall below the launch price because there is no ETH below it. For the first five minutes after launch the swap fee starts at 20% and falls to 2%, which takes the edge off sniping the launch. The remaining 2% of the supply went to the team.
What the house does with its half
The house is the founding team's treasury. Its share keeps the pool deep, funds the market itself — this site, the art, the moments around each new name — and pays for the development of the contract and the tools around it.
What a sponsor can do.
A sponsor owns the token's face, not its body. Everything that could hurt a holder — supply, fees, liquidity, balances — is out of the sponsor's reach by design.
On names
Names are plain ASCII, up to 32 characters, without markup characters; tickers are A–Z and 0–9, up to 10. No ticker is reserved: any letters and digits will do, and nothing stops a name from borrowing one that belongs to something else. This site renders them as plain text, exactly as written — no markup, no tricks. The chain does not censor. Choose a name you would be happy to have burned a great deal of money for.
Questions.
The name changed. Did my tokens change?
No. Same contract, same balance, same liquidity — only the metadata moved. If your wallet still shows the old ticker, it has cached it; the address is what matters.
Can I buy the name more than once?
As often as you can pay. Every sale costs the same, whoever made the last one.
Can someone buy it back immediately?
Only by burning the bid themselves, once the two-minute lock has passed. While a name is locked, nobody can buy it away.
Is the bid refundable?
No. The burn happens first and is gone the moment the transaction confirms. There is no cancelling a purchase — the name is yours the moment it confirms.
Where does the sponsor's ETH come from?
From the attention fee on each swap, always in ETH: a buy pays it out of the ETH coming in, a sale out of the ETH going out. Half is credited to the sponsor, who claims it whenever they like.
What if nobody buys the name for a long time?
The sponsorship simply continues and the sponsor keeps collecting. The price of the name does not change.
Is this financial advice?
No. It is a market with a contract attached. Read the contract, mind the fee, and never burn what you cannot afford to lose.
Glossary.
- NAME
- One incarnation of the token: a name, a ticker and a logo, numbered in the order they were bought.
- ATTENTION PRICE
- What it costs to buy the name right now — the same for every sale.
- BID
- The $ATTENTION burned to buy the name. Non-refundable by construction.
- THE LOCK
- The two minutes after a purchase in which the name cannot be bought again.
- SPONSOR
- The address that last bought the name. Receives 1% of every trade until outbid.
- TENURE
- The time a name stands — from its purchase to the next one.
- ATTENTION FEE
- The 2% taken on every trade and split between the house and the sponsor.
- THE HOUSE
- The founding team's treasury; keeps the other 1%, and all of it before the first sale.
- LOGO
- The image attached to the current name, shown on this site.
- GENESIS
- Name I — Attention Markets itself, before anyone paid to change it.