the philosophy

the joke is the brand. the mechanism is the punchline. everything else is decoration.

most memecoin platforms treat their users as a renewable resource. they print volume, the platform skims, and when activity dies, both sides move on — the platform with the receipts, the users with bags.

we built hehe.fun because there is a version of this game where the structure itself refuses to extract. not promises, not roadmaps, not vibes. the math contracts, signed at deploy, with no override.

this page is the worldview that produced every decision in the rest of the docs.

§1. anti-extraction is structural, not aspirational

"we care about our community" is a marketing line. anyone can say it. it costs nothing.

what costs something is encoding it into the protocol:

• 2.5% trade fee, 1.60% of which routes to the token's own stakers — 64% of every trade returns to people holding this specific token. not to a platform-wide pot. not to the treasury.
• the platform takes 0.20% of trade value (= 10% of our 2.0% partner cut) for the treasury — the same share the token's creator gets, and a quarter of what stakers get. our operational budget scales with how much our tokens get traded; it does not lever above the staker share.
• the routing percentages are pinned at the on-chain program level. they cannot be tweaked retroactively.

if you find a fee we collect that isn't on fee routing, it's a bug. fix-by-PR, not by trust.

§2. the math is the brand

most products communicate trust through copy. through testimonials, through audits, through team photos. fine, useful, but soft.

hard trust comes from mechanism. when you can derive the user experience from a formula on a whiteboard, the team's intentions become irrelevant — the system is what it is regardless of who's running it.

our hardest formula:

your reward share grows with how long you've stayed in. linearly. automatically. there is no admin function that adjusts it. there is no boost multiplier you can buy. holding longer means earning more, full stop.

we picked this over the tier-based alternative (1-week / 1-month / 3-month with multipliers) deliberately:

1. tiers force users to predict the future. wrong guess = locked out of opportunity.
2. tiers are gameable — every sophisticated staker picks the longest lock, so the tier system converges to a single tier with extra UI noise.
3. the linear model already rewards what tiers were trying to reward. any tier system is approximating linearity badly. we just use the actual function.

the user doesn't have to learn this. they stake, they wait, they earn more. the math does the work silently.

§3. graduation is the beginning, not the end

on most launchpads, "graduation" is when the bonding curve closes and the token migrates to an AMM pool. it's a milestone. it's also usually the end of the platform's involvement with the token — fees stop, the platform moves on to the next launch.

we hated this. it converts every token into a finite game. you launch, you race to graduation, you exit, repeat. there's no compounding loyalty because there's no compounding reason to stay.

so we route every graduation through Meteora DAMM v2 with a permanent_lock_position LP policy — the partner-side LP is locked forever but keeps accruing trade fees the whole time. we claim those fees on a schedule and split them three ways via an on-chain program.

result: from a staker's perspective, graduation is invisible. the pool keeps growing. the SOL keeps flowing. the source changes from "the partner cut on curve trades" to "the partner cut accruing against our locked LP on DAMM v2," but the user doesn't have to know that. same 1.60% staker yield per trade in both phases.

a token that graduates becomes a permanent cashflow asset for the people who stayed in on it. that reframes the whole game.

§4. show, don't tell, with copy

we don't write "join the community of believers."

we write "stay in on the joke."

the difference: the first one is a slogan that means nothing specific. the second one is a description of the mechanism. staying in is literally what earns. the joke is the shared premise of memecoin culture.

every product line on the site is meant to be interpretable as either a brand statement or a literal description of the protocol. when those two layers line up, you've got a brand. when they don't, you're just stuck doing marketing.

§5. opt-in, irreversible, no overrides

once you ship a contract, you should not be able to unship it.

we deliberately gave ourselves no levers. there is no:

• pause function on trading
• blocklist for individual wallets
• mint-more-tokens function for creators
• fee-rate adjustment function for the platform
• "emergency" mode

if something goes wrong at the contract level, the only fix is to deploy a new one and migrate. we'd rather have that friction than the moral hazard of being able to "intervene."

this also means: we couldn't extract retroactively even if we wanted to. if the platform's economics change five years from now, the existing tokens' fee structures don't change with them. you got what you got when you launched.

§6. memecoins are real, treat them that way

a recurring pattern in serious crypto media: "memecoins are dumb gambling." then, six months later, the same media is covering a memecoin that ate the chain's volume.

memecoins are a coordination game on shared cultural references. that is not a small or unserious thing — it's how a lot of value gets allocated in human systems. flags, brands, religions, currencies. cultural value isn't fake; it's the only kind there is, after a certain abstraction layer.

we treat memecoins as legitimate financial primitives. that means: real launch flow, real graduation event, real cashflow, real composability. not as a casino with cute branding.

hehe is the smirk that admits all this without flinching. we know it's playful. we know it's serious. those are not in tension; they reinforce each other.

§what to read next

if this resonates: the math behind it →

if you're skeptical: how this is different from pump.fun →

if you want to use it: quickstart →