Docs

Everything you need to understand internet coins. Docs may be updated frequently.

Disclaimer: Minting internet coins is purely experimental and carries significant financial risk. Coins created on this platform might never develop any economic role or market value. Do not participate unless you are prepared to lose everything you put in.

Introduction

What is c402?

c402 is a new coin standard — a regular ERC-20 token with x402 support and built-in open mint mechanics. c402 coins are "Internet Coins".

You can find the source code on GitHub (soon).

What is c402.markets?

c402.markets is a mintpad for internet capital markets. It’s a platform for creating and minting internet coins.

Voting

How does voting work?

You can vote using your $PING and NetPacket balance. Voting is free except for the gas costs. You always vote with your full account balance and cannot split your votes. You can move your votes at any time. Coins with the most votes appear at the top of the main page list. When you vote, you’ll receive a "Voter Eligible" badge.

Why vote?

By submitting votes, you can move projects to the top of the preview list, putting them in front of more people.

Minting

How does a mint on c402.markets work?

Anyone can create a coin by providing a name, ticker, description, and image. Each coin has a total supply of 1 billion tokens.

c402 coins launch through an auction-based mint system with 402 auction slots. Each slot represents an equal share of the mintable supply. Participants bid USDC on these slots — your USDC is swapped to the base token at the current market rate, which becomes your bid amount.

  • To outbid someone, your bid must exceed the current highest bid by at least 5%.
  • When you’re outbid, your base tokens are returned to you.
  • The auction runs for a set duration chosen by the dev. When it ends, if all 402 slots have bids (“mintout”), LP is created and winners can claim their tokens.
  • If mintout is not achieved, no LP is created and bidders can withdraw their base tokens.

What is the auction clearing price?

The clearing price is the lowest winning bid across the 402 slots at any moment. It only moves up as higher bids replace the cheapest slots; bids stay locked until the auction ends.

If your bid is at or above the current clearing price, you hold a slot; if it drops below, you lose your spot until you top the new clearing price by at least 5% to outbid the current holder. If mintout fails, no slots clear at all and everyone withdraws their base tokens.

How can I mint a coin?

Be ready when an auction starts. Demand may vary, and you might need to compete for slots. You can bid on individual slots or use batch bidding to target multiple of the cheapest available slots at once.

After the auction ends, anyone can call “Finalize” to confirm the result. If mintout was achieved, winners claim their tokens. If not, bidders can withdraw their base tokens.

What is dev supply?

When launching a coin, devs can optionally allocate a percentage of the total supply to themselves (0-99%). This is minted directly to the dev. Watch for dev supply warnings on coin pages — a high dev supply means less is distributed through the fair auction.

Where can I trade minted coins?

Liquidity is provided on Uniswap V4. Any frontend supporting Uniswap pools will work. c402.markets is for creating and minting coins, not for trading them.

Fees

How can I earn as a dev?

LP Fee: You earn 100% of the LP trading fees on all DEX trades involving your coin’s locked liquidity. c402.markets doesn’t take a cut of trading fees. The fee is 2.5% for the first 24 hours after pool creation, then permanently drops to 1%.

Creation fees

Coin metadata is uploaded via IPFS. Each IPFS upload incurs a 0.02 USDC fee, paid through x402. Submitting your information to the onchain coin registry costs 0.0003 ETH, both for the initial submission and for each subsequent update. These fees primarily serve as a spam-prevention measure.

Minter fees

When you bid on an auction slot, you pay in USDC. That USDC gets swapped into the base token, and the swap carries a Uniswap V4 LP fee based on the pool. c402.markets also takes a 0.3% fee on every bid — but that fee is converted into $SPAWN, the first token launched on c402.markets, and then sent to your wallet. So instead of losing that fee, it basically becomes a forced buy of $SPAWN, which you can sell whenever you want.

  • Gas fees apply since c402 runs on Base.
  • All bids are non-refundable unless mintout fails, in which case bidders can withdraw their base tokens.

At platform launch, only selected coins are supported as base tokens. The contracts technically support all tokens, but the frontend will not index everything. Developers are encouraged to contribute and build their own frontends.