A barebones Solana token launcher. No frills, no extractive nonsense.
The trebuchet is the superior siege weapon. It can launch a 90 kg
projectile over 300 meters.
Trebuchet mints an SPL token, deploys it as single-sided liquidity on Raydium CLMM, locks the position with Burn & Earn, and hands you the Fee Key NFTs that will earn fees forever. It runs on your own machine against your own RPC, with no middleman taking a cut of your supply, charging launch fees, or holding your liquidity hostage.
Tagged GitHub releases are built from a clean checkout in GitHub Actions.
Each release includes SHA256SUMS.txt, and the release notes state which
desktop artifacts were signed, notarized, unsigned, or published as
unsigned test artifacts. Merges to main automatically create the next
release and publish the GitHub Package. See docs/releasing.md.
Do not attempt to launch a token using the public Solana RPC. The
free api.mainnet-beta.solana.com endpoint is shared by the entire
ecosystem and is aggressively rate-limited. Pool creation requires a
sustained burst of dozens of requests; you will be throttled mid-flow,
transactions will fail, and you can lose SOL on partial failures that
require manual recovery.
This is the single most common cause of failed launches. Spend the five minutes to set up a real RPC before doing anything else.
Recommended: Helius — sign up, create an
API key on the dashboard, and you'll get a URL like
https://mainnet.helius-rpc.com/?api-key=YOUR_KEY. The free tier is
plenty for individual launches; you don't need a paid plan.
Alternatives: Triton, QuickNode, Alchemy. Any reputable Solana RPC provider will work, and all of them have free tiers that handle what Trebuchet needs. Avoid free aggregator endpoints (the ones that bundle multiple public RPCs behind a single URL) — they fail in the same ways as the public RPC, just with extra middleware in the way to obscure the cause.
Add your endpoint inside the app: click the RPC bar at the top of the page, paste your URL into "Add a New RPC", give it a name, click "Test connection", then "Add & use". The setting is saved and will be remembered between sessions.
Before launching, have these ready:
- A dedicated RPC endpoint (see above — non-negotiable; free tier from any reliable provider is plenty).
- A funding wallet with enough SOL to cover the launch costs. The app calculates the exact amount required during Step 3 and shows an itemised breakdown. Roughly: 0.1–0.3 SOL for fees plus whatever USD-equivalent of liquidity you want to deploy.
- A logo image for your token. PNG or JPG, square, under 100 KB.
- A destination wallet address — where the Fee Key NFTs and any leftover tokens/SOL will end up at the end. Use a wallet you own and control.
Step 2 lets you create multiple pools and pair each with any token you want. Most basic launches use neither feature — one pool, paired with SOL, full supply. But these are the most interesting things Trebuchet does, and worth understanding before you configure your pools.
The conventional way to compensate team members, venture capitalists, advisors, and marketing partners is supply allocations — give them N% of the token, usually with a vesting schedule, and they sell when they're ready.
I think this is bad practice and don't recommend it. Allocations create overhang: holders know there's a wallet out there that can dump at any time, vesting cliffs become coordinated sell events, and recipients have no reason to care about the project once their tokens unlock. It's also one of the most common rug pull vectors in the ecosystem.
Trebuchet's alternative is to split locked liquidity into multiple positions and hand out the resulting Fee Key NFTs. To allocate "10%" to a marketing partner, create a 10% pool, let Burn & Earn lock it, and transfer the Fee Key NFT to them. The mechanics change in ways that materially align incentives:
- They can't dump. The LP is locked permanently. No overhang, no vesting cliff, no exit pressure on holders.
- They're paid by volume, not by sale. Fee Keys collect a share of trading fees from their pool. It's recurring income, not a one-time grant — the more the token trades, the more they earn.
- Incentives compound over time. A marketing partner with a Fee Key has continuous reason to drive volume. A team member has reason to keep building. In theory this fosters longer-term strategy and effort than a tokens-and-vest arrangement, where the relationship effectively ends at the unlock.
- Your supply isn't diluted. You're not paying people by printing tokens at the expense of holders. The cost comes out of trading fees, paid by whoever's actually using the token.
Fee Keys are transferable NFTs, so recipients aren't trapped — they can sell on a secondary NFT market if they need liquidity. The locked LP stays locked regardless of who holds the key.
Trebuchet ships with two pre-configured flywheel quote tokens: Reserve and Meme. A flywheel is a quote token chosen specifically because it sits in multiple liquidity pools with other interesting tokens. When someone buys your launched token through the flywheel pool, the SOL or other asset they trade in flows into the flywheel token's broader pool network — your launch can pull in arbitrage volume from exotic pairs across the ecosystem, and price action from those paired assets can correlate back to your token.
The default launch is a 90/10 split: a SOL pool with 90% of supply, plus a flywheel pool with the remaining 10%. The flywheel slice is small but does real work — it gives the token immediate exposure to arbitrage flow that a pure SOL launch wouldn't have. You can disable the flywheel entirely, switch between Reserve and Meme, or adjust the percentage (5–30%) in the Step 2 panel.
The Meme flywheel is the default, even for non-meme launches. Its pair set deliberately includes the Reserve flywheel as one of its quote tokens, which means a Meme-launched token gets cascading exposure to the Reserve network too — picking Meme covers both networks at once. Reserve only sees its own network. Switch to Reserve manually if your project's posture is closer to "utility / brand / long-term hold" than "memetic / momentum"; the explainer modal in the app walks through when each makes sense.
- Reserve flywheel — paired with an ETH-backed token, a BTC-backed token, and a stable-backed flywheel token. Acts as a store of value and a hedge against SOL. Lower downside risk, less volume. Use this for serious projects, utility tokens, or anything with a long-term posture.
- Meme flywheel (default) — paired with popular meme tokens that have retained active communities and attention, plus the Reserve flywheel itself. Higher chance of generating meaningful volume, more downside exposure if those paired memes decline. Use this for meme launches, or for any launch where the cross-network exposure is more valuable than the lower-variance Reserve-only positioning.
The "Learn more" link next to the flywheel toggle in the app expands on the mechanics and risk tradeoffs.
Every CLMM pool has a quote token. SOL is the obvious default and what most users will expect to swap against. But you can pair with any SPL token, and there are real reasons to:
- Support another project. Pairing your token with theirs creates permanent, locked liquidity between the two. It's a credible signal of alignment that's hard to fake — you literally can't take it back — and it gives both communities a way to swap directly without routing through SOL.
- Generate arbitrage volume and price action. If your token has pools against multiple quotes (yours/SOL and yours/USDC, say), arbitrageurs will trade between them whenever the implied prices diverge. That's volume that generates fees for every Fee Key holder in the system, with no organic demand required to bootstrap it.
One caveat: pairing with an illiquid or untrusted token couples part of your launch's price discovery to whatever happens to that token. Don't pair with something whose risk profile you don't understand.
The app walks through six steps. Each step unlocks the next when its prerequisites are met. You can scroll up to a completed step to review it (the fields go read-only), but you can't go back and change inputs once a step is completed — that's what Cancel & Refund is for if you need to start over.
Click Generate Wallet. Trebuchet creates a fresh keypair and displays its public key plus a QR code. This wallet exists only for this launch — every transaction below is signed by it. It does not need to be funded yet.
The 12-word recovery phrase is shown for your records, but you don't need to copy it down for the normal flow. Step 6 sweeps everything out of this wallet at the end. Save it only if you want a paranoid backup in case something interrupts the flow — and remember that the app already saves an encrypted copy in your OS keychain, so this is genuinely just a paranoia option, not a normal step.
Token Details:
- Name — what your token is called. "Doge Killer Killer."
- Symbol — the ticker, 1–10 characters. "DKK."
- Total supply — how many tokens to mint. Common choices: 1 million, 1 billion. Bigger numbers don't make your token worth more, smaller numbers don't make it scarcer in any meaningful way; pick what looks right alongside the price.
- Description — a sentence or two for the metadata.
- Logo — upload your image.
Pool Configuration:
- Target launch market cap (USD) — sets the initial price. If you pick $100,000 with a 1B supply, each token is worth $0.0001. All pools start at the same USD-equivalent price.
- Use a flywheel (default on, 10% Meme) — adds a second pool paired with the chosen flywheel quote token for arbitrage volume exposure. The Meme flywheel ($seige) is the default because its pair set includes the Reserve flywheel itself, so meme-launched tokens plug into both networks at once. Switch to Reserve (XLRT) for serious / utility tokens. See Flywheels above. Untoggle for a pure SOL launch.
- Split the LP (default off) — splits each pool's main LP into multiple positions, each minting its own Fee Key NFT. Useful for partial fee-stream giveaways or sales (see Splitting liquidity above). To also split the flywheel pool, use Customize.
- Add starting liquidity (default off) — by default each pool opens with a tiny ~$1 reserve position that just makes the pool tradable. Enable this to deposit real starting liquidity across all pools. You specify the total SOL to commit; the app splits it evenly across every pool (SOL pool plus any flywheel pool), and each pool's bootstrap uses a full-range position so the support shows up at every price level. Token-side liquidity carves out of each pool's allocation; you don't need extra tokens.
- Ladder positions (default off) — splits a portion of each pool's supply across discrete log-spaced price bands going up to a 1000× launch-price ceiling, with gaps between bands for breakouts. Each band acts as resistance on the way up and support on the way back down. Smooths supply distribution so 90% isn't gobbled up by the time you hit 10×. Slider sets the percentage of pool supply that goes into the ladder (20–80%); a second slider picks the number of bands (3–10). The remainder of the pool's supply stays in a wide main position covering all prices.
- Customize pools manually — for anything more elaborate than the defaults: multiple non-SOL pools, custom quote tokens, per-pool splits, external Fee Key recipients, custom ladder bands at hand-picked ranges. The simple panel covers ~90% of launches; the Customize view is there when you need it.
- Lock liquidity (Burn & Earn) — leave this on. It permanently locks the LP position and gives you a transferable NFT (the "Fee Key") that collects trading fees forever. Without it, your liquidity isn't really locked and traders will rightly distrust the launch.
Before continuing you can click Visualize tokenomics to see a donut chart of your configured distribution — supply broken down by pool and by position type (bootstrap, main LP slices, ladder bands). Helps catch "I configured 5% of pool to bootstrap but really meant 50%" before you start funding. Token logo appears in the chart center if you uploaded one.
Click Continue to Funding.
The app shows you exactly how much SOL (and any quote tokens for non-SOL pools) need to land in the temporary wallet. Send those amounts from your funding wallet. Click Refresh balances until everything turns green, then Continue to Token Creation.
For non-SOL quote tokens (flywheels, USDC, custom pairs), Trebuchet can auto-swap the small amount needed from your SOL deposit — no need to source those tokens separately. After your SOL lands, click Acquire quote tokens to run the swap. If a swap can't be routed (an obscure quote token with no Raydium liquidity path) the row auto-converts to a manual prefund row and you can send those tokens yourself.
The "Show cost breakdown" link expands an itemised list — pool creation rent, position NFT mint fees, Metaplex metadata fees, network fees, plus your actual liquidity deposit. You're not being charged a launch fee; this is what Solana and Raydium and Metaplex cost.
Sticker shock? Click Edit configuration at the top of the funding panel to go back to Step 2 with all your settings intact — adjust the bootstrap amount, ladder percentage, or pool count, then return to Step 3 for an updated estimate. Funds already in the wallet stay put and count toward the new estimate. This is the right escape hatch for "I should have set X differently"; Cancel & Refund is the heavier "abandon everything" option.
Click Create Token. The app:
- Mints the SPL token with your metadata.
- Transfers the full supply to the temporary wallet.
- Renounces the mint, freeze, and metadata-update authorities.
After this step the token exists permanently on Solana, and nobody (including you) can mint more of it, freeze accounts, or change its metadata. This is intentional — it's what makes the launch credible.
Click Create Pools. The app runs the launch in phases so every pool ends up at the intended price and gets locked together:
- Main positions — for every pool: open the wide main LP and any ladder band positions you configured. Pool is created but not yet tradable (the bootstrap position hasn't landed).
- Bootstrap — once every pool has its main positions in place, open each pool's bootstrap straddle. This is what makes the pool tradable at the launch price. Running bootstraps as a separate phase means no pool can become tradable while others are still being built, which prevents swap activity on an early pool from moving prices relative to the others.
- Lock — Burn & Earn locks every main and ladder position (plus the bootstrap), burning each position NFT and minting a transferable Fee Key NFT in its place.
- Transfer Fee Keys — for any slices configured with an external recipient, the Fee Key NFT transfers to that address. Slices without a recipient stay with the launch wallet and sweep on Step 6.
When everything succeeds you'll see a green banner and two buttons: Continue to Final Transfer and Download launch report. The report is a self-contained HTML document with all your token's addresses, pool IDs, position NFTs, lock-transaction proofs, and a tokenomics chart — copy-button-ready for listings, investor updates, and the team's reference sheet. You can also download it again from Step 6 after the transfer.
If something fails partway through, the app surfaces what completed and offers an in-place Resume launch button. The resume path skips the already-completed work (immutable on-chain anyway) and retries just what's missing. Most transient failures (RPC blips, slippage drift) clear up on retry. You can also fall back to Skip to Transfer Assets to sweep the wallet and start over with a fresh token; the pools that did succeed stay on-chain.
Enter your destination wallet address. Verify it character by character — there is no undo. The app shows a confirmation modal listing exactly what's about to move; read it.
Click Confirm and Transfer. The app sweeps:
- All Fee Key NFTs (these are your earnings stream — keep them safe)
- Any unallocated tokens that didn't go into pools
- Remaining SOL above what's needed for the final transaction fees
After the sweep completes you'll see a green confirmation with a Download launch report button. Same content as the report from Step 5 — grab one now if you didn't earlier.
Done. The temporary wallet is now empty and your destination wallet holds everything that matters.
After all pools land in Step 5, and again after the sweep in Step 6, the app offers a Download launch report button. The output is a single self-contained HTML file (~50 KB) you can open offline, share by email, or print to PDF for investor decks.
The report includes:
- Token mint address, decimals, supply, target market cap
- Logo (embedded as a base64 data URL — survives email forwarding)
- A tokenomics donut chart, same one the preview modal shows
- Per-pool sections: pool ID, fee tier, supply allocation
- Per-position records: bootstrap, main LP slice(s), every ladder band — each with NFT mint, lock status, open TX, lock TX, and Fee Key transfer TX where applicable
- A summary banner: how many positions locked, how many Fee Keys reached their external recipients, with explicit warnings if anything didn't complete
Every address and transaction signature has a one-click Copy button and a Solscan link icon. The visual theme matches the makesometokens.com marketing site — parchment background, engineering-manuscript styling, Trebuchet MS typography. It's the reference sheet your team needs for listings, launch announcements, or explaining the cap-table mechanics to investors.
The Cancel & Refund button in the top-right is the bail-out path, not the retry path. Use it when:
- You want to abandon the launch and recover whatever's in the temporary wallet to a destination wallet.
- A failure can't be recovered via Resume launch (rare — only if the on-chain state is unrecoverably partial).
Don't reach for it just because a step failed. Most failures are transient and the in-place retry buttons (Resume launch, Retry bootstraps, per-row swap retries) get you through cleanly without restarting. Cancelling means you lose the cost of any work that already landed on-chain.
If the wallet is still empty when you click Cancel, the dialog shifts to "End Launch" mode — it just locks the UI without doing a sweep, since there's nothing to refund.
After a cancel that happens before any on-chain work (Steps 1–3), the terminal panel offers Start over with the same wallet. The wallet stays available, but the token form, pool configuration, and created-token state all reset to defaults — you can start a fresh launch without generating a new wallet. The button is hidden after cancels that happen post-mint (Step 4+), because starting over at that point would silently create a second token while the first one is still on-chain.
- Take a cut of your supply
- Charge a launch fee
- Hold your liquidity hostage
- Promote your token, list it anywhere, or do any marketing
- Anything you didn't tell it to do
If you wanted any of those, you launched on the wrong tool.
- Use a dedicated RPC. Said it twice already, saying it a third time. The free tier from Helius / QuickNode / Triton / Alchemy is plenty — you don't need a paid plan. You just need an endpoint that isn't the public mainnet RPC or an aggregator.
- Preview your tokenomics before funding. Click Visualize tokenomics at the bottom of Step 2 — the donut chart makes miscalibrated bootstrap / ladder / pool-split percentages obvious before you've committed any SOL.
- Test on devnet first if you change anything substantive about the launch parameters or you're learning the flow. Mistakes on mainnet cost real money.
- Verify the destination wallet in Step 6 character by character before confirming. Solana addresses look similar enough that swapped characters are easy to miss; Solana transactions are final.
- Save the launch report before sweeping. It's the canonical reference for every address and transaction your team or investors will need. The Step 6 button gives you a second chance if you skipped it at Step 5.
- Don't burn or transfer your Fee Key NFTs unless you mean to permanently give up the income from your locked liquidity. Treat them like a property deed.
"Transactions keep failing in Step 5." Almost always an RPC problem. Double-check that the active RPC at the top of the page is your dedicated endpoint and not the public mainnet fallback.
"Pool creation succeeded for one pool but failed for another." Click Resume launch in the failure banner. The app will skip the pools that already succeeded (they're permanent on-chain) and retry just the failed work. You can resume multiple times — each pass only attempts what's still missing. If retrying keeps failing, use Skip to Transfer Assets to sweep and start over with a different config.
"A pool's bootstrap failed but the pool exists." Click Retry bootstraps. The pool is real and your main positions are locked; only the small straddle position that makes it tradable at the launch price failed. Retrying is safe and usually clears transient errors.
"A quote token couldn't be auto-swapped." The row auto-converts to a manual prefund: send the listed amount of that token to the temporary wallet yourself. Alternatively, click the per-row retry button to attempt the swap again — useful for transient errors that the bulk Acquire didn't get past.
"The compatibility check says my quote token isn't supported." Some Token-2022 mints use extensions Raydium doesn't allow (transfer hooks, pausable, default account state, etc). Trebuchet catches these in a pre-flight pass before spending any SOL — pick a different quote token or use the standard SPL Token equivalent if one exists. The check accepts every Token-2022 extension Raydium's on-chain code permits, including TransferFeeConfig.
"I closed the app in the middle of a launch." The temporary wallet's secret key is automatically saved (encrypted at rest via your OS keychain) when generated in Step 1. On next launch of the app, the Pending Wallets panel at the top of the page shows the wallet with a button to copy its recovery phrase or secret key. Import that into Phantom or Solflare to recover any SOL/tokens manually. Once you're done, click Discard on the panel entry to clear it.
When you actually try to close the app mid-launch via the X button, a confirmation dialog appears first asking whether to leave or stay, so accidental closes are caught before they happen.
"I want to launch with a quote token I don't see in the dropdown." Use Customize mode in Step 2 and pick "Custom mint…" in the quote token dropdown. Paste any SPL or Token-2022 mint address. The app resolves its symbol, price, and Raydium compatibility on the spot.
The desktop app is an Electron wrapper around the original web build. Both share the same source files, and the web build still works standalone:
npm install
npm run web # standalone web server on port 3000
npm start # Electron desktop app
npm run build:win # build Windows installer and portable EXESource files of interest:
server.js— Express APItokenService.js— wallet generation, SPL mint via Metaplex UmilpService.js— Raydium CLMM pool + position creation, Burn & Earn, bootstrap phase, ladder-band positions, deferred-lock orchestration (phases: open mains → open bootstraps → lock all → transfer Fee Keys), resume-launch path, Token-2022 compatibility checkswapService.js— SOL → quote-token auto-swap via Raydium Trade APIwalletHelpers.js— multi-token balance + NFT enumeration/sweeptokenInfoService.js— quote-token resolution (symbol, decimals, price via three-tier fallback: GeckoTerminal → Jupiter V3 → DexScreener; cached for 60 s / 24 h)rpcConfig.js— persistent RPC endpoint settingspendingWallets.js+secretStore.js— encrypted recovery cachepublic/app.js— the entire frontend (~9000 lines, vanilla JS). Houses the step orchestration, pool/position editing UI, the tokenomics visualization, and the HTML launch-report generatorpublic/index.html— single-page frontend (Bulma + the styles needed for the parchment-themed launch report)main.js— Electron entry point, menu definition, BrowserWindow lifecycle
Pull requests must pass the Test job before merging. The Test job runs syntax checks, the full unit/integration test suite, and a critical npm audit. A maintainer may enable branch protection to enforce this automatically; until then, reviewers are expected to confirm a passing CI run before approving.
The Build job (smoke package builds for all four platforms: macOS arm64, macOS x64, Windows, and Linux) is advisory — it confirms the app packages without errors but is not required for merge. A failing Build job is a signal, not a gate.
To enable required checks via the GitHub UI:
- Go to Settings → Rules → Rulesets.
- Create a ruleset targeting the default branch.
- Under Required checks, add
Test. - Optionally require at least one approving review.
Running on devnet: change cluster: 'mainnet' to 'devnet' in
lpService.js, swap to DEVNET_PROGRAM_ID.CLMM_PROGRAM_ID, hit a
faucet, iterate freely.
MIT
Trebuchet bundles a few vendored assets:
- three.js (the 3D coin preview) is licensed under the MIT License.
See
public/vendor/three/LICENSE. - Fonts (IM Fell DW Pica, EB Garamond, JetBrains Mono) are licensed
under the SIL Open Font License; see
public/vendor/fonts/OFL.txt.
The medieval gauntlet cursor artwork is original to this project.