FRONK: The frog who was lost but is on the way back

I think any good crypto portfolio should have a small amount of wild bets in it. It is still such wild west times in crypto that there is a higher than usual chance of strange little projects taking off. These periods only happen once in any industry’s history and plenty are left regretful they never were a part, and that’s usually not a regret for any missed monetary gain but for the missed experience.

Remember: Most internet technology investments went to zero despite the industry becoming a global powerhouse. Those early days were intensely interesting for those involved though.

Meme coins are equal to the wildest projects out there. They are the definition of something out of thin air. However even meme coins can have good and bad fundamentals. It takes time and effort to build and run a project, just because there might be a cute dog or ugly frog on the logo doesn’t mean it doesn’t contain some credible innovation, a strong community, and a hard working team.

NB: You're taking on extreme levels of risk so size any monetary exposure accordingly.

A snarky little frog called Fronk.

The now famous Bonk project on Solana was started in the depths of the late 2022 crypto crash which saw the Solana ecosystem particularly affected due to their exposure to and connection with FTX. There was a moment where even senior figures in the Solana ecosystem were unsure if the chain would survive. Out of that moment was born Bonk. A meme coin project that enacted a massive mint and then proceeded to airdrop it most of it to active wallets in the Solana ecosystem.

This action is credited as one of the factors that helped kickstart the Solana ecosystem to stage a significant revival in the first quarter of 2023. The Bonk project has continued to quietly build and grow since then and is widely adored amongst the Solana community. Well mostly…

You see the airdrop wasn’t seen as fair by all the Solana community. There was a section of the community who felt they had been deliberately left out. This feeling lead to a competing Bonk-like project called Fronk.

A brief history of Fronk

Fronk is not that old. The $FRONK token launched early Jan 2023. The price chart shows a pretty typical pattern to most meme coin token launches.

The general sentiment on the Discord goes from positive to negative in line with the price decline.

After delivering on a number of piece of infrastructure in quick succession the project and community became chaotic and a number of people, including the founding team, became disillusioned and walked away.

The project then fell into a kind of dormancy for a few months until recently.

I won’t try to summarise the various events as I don’t have enough knowledge to be able to be able to fairly tell the story.

Instead here is a summary posted to Twitter and the Discord from the team who have now assumed leadership in the project.

In the spirit of rebirth a number initiatives have launched to help kick start the Fronk project and community.

One of the key actions was regaining control of the project team wallet and the considerable amount of $FRONK in it. 7 trillion in total. Note: This is different to the Fronk DAO allocation.

The new team announced these tokens would be used in promotional exercises aimed at reinvigorating the Fronk community and token.

FRONK 🐸 @fronk_inu
The FRONK Team wallet holds approximately 7T $FRONK
By the end of June 2023 it will hold zero.
ZERO.

Promotion 1

Two LP pairs have been established in Raydium farms and funded with $FRONK rewards.
FRONK 🐸 (@fronk_inu)
$FRONK is for the FARMERS!
FRONK/SOL & FRONK/USDC @RaydiumProtocol Farms are now LIVE!
1,000,000,000,000 $FRONK per Farm to be fairly distributed to our Liquidity Providers over the next 40 days!
What's next???

Promotion 2

A multi token $FRONK rewards event is being run with a 6 popular Solana community tokens being incentivised in new Raydium ecosystem farms.

FRONK 🐸 (@fronk_inu)
Monday, May 29 $FRONK will begin a series of aggressively funded @RaydiumProtocol Ecosystem Farms. 6 popular tokens LP Pools will be created, paired with $FRONK, & will be funded with large amount of $FRONKhafeh for LP Rewards.

This is only the start of the new team’s plans. There is still a long way to go. It does speak to the attitude of the team they’ve chosen to put these tokens back into the market via deliberately funding market making actions rather than another airdrop or burning them.

I think this was a smart move.

The Fronk project, like all crypto projects, is dependant ultimately on transaction fees. Burning a lot of tokens might have increased the price, but that wouldn’t see usage increase nor long term revenue.

Similarly an airdrop may have seen a large number of tokens end up locked up in wallets as there was no impetus for them to be in the market. These incentives, whilst short lived, give reasons for token holders (existing and new) to actively participate.

So what has Fronk built?

The Fronk team did deliver a number of pieces of project infrastructure. Not all are still working as intended but they point to a project that is more than just it’s mindshare alone. The bones of a solid project are here and can be built upon.

$FRONK

$FRONK has a large number of tokens in circulation across a large number of wallets. A lot of this was achieved through the initial growth phase in the project that saw multiple projects integrate $FRONK in way or another. Unfortunately many of those integrations have lapsed. An expansion to Polygon, whilst positive initially, appears to have seen the project largely stalled on that chain.
Never-the-less the first hurdle for any new token is adoption and Fronk has a start that many small projects would kill for.

Fronk Discord

Fronk have a fully set up and well organised Discord. It’s got all the tools you need to manage a successful project.

FFFlip (with $FRONK)

FFFlip is a simple coin flip game run by the successful, and rapidly expanding, Solana NFT project FFF (Famous Fox Federation). It allows you to “flip” 36 different tokens from Solana community projects (including $SOL itself).

It’s nothing that complicated but it gives something for the holders of the $FRONK token to do with their holdings as well as aligning with a large and influential community from the Solana ecosystem.

A 3% fee per play is kept by FFF. So whilst the exposure is good, and this gives people more things to do with $FRONK, this isn’t directly revenue generating for the project.
That and the minimum bet size is a bit large IMO. Unfortunately this is something out of the control of the Fronk project team.

FronkSpin

FronkSpin is a $FRONK game of chance with a distribution between a token burn and the developer of the game.

FronkSpin been out of action for over a month now unfortunately. A victim of the team turnover and of the declining interest in $FRONK, the latter being the reason given by the dev in the Fronk Discord for them pausing usage.

This is the sort of application Fronk needs more of.

It offers a more flexible game than FFFlip and the distribution of earnings can be tuned to best serve the long term goals of the project and the community. I could see this (and similar apps) being a cornerstone of the future tokenomics of the Fronk ecosystem as it allows liquidity to be directed via direct engagement with the $FRONK token and project.

Things like this are easy levers to use to steward the tokenomics of a project in sustainable direction. It’s very easy to change the mechanics for promotional periods.

Also, once you have an application that works well for Fronk, it’s not too hard to then onboard other projects to help expand your usage. Just as FFFlip now supports 36 different tokens, applications like this can be used to help launch new tokens and run promotions for existing projects.
If Fronk shares the fee revenue with those token’s projects I think that could fuel a lot of growth.

Fronk Farmers NFTs

Explanation of Fronk farmers & updated tokenomics
Fronk Farmers NFTs: https://magiceden.io/marketplace/fronk_farmers
Staking Fronk Farmers NFTs: https://fronk.xyz/staking

IMO this is the most interesting piece of infrastructure that Fronk has built. Read the above links for the full details, what follows a summary.

Because the Fronk project took the approach to mint all their tokens up front and then deflate their token over time, that left them with a massive amount of tokens to distribute even after the initial airdrop. Many other projects choose to mint tokens based on fees and then use these emissions to incentive staking and other activities. In the case of Fronk there is no on-going revenue from the core product (the $FRONK token) so staking $FRONK doesn’t make sense.

But just distributing more airdrops to all $FRONK holders doesn’t really incentive anything but holding the token.

So what the team did was essentially to kill two birds with one stone: Create a source of revenue linked to the core product and allocate token distributions to engaged participants.

Hence the Fronk Farmers NFTs were born.

It’s pretty simple, and that’s the beauty of it.

• Buy a Fronk Farmers NFT for $SOL
• Stake the NFT in the staking contract and be rewarded with a set amount of $FRONK per week for a set period of time (see the updated tokenomics for details)

Essentially these NFTs operate as shares in the Fronk project, but as they are NFTs so people can sell them if they want, with the Fronk project getting $SOL fees from sales (as long as royalties are enforced).

The longer you hold, the more rewards you’ll receive. The Fronk coined a clever phrase for this mechanism

The core Fronk products

There is now a set supply of the Fronk Farmer NFTs so Fronk now has one deflating product: $FRONK (via token burns), and one fixed supply product: Fronk Farmers NFTs.

If Fronk decides to maintain the stance that Fronk Farmers NFTs are the only way to earn $FRONK protocol revenue (outside of promotions for LPs) then that would see the value of these NFTs rise over time as the $FRONK token appreciates. That's if rewards continue of course.

One of the issues here is trading the NFTs is a key way to drive revenue for the project but with all the incentive now to hold the NFT, and not trade it, that decreases the trading fees from these.
That said: What value is there in buying most NFTs? The Fronk Farmers NFTs have at least guaranteed yield (in $FRONK) so that may see demand for them increase which would see increased trading.If the team continues to add more utility to these then the value will increase and hopefully this results increased fees for the project.

What next?

Fronk is still a risky project and token. Whilst the “moon“ meme is often used to signify a crypto project’s success, and especially for meme coins, this shouldn’t ever be seen as investment opportunity in the same way other projects are. It’s still a very early stage project without a proven track record.

The project hasn’t fully been turned over to community ownership. The DAO on Realms and the DAO Twitter account remain inactive and until those are active there can be no significant forward momentum community wise. The new team have flagged there will be an update soon after the multi token liquidity promotion.

There are few integrations still active so there’s a fair amount of work to be done rebuilding and developing new relationships in the Solana ecosystem.

The Fronk Farmer NFTs remain functional and, though they have seen a price drop, we’ve started to see increased trading on them.

This multiple LP promo will hopefully spark interest amongst the existing base of $FRONK holders and hopefully attract new interest from the communities from the tokens they’re boosting in LP pairs with as those users will be receiving the majority of the rewards in $FRONK.

And then it’s just down to driving more use cases for $FRONK.

The Fronk Opportunity

I think there are two opportunities here.

The first is obvious: Buy low sell high. It’s a meme coin and has large price fluctuations. Don’t put in what you can’t afford to go to zero. And treat zero as likely outcome.

I’ve invested based on the thesis above. I’m in the LP pools and am staking Fronk Farmers NFTs. I’ve allocated an amount that is well within what I allocate in my investment portfolio to high risk speculation.

The current promotions are very generous and Fronk Farmer NFTs continue to have a high $FRONK yield. Whatever happens with the price I’m going to end up with a sizable $FRONK bag at the end.

The second opportunity is the much more interesting one: Be an active part of the community.

If you were looking for a web3 project to cut your teeth on, you could do a lot worse than Fronk. There is stuff to work with here and plenty of work to be done. Unlike more established projects or projects with VC funding, Fronk really is a community driven project now and it’s looking to build it’s next core team and core community member to drive the next phase of the project.

Even just being an active investor in Fronk will give you a greater insight into the project than you’ll get at plenty of other places.

It’s often these types of opportunities come up to get deeply involved in established projects.

Join the Fronk Discord - you’ll need 1B $FRONK to be verified for the Fronk DAO channels but you can look around and interact with the community easily in the other channels