The pool, explained
"Liquidity locked forever" is the most important claim on this website, and it's meaningless if you don't know what liquidity is. So here it is in plain English, including the parts that aren't flattering.
There's nobody on the other side
When you buy a share, someone somewhere is selling it to you. A coin like this doesn't work that way. Instead there's a pool: a contract holding a pile of $CAMDEN, which will trade with anyone, at any hour, with no permission and no counterparty.
You send it ETH, it sends you coins. You send it coins, it sends you ETH. The price isn't set by anyone — it falls out of a formula based on how much of each thing the pool is holding. Buy and you take coins out, so coins get scarcer and the price goes up. Sell and you put them back, so the price goes down. That's the whole machine.
This is why you never need to "find a buyer". The pool is always the buyer. What changes is the price it will pay you.
Where did the liquidity come from? Nothing was put in
The fair question, and the one that sounds most like a scam until you see how it's done.
Normally a launch pairs two things in the pool: the coins, and a pile of the founder's own ETH. That ETH is the "liquidity", and it's exactly what gets stolen in a rug pull — the founder takes it back out and everyone else holds coins nobody will buy.
Camden Punks has none, because no ETH was ever put in. Every single coin went into the pool, priced so that it only ever sells them upward from the starting price. At the very first moment the pool holds 1,977,000,000 coins and zero ETH.
Then the first person buys. Their ETH stays in the pool, and now the pool holds ETH as well — which is what the next person sells into. The buyers bring the liquidity, and it accumulates as they arrive. There is no founder's stake to remove, because there never was one.
Said plainly, because it cuts both ways: on day one, before anyone has bought, there is nothing in the pool to sell into. Early holders are early precisely because they're taking that risk.
What a buy actually does
Starting price tag: 2 ETH. Not money anyone deposited — just where the pool opens. At an ETH price of about $2,500 that's a $5,000 valuation.
| Someone spends | They end up with | Price moves |
|---|---|---|
| $50 | about 1% of all coins | +2% |
| $500 | about 9% | +21% |
| $2,500 | about 33% | ×2.2 |
| $10,000 | about 66% | ×8.8 |
Two things follow from that shape. Small buys visibly move the chart, which is the fun part. And getting a big share costs progressively more — a whale can't quietly take half the supply for pocket change, because the price runs away from them as they buy.
What "locked forever" actually locks
When liquidity goes into a Uniswap pool, the depositor gets an NFT representing the position — the claim ticket on everything they put in. Whoever holds that ticket can pull the liquidity back out. In most rug pulls, that ticket is sitting in the founder's wallet.
Here the ticket was sent, in the same transaction that created the pool, to a contract called the locker. The locker has nine functions. Six of them only read things. Of the three that change anything, one collects the trading fees and two let each recipient hand their own share to a different wallet.
There is no withdraw. No transfer. No owner, no admin, no upgrade path, no emergency hatch. Not "we promise not to use it" — the function does not exist, and the contract can never be changed. The liquidity cannot leave, by anyone, ever. The fees can — split at a ratio that was set at deployment and that nobody, including the creator, can alter. Each side can redirect its own half to another wallet if one is retired; neither can take the other's.
Don't take our word for it: the pool · the locker — read the code, look for a withdraw function, and note there isn't one.
The 1% fee
Every trade through the pool pays 1%, in either direction. That fee doesn't go into the liquidity — it's held separately for whoever owns the position, which is the locker. Anyone can press the button that collects it, and the locker splits it as it goes: half to the Punk Fund wallet for prizes, half to the creator.
That split is arithmetic in the contract, not a promise on a website. The fund's half is sent straight to its own wallet and never passes through the creator's. Every collection is listed on the numbers page, read live from the chain.
What this does not protect you from
Locked liquidity means nobody can steal the pool. It does not mean the price can't fall, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something.
- The price can go to almost nothing. If holders sell and nobody buys, the pool pays less and less. Locked liquidity is not a floor.
- You can only sell for what's in the pool. Early on that's very little. A big sell into a thin pool gets a bad price.
- Thin pools are violent. The same maths that makes small buys move the chart makes small sells move it too.
- "Market cap" is not money. It's the price of one coin times all of them. Nobody could ever sell every coin at that price.
- Most coins like this go nowhere. That's the honest base rate. Only spend what you'd happily set on fire.
Or see how the whole loop fits together.