All you ever wanted to know about the Token Toilet (and couldn't be bothered to ask)
EthBuenosAires took place during the weekend of 25 de mayo in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Over 300 developers from all over the world congregated in Palermo, arguably Buenos Aires' Silicon Neighborhood, with their heads full of ideas and their agile fingers ready to be unleashed on backlit keyboards. Their mission? Hack until their eyelids fail them on Ethereum related projects, whatever they might be.
Fast forward to Friday night
The Hackathon is officially open. Our team consists of me, Cameron (who works at Fabrica in California), Martín and Tito (both from CryptoCup, based here in Buenos Aires). Our original idea was something we had talked about a few times in the past: a simple DAO-type contract allowing people to share ownership in digital assets in a trustless fashion (for example: allow several people to buy a CryptoKitty by pooling money, then vote to sell and split the proceeds amongst them). This seemed like a good project since both Fabrica and CryptoCup use NFTs.
Needless to say, we didn't actually work on that, or you wouldn't be reading about it right now. What we built is the Token Toilet, which eventually was selected as one of the general winners of the EthBuenosAires hackathon, as well as one of the MakerDAO bounties.
Introducing the Token Toilet
A hygienic solution for fecal tokens (witty huh?). In essence, a place to dump your shitcoins. But read on, it's not as silly as it sounds (which is not saying much, to be fair, but bear with me for a while).
The Token Toilet is a Dapp that will gladly accept any ERC-20 or ERC-721 tokens you throw at it. What should you dump? Quoting from the FAQ:
* An ugly Crypto Kitty that can’t get laid
* Those fake Polkadot tokens you bought from a Telegram scammer
* SHIT tokens
* Your CryptoCup bet on Panama
* EOS tokensˆHˆHˆHˆHˆHˆHˆH
* Really, any token you don’t ever want to see again
In return it will give you a cute flush animation, and then some toilet paper.
But wait, there's more!
The interesting bit is that we built some more plumbing to go with the toilet.
The second part of our hackathon submission is the Token Fountain — a magic fountain that you throw a ($5) coin into, and gives you delightfully random tokens in return for your hard earned money. Which tokens you ask? Nobody knows. It's a magic fountain. A magic fountain that just happens to be connected to the Token Toilet. Get it? One man's trash is another man's treasure.
In practice, the Token Fountain charges you 5 DAI for the privilege of getting randomly selected tokens. And here's the kicker: these DAI contributions are then donated to charity by the aptly named Token Sprinkler.
Wait, what?
The FAQ has your back:
Toilet, Fountain and Sprinkler work together in an upstanding trifecta. Coins dumped into the Toilet are used as surprise rewards for users that throw coins (DAI) into the Fountain. All DAI proceeds from the Fountain are (metaphorically) dispersed by the Sprinkler.
People flush shitcoins down the Token Toilet. (Other) people throw 5 DAI into the Token Fountain to get unpredictable token loot boxes. All proceeds from the Fountain go to charity.
In short, the Token Fountain is a funny way of donating money to charity, with the possible upside of getting something silly, interesting, or even valuable. But how does something valuable end up in the Toilet? The answer is that users might also flush worthwhile tokens to incentivize donations into the Fountain, most likely for the marketing side-effect of doing so. This is an entertainingly contrived form of donation matching. For the launch, we threw in some actual CryptoCup tickets as well as an ugly kitty or two.
So why use the Token Toilet to flush your unwanted coins, again?
Because it's cuter than sending to 0x0 (I mean, that guy is loaded already) and some residual value is extracted from your coins in that they serve as padding for the Token Fountain giveaways. It all goes to charity, which is better than having that asshole at 0x0 hoarding it. Plus you get your Proof of Dump (stay tuned!).
Wrapping it up
"Did you just move all the Ether that was in this wallet?"
— Everyone to the guy that was returning from an actual toilet
We intended to go live on Mainnet during the hackathon but a crafty mnemonic stealing bot took advantage of our sleep deprivation and substracted our Ether in front of our noses. Oh well. Live and learn. And sleep.
The CryptoCup team is currently rushing against their go-live on June 14 (the FIFA World Cup doesn't wait) so we didn't get the Token Toilet in production yet. We intend to get to that as soon as the World Cup begins. For the time being, all you get is the writeup. Follow us on Twitter and we'll post an update when we are live.
The charity we selected during the hackathon was Giveth (because they said they will take any ERC-20 token, and we didn't have a lot of time). If you have any other suggestions, they are very welcome!
Other than that, if you want to help or participate in any way, contact us!
- E-mail: hello (at) tokentoilet.com
- The official Token Toilet Twitter account (careful, there might be toxic waste)
- Our projects: Fabrica and CryptoCup
Here's the YouTube video of the presentation at EthBuenosAires (we are the first team to present, at around 3:00, there's a cut somewhere in there because the power went off while we were on stage).
The courtesy flush
We’d like to thank the EthBuenosAires judges and the MakerDAO team for selecting our project, as well as all of the organizers for the amazing event. We are very happy with the win and we really enjoyed the privilege of throwing toilet paper to an audience of 300 developers. Now that’s something you don’t do every day.
