Redesigning the FWB Token System

Introduction

The first wave of social tokens proved a thesis: communities could coordinate capital, governance, and identity through programmable assets. But their mechanics often lagged behind their ambition. Smart contract patterns were inherited from DeFi, not designed for cultural software. Gas fees throttled engagement. Participation became financialized. And the very tokens meant to unlock creativity ended up gating it.

For Friends with Benefits, these challenges crystallized over time. $FWB, our fixed-supply governance token, served as the foundation of our cultural economy, but it wasn’t designed for fluid, participatory, high-frequency micro-interactions. We needed a new architecture: one that preserved the symbolic power of $FWB while enabling experimentation, access, and adaptability.

Rather than discard the system or patch over its faults, we initiated a redesign. The result is a clean-slate migration to Base, a Time-Weighted Automated Market Maker (TWAMM) implementation to automate sustainable treasury behavior, and a dual-token model that distinguishes between governance and experimentation.

This essay documents how we did it and why we believe this redesign is a good blueprint.

Home on Base

Migrating to Base is a strategic alignment with infrastructure designed for onchain culture. As an Ethereum Layer 2 built with Optimism’s OP Stack, Base offers not only low fees and higher throughput, but also cultural resonance: a chain built for everyone, designed for scale, and grounded in a broader mission to onboard the next billion users.

Base provided what Ethereum mainnet could not:

• Micro-affordability: enabling high-frequency interaction
• Ecosystem support: a direct line to technical collaborators and dedicated dev resources
• EVM compatibility: allowing seamless migration of our smart contract stack

Beyond Bridging: Migration as Redesign

Typical chain migrations rely on bridges: lock tokens on one chain, mint them on another. But bridges carry execution risk, break composability, and fragment trust. We rejected this route.

Instead, we engaged Squad to match us with developers and Hacken to audit a two-contract architecture and decided to restore the original 10M supply of $FWB. Returning to the original supply cap of 10 million $FWB ensures that tokens are accessible and actively circulated, thereby encouraging new memberships and enhancing participation in the DAO's governance.

Lifecycle Flow

1. User deposits L1 $FWB → MigrationManager
2. Event emitted on Ethereum
3. Tenderly relayer picks up event
4. Relayer writes to MigrationDistributor on Base
5. 780-second delay
6. Base $FWB (10:1 recapped) is minted to recipient

Why the Delay?

A 13-minute (780s) delay protects against Ethereum reorgs while maintaining UX fluidity. This value was calibrated based on empirical block reorganization risk.

Dual-Key Security Model

Two roles govern the migration:

• migrationRecorder: writes deposits to L2 contract
• migrationProcessor: executes token mint after delay

Both roles are held by separate keys, ensuring that no single operator can execute a malicious distribution.

The TWAMM Hook

Every DAO eventually runs into the same treasury paradox: how do you restock your own token without driving up its price, triggering slippage, and exposing yourself to MEV extraction?

In mid-2023, Uniswap Labs introduced a promising solution with the release of Uniswap v4 and its flagship feature: hooks, including—including a proof-of-concept for a Time-Weighted Average Market Maker (TWAMM). TWAMMs are designed to split large orders into thousands of micro-swaps, executed incrementally over time. The result: smoother execution, gas efficiency, and resistance to frontrunning.

After the DAO passed a governance proposal to allocate a portion of projected revenue toward strategic $FWB restocking, we reached out to Uniswap Labs for support implementing a TWAMM-based solution. They connected us with the Uniswap Foundation and Zaha Studio.

Zaha identified and implemented several critical enhancements from the original example that made the hook viable for real-world use:

• Order Linearization: Rather than processing each long-term order as a discrete series of swaps, the system now consolidates execution into a single transaction per block, dramatically reducing gas costs and computational overhead.
• Token-Centric Earnings Tracking: Instead of tracking earnings per liquidity pool, Zaha’s implementation tracks per token. This enables multi-pool compatibility and many-to-one trading strategies essential for treasury-level deployments.
• MEV Resistance via Block Priority: The hook was designed so TWAMM orders execute at the start of each block, mitigating information leakage and eliminating frontrunning risk.
• Gas Optimizations: State management improvements and batch order processing make the system operationally efficient over extended timeframes.

These upgrades not only made the TWAMM hook production-ready, they significantly extended its design space. What began as a static example evolved into a robust DeFi primitive—capable of powering predictable, non-extractive treasury restocking.

Treasury Integration

The TWAMM hook is now core to FWB's onchain revenue-to-governance flywheel:

• A fixed percentage of FWB revenue will be allocated to the TWAMM contract
• ETH is streamed into the market over time to accumulate $FWB
• Accumulated tokens replenish DAO reserves

This final implementation is open-sourced and forkable by any DAO seeking to manage large-scale token operations without leaking value.

The Emergence of a Dual-Token Ecosystem

With $FWB trying to do everything—governance, access, participation—it was inevitable that its functionality would fracture. The simplest solution was architectural: introduce a second token.

• $FWB remains the fixed-supply governance and identity layer.
• $Benefits is our mintable arcade token: an internal currency used for participation, experimentation, and community activation.

The two-token system creates expressive differentiation:

• $FWB is used to propose and vote on governance actions, including the distribution of $Benefits, and unlock dApps,
• $Benefits is used to access events, reward contributions, and prototype internal micro-economies.

In this system, governance is scarce and symbolically charged. Participation is abundant and flexible.

Initial Allocation

We allocated 100M $Benefits in the first drop:

• 69M: for L1 to L2 migrators
• 25M: for ETH contributors to the LP via PartyDAO
• 4M: for $FWB donations to the LP
• 1M: for voters on the migration proposal
• 1M: for FEST activations

Future $Benefits distributions—another 50M and 100M—will be subject to L2 governance votes. This model reflects contribution instead of encouraging speculation. It reinforces governance by tying utility token minting to the scarce token’s consent.

Forkable Patterns

This redesign is not about infrastructure for its own sake. Our goal was to design a system that matched our needs as a culture-first DAO: stability without ossification, flexibility without chaos, incentives without speculation.

We don’t expect other DAOs to copy this stack line-for-line. But we do hope elements of it—TWAMM hooks, burn-and-mint migrations, arcade-layer tokens—to become shared primitives.

What we’ve shared is a composable reference system. A working blueprint for questions any DAO eventually asks:

• How do we scale participation without bloating governance?
• How do we restock tokens without creating extraction points?
• How do we build infrastructure that reflects our cultural logic?