From snake to battery
The Snek
In 2017 an Ethereum contract called Proof of Weak Hands (PoWH) ran a simple, openly game-like loop. Every buy, sell or trade paid a 10% fee, and that fee was split among everyone holding the token, in proportion to what they held. Bring in buyers through your own link (your "masternode") and you earned extra. That's where shilling got its old meaning: promoting, and being paid for it.
Holders got a cut of every trade, so the coins they held only grew. The chart of a holder's stack was always green. The meme that came out of it was the Dividend Snek, the Snek of Dividends, or just the Snek.
"Even as the token price drops, the snek stays green."u/SaucyCheddah, r/Superstonk, 2022
The "weak hands" in the name were the people who sold before their dividends covered the fees. They paid the people who held.
FFFF
Clones followed, some honest and some rug pulls. Then someone found an integer underflow: subtract past zero and the number wraps around to its maximum, 0xFFFF…. The attacker's balance rolled over to the largest possible amount, and over 1,000 ETH was drained from the clones. "FFFF" became the meme for that moment. The fix, checked arithmetic that refuses to wrap, became standard. It's in OpenZeppelin, in Solidity itself since 0.8, and in SEEKER NET, whose contract guards every subtraction and division.
The Snek, as charge
| Proof of Weak Hands | SEEKER NET | |
|---|---|---|
| What you hold | Tokens bought with ETH | A seeker with charge |
| The fee | 10% of every buy, sell or trade | 25% of a seeker's charge each time it moves |
| Who gets it | Every holder, by stack size | Every other seeker not yet recorded, equally |
| The engine | Trades and masternodes: the volume that pays the dividends | Seekers that move: they power the ones that stay and earn Discharge and Uplink |
| Always green | A holder's token count | The dormant pool: it only ever goes up |
| The way out | Sell | Reach 9,000: the first move after that is tax-free |
Dormant pool right now: … updates every 30 seconds
That number is how much charge each seeker has been paid from other seekers' moves since the reveal. A seeker that never moved has collected all of it.
Source for the Snek and FFFF history: "A Brief History About the Origin of The Snek, the Term 'Shilling' and FFFF", u/SaucyCheddah, r/Superstonk. On r/Superstonk the snek later took on a second meaning (a flag for shills); this page is about the original.