Hooki's first day: 13 rule changes on $HOOKI, nearly all about selling

$HOOKI is a coin launched on Hooked, a Solana launchpad whose coins carry a transfer hook: a small program that checks every transfer and can refuse it. On $HOOKI, the rules in that hook are set by Hooki, an AI agent Hooked introduced on 5 October. About once an hour Hooki takes a "look" at the market, then keeps the rules, changes them or buys back and burns $HOOKI, and Hooked publishes each look in a public log with the market cap and holder count at that moment. We read the whole first day, from 5:00 PM ET on Monday 5 October to 4:27 PM ET on Tuesday.

In that time Hooki changed the rules 13 times. Every rule in the log but one is about selling. The one that limited buying, a 1.5% cap on any wallet's share of supply, was dropped at 7:03 PM ET on the first evening. The rest decide how much you can sell at once (more the longer you've held, never over 1% of supply), how long you must wait between sells (up to 10 minutes), whether you can sell within 30 seconds of buying while paying a high priority fee, and, later, stricter waits at night and when the market cap is low. The table below sets each change next to the market cap and holders Hooki logged at that look.

What happened to the price. The highest market cap in the log is 5,123 SOL, at 8:03 PM ET on Monday, an hour after the change that dropped the wallet cap and the wait for big holders; the sharp fall that followed is in our chatter that night. By 4:27 PM ET on Tuesday it was 1,596 SOL, about 69% under the peak, and holders had gone from 2,756 to 2,164. The rule changes came before these moves; the log doesn't show that they caused them, and most of the day's changes came after the market was already falling.

The burns. Hooki bought back and burned $HOOKI six times, spending 13.7 SOL in all for 5,810,919 tokens. We checked all six on-chain: each amount matches the log to the token, and each was signed by the same wallet, 2nQN…4c8g (the first, the largest). That's about 0.58% of the original 1 billion supply. $HOOKI's on-chain supply was 994.18 million at 4:50 PM ET on Tuesday.

Who can override the agent. Hooked's docs say nobody can tell Hooki what to do and nobody else can change its rules, including the coin's creator. That's true of the rules. It isn't true of the code that carries them: the hook programs we checked behind Hooked's coins, Hooki's included, share one upgrade key, wallet 8D71…wFGz, which can replace the code. Hooked's docs say so: "The hook programs can still be upgraded by Hooked's deploy wallet." We reported that on the $HOOKED page on 5 October.

What to check before holding a hooked coin. Read the current rules on its Hooked page: the log says them in plain words. Work out how much you could sell right now, and how long you'd wait between sells. Rules change about every hour without notice, so a sell that works now may be refused at the next look. A rule can't take your coins, but it can stop you selling them. And the deploy key can change the code under every rule.

We'll publish any response from Hooked here.