The Balancer Launch & the '1.8 ETH' Question

A recurring suspicion says CAW's launch was a thin-liquidity setup ripe for manipulation. The facts underneath are real — the reading isn't. ❶ The launch: CAW didn't open on Uniswap first. Price discovery ran ~Apr 14–17, 2022 through a CopperLaunch Liquidity Bootstrapping Pool (LBP) on Balancer, tagged 'teh eyes to see,' before liquidity moved to Uniswap on the 17th. ❷ The '1.8 ETH': A contemporaneous Copper-launch guide (Apr 25, 2022) used $CAW as its worked example, noting the initial pool held only ~1.8 ETH (~$5,550) and warning readers not to ape more than 0.5 ETH. ❸ The suspicion: from there, some conclude 'thin liquidity = easy to manipulate; early buyers grabbed cheap and dumped.' 🔍 Observatory: this is where a small fact gets read backwards. An LBP is built so the token's weight decays over time — without sustained buying the price falls, which means the earliest buyers usually pay the highest price, not the lowest. The thin ETH side doesn't let someone cheaply pump it; it makes your own buy slip against you. That's exactly why the guide says 'don't ape' — a warning about overpaying, not an invitation to manipulate. No rug, no drain, no exploit has ever surfaced — and no primary source that substantiates the suspicion has turned up in what we can search. What's left is a fair-launch mechanism that was fashionable in 2022, wearing the costume of a mystery. The launch was strange — but strange isn't the same as crooked. May the difference between the two always be worth the patience to check. 🐦‍⬛