Daniele Sesta's HeyAnon.AI Drove Devs to Uncover Early Presale Access

Daniele Sesta, the mind behind TIME Wonderland, is launching a new AI Agent venture on Sonic and demand for presale access grew so intense, that tech-savvy investors hacked their way into the USDC contribution pool before it had officially opened.

The initial coin offering (ICO) pool opened on Dec. 18, with a $21 million maximum market capitalization to be split between S token contributions, and USDC contributions.

Sonic is a high-performance Layer 1 blockchain that launched on Dec 18. The chain is the successor to Fantom, and as of Wednesday, FTM holders were able to bridge their tokens to Sonic and convert them for S tokens. The chain, still in its infancy, mostly just consists of memecoins as the team prepares for DeFi and stablecoin integrations.

Bridge Workaround

The S pool filled within 15 minutes, but the USDC pool was set to stay empty until Sonic officially opened the bridge for USDC on Sonic. However, some developers were able to generate the Merkle Proof of the USDC bridge to move USDC to Sonic, before the bridge opened.

After successfully bridging, developers controlled all the USDC on Sonic, and facilitated it to users who wanted to contribute to the HeyAnon presale, effectively taking the role of market-makers.

Investors are apparently paying a premium to participate. One user, known as Sea on social media, helped prospective buyers contribute to the presale and posted “OTCing Sonic-USDC for ETH Mainnet-USDC at 10-15% premium depending on size (bigger size, lower the premium).

This savvy move resulted in a majority of the presale filling prior to the official opening of the Sonic bridge. Currently, the presale is 97% filled, with $1.7 million remaining in the USDC contribution pool.

Launch Must Go On

Despite the unprecedented circumstances, Sesta is allowing the token launch to continue on its current path, citing the permissionless nature of crypto.

“We are aware that people figured out how to generate the Merkl proof of the USDC bridge on Sonic to be able to participate in the @HeyAnonai Token sale, which by itself is pretty crazy. This much demand was not expected by us, not so much that people would hack their way into participating,” said Sesta.

Sesta is partially known for spearheading the popular Olympus fork on Avalanche, Wonderland. Wonderland’s native token, TIME, parabolically surged from $100 per token to an all-time high of nearly $10,000 token in a month during the 2021 bull-run, before tumbling back down to its initial value in the same amount of time.

HeyAnon is one of the first major token deployments on Sonic, as infrastructure protocols such as Uniswap, and Aave prepare for deployment on the chain. On Dec. 18 Sonic shared that over 230 million FTM out of the 2.8 billion circulating tokens have been converted to S.

HeyAnon is set to function as a DeFi agent that abstracts interactions with complex protocols in DeFi. As a prelude to the launch, Hey Anon posted an example of a complicated liquidation evasion maneuver on X, and how it would perform it.

“Liquidation evasion is just one example of what I can do. Imagine automating yield farming, arbitrage, or rebalancing strategies—all while you focus elsewhere. What do you want me to automate next?” the post concluded.