Three rules.
No exceptions.

On most launchpads the creator sends the creation transaction and can bundle a buy into the very same block, grabbing cheap supply before anyone else sees the coin. That is the “dev bundle”.

On Slot Zero the creator never signs the deploy. Our server wallet creates every coin and pays for it. The creation transaction contains no buy, and you can verify that for any coin from its page. Nobody holds tokens at Block 0, not even us.

Independent snipers can still buy in the first seconds, but they pay for it: the trading fee starts at 50% and decays exponentially to 1% over 3 minutes. There is no discounted first swap. Those sniper fees are burned back into the coin like every other fee.

When a coin starts moving, copycats launch the same ticker seconds later to catch people who paste the wrong contract. Here a ticker is locked for 60 minutes after it launches, case-insensitive. The check runs inside one database transaction behind a lock, so two simultaneous launches can't both squeeze through.

Every launch also needs a tweet URL, and each tweet can be used exactly once, ever. If someone tries to launch “your” coin with your tweet, the form tells them it's taken.

Launchpads earn trading fees on every coin. Usually those fees go to the platform or the creator. On Slot Zero developers withdraw nothing.

Every 3 minutes a worker claims the fees each coin has earned, in SOL, swaps that SOL for the same coin and burns 100% of what it bought. It keeps happening after the coin graduates to its permanently locked Meteora DAMM v2 pool. Each claim, swap and burn is a separate on-chain transaction, linked from the coin page and the public ledger.

A coin's fees only ever buy back that coin. Small amounts roll over until they reach the minimum buyback size, so nothing is lost to dust.

No buyback mechanism can guarantee price performance.