Free the Bird has launched on Neo N3 MainNet, with live trading, staking, governance, and an FTB token claim mechanism for former Flamingo Finance users across 5,233 eligible wallets. Free the Bird is a keyless, oracle-less non-custodial exchange built by Neo community member Xatoxi as a direct response to Flamingo Finance’s August exploit and subsequent status in limbo.

Regarding the buildout and launch of Free the Bird, Xatoxi believes the exchange protects users from a potential shutdown, as Neo’s premier non-custodial exchange experienced. He said:

Flamingo’s code was never the problem, the keys were. An upgrade key is a liability even if nobody ever turns it, because its mere existence means the system was never really yours. We took contracts the community already trusted, stripped every key out, and renounced ownership on chain. We can’t upgrade it, mint from it, or pause it any more than you can. Code is only law when nobody holds the pen.

The platform is designed to offer conventional non-custodial exchange features, as well as innovative tools such as a Neo Discord bond, aimed at improving social accountability. The FTB token will be used for platform trading fee rewards and to enforce governance.

Claim mechanism for Flamingo holders

FTB has a fixed hard cap of 100,000,000 tokens and resides on the Neo N3 chain. According to Xatoxi, FTB’s contracts are designed with no owner key, meaning no address holds upgrade or administrative authority over the protocol.

Former participants in Flamingo Finance can claim FTB tokens based on a snapshot of their prior on-chain positions. Eligible wallets include those that previously held FLM or FLOCKS tokens, liquidity pool positions, or lending vault positions on Flamingo Finance.

The snapshot has already been taken, and each address can only perform a claim once. Future staking dividends are also claimable on the same page.

Governance and the Discord Bond

Governance proposals are open for anyone to put forth and vote on. Submissions require a refundable FTB bond, and proposals that are deemed spam forfeit that bond. Voting weight is 1 FTB per vote, with snapshot-weighted counts recorded on-chain. Because FTB’s contracts are designed with no owner key, protocol rules change only by community vote.

Additionally, the Discord Bond is a unique, on-chain social accountability mechanism that requires bonding tokens to enter. The Free the Bird website describes it:

Entry to the FTB Discord is bonded. Post a 1,000 FTB bond, verify your deposit, and you’re in. The bond is your skin in the game: if you scam a member, the community can file an accusation and vote to liquidate and burn your bond. Honest actors get their bond back on a clean exit; scammers lose it to the fire.

Accusations can be made against bonded Discord members, including spamming, mass mentioning, link flooding, and others. Should a bonded Discord community member be found in violation of any of these activities by a vote, their FTB tokens will be sent to a black hole address and burned.

In addition to the code and keys, the Free the Bird website is hosted in a distributed manner.

IPFS hosting and censorship resistance

The Free the Bird application is a bundle of static files published to IPFS, a peer-to-peer distributed file system similar to NeoFS. The Free the Bird site explains the model, “Any machine can hold that bundle and serve it. When you run an FTB node it keeps a bit-for-bit copy and shares it — so even if every FTB-run machine vanished, the app is still reachable from yours. It holds no wallet and no keys.”

One qualification applies: the freethebird.co domain has a registrant. The IPFS hosting model means the application persists if FTB’s own infrastructure goes offline, but the domain itself is not ownerless.

Flamingo background

Free the Bird’s design choices respond directly to the two events that have seemingly ended Flamingo Finance.

In April, Flamingo published an open letter detailing a dispute over support with Neo Global Development and the Neo Foundation, in which it disclosed that the Flamingo team had never held upgrade authority for its own smart contracts.

Contract control had remained with NGD and the NF. Among other grievances, Flamingo alleged that three expected disbursements totaling approximately 100,000 USDT, 20 BTC, 600,000 USDT, and an additional 100,000 USDT from the sale of ONT and WING tokens had not been received.

On August 31, Flamingo was exploited through a staking contract vulnerability. Approximately 2.19 trillion FLM were minted due to a flaw in the interaction between the lending and staking contracts, more than 3,500x the pre-exploit supply. The minted tokens were sold into liquidity pools, draining remaining liquidity.

In response, the Neo Council voted to freeze the attacker’s address on Neo N3.

FTB’s hard cap and no-mint design are a direct architectural response to that exploit. Its keyless structure responds to Flamingo’s core complaint: that other entities held the keys.

As of Nov. 7, neither Neo co-founder has publicly acknowledged Flamingo’s hack and subsequent suspended services.

Limitations and open questions

No external audit has been conducted on Free the Bird’s contracts; however, Xatoxi points out that everything is open source and available for public scrutiny. He said:

The AMM carries Flamingo’s existing audit because it is literally the same bytes. The keyless core (token, migrator, lending) is renounced, and you can verify on chain in about thirty seconds that it holds no keys. There’s a per-contract attestation in docs/security that walks you through the exact RPC calls. The governance and staking modules are deployed but deliberately not renounced yet, because that is new code and keyless is permanent.

Free the Bird has also provided an internal review of its non-custodial exchange design, which was compared to that of several other leading exchanges including Uniswap, PancakeSwap, Hyperliquid, THORChain, and more. The team ranked their design highest among the others because of the exchange’s oracle-free, keyless peer-to-peer design.

Ultimately, Xatoxi designed and launched Free the Bird to remedy Flamingo’s silent collapse. He said:

It’s a gift to the community that got burned, the ownerless version of what they already trusted. We’re not trying to replace Flamingo and we’re not racing Forthewin, who are building real products and are further along on Neo X than we are. We have real respect for what the Flamingo team built. The engineering was never what let people down. If a Flamingo rebuild ships keyless, or Forthewin renounces, we’ll be the first to say good. We’d rather the whole ecosystem adopt the standard than win a category.

The Free the Bird GitHub repository is published and available for all the review.

The full launch announcement can be found at the link below:
https://x.com/Xatoxi_/status/2119020231796367432

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