Jack Paul 
The broken promise of fair launch
When you hear “fair launch” in crypto today, it’s hard not to feel a bit skeptical. The term once meant something real—equal access for everyone, no hidden advantages, no special treatment for insiders. But looking around now, it feels more like a marketing buzzword than an actual principle. I think we’ve lost sight of what made the concept meaningful in the first place.
Maybe it’s just the natural evolution of things, but the values that guided fair launch—equality, true alignment between users and builders—have been watered down to fit whatever allocation scheme the latest token needs. It’s become flexible enough to mean almost anything, which probably means it means nothing at all.
Bitcoin’s complicated legacy
People often point to Bitcoin as the original fair launch, and there’s some truth to that. No venture capital rounds, no foundation treasury, no presale. But when you look closer, the picture gets messy. For that first year, Satoshi controlled most of the network—some estimates say around 70%. Early mining was effectively a premine, and the small number of participants could accumulate enormous amounts before most people even knew what cryptocurrency was.
Why do we still call it fair? Mainly because Satoshi never moved those coins. No insider cash-out distorted things. The economics aligned with the product in a way that made sense at the time. Each block was a unit of record, and participants were rewarded equally for producing them.
But scarcity turned Bitcoin into digital gold rather than the peer-to-peer cash system it was supposed to be. The fixed supply meant latecomers could never stand on equal footing with early miners. The halving mechanism reinforced this divide over time. The system itself never treated participants equally across different cycles.
The DeFi summer illusion
Fast forward to 2020’s “DeFi Summer,” and fair launch became fashionable again. Projects like Yearn Finance proudly declared their tokens fairly distributed. Anyone could farm liquidity and earn governance rights. But providing liquidity wasn’t really a universal activity—it was more like a financialized business product.
These “fair launches” turned out to be vulnerable to vampire attacks. SushiSwap forked Uniswap, PancakeSwap cloned Sushi. Each “fair” fork pumped liquidity by promising higher yields. Early insiders kept getting rewarded again and again. Fair launch in DeFi ended up meaning little more than “we didn’t do an ICO.”
Where we are now
Today, the definition has shifted even further. Ethereum’s ICO raised over $18 million by selling 72 million ETH—more than half of current circulating supply—before any blocks were mined. Solana, Aptos, and Sui repeated this pattern, raising hundreds of millions and allocating huge percentages to insiders.
Users aren’t really buying into a network anymore; they’re buying out early backers. “Fair launch” has been reduced to a threshold—5% insider allocation is now considered fair enough. But whether it’s 5% or 35%, the principle is compromised.
What fair launch should mean
Fair launch was never about percentages on a cap table. It’s about alignment of values—whether the smallest unit of contribution to a network is rewarded equally, whether you joined on day one or ten years later. In Bitcoin, the smallest unit is a block. In identity networks, it might be a verified human. In other systems, it could be compute or bandwidth.
The real test is simple: does the network treat all contributors as equals forever?
Other questions matter too. Is the smallest unit of contribution clearly defined and open to any human, not just capital providers? Are equal contributions rewarded equally across time? Are insider allocations zero at the network layer? Is on-chain inflation inclusive and auditable?
By these standards, almost every project today fails. Presales and foundation treasuries create deferred inflation that users must buy out. “Liquidity mining” fair launches restrict participation to capital-bearing specialists. Unlock schedules hard-code exit liquidity into the future.
For a true fair launch, the core protocol has to stand on its own and deliver genuine utility, independent of token price movements. Founders and developers should earn profits from adjacent ecosystems—services or businesses layered on top of the network. The upside should come from building things people actually want, not from continued token appreciation.
When a protocol’s survival depends on token demand, fairness is already compromised. Fair launch is the only foundation durable crypto networks can be built on. A network that privileges insiders will always fracture because someone can always fork the code and promise a slightly better deal.
But when fairness is absolute and product value drives everything, there’s nothing left to fork against. Communities stay because they’re treated as equals, not because of speculative incentives. That’s what fair launch should be—a commitment that no matter when you arrive, you stand on equal ground with every other participant.