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The sentence fair launch conjures up images of grassroots communities with no preferential treatment for any specific group, equal access for all without development or team incentives, and protocols that emerged without hidden privileges. Yet by 2025, fair launch has become less of a principle and more of a marketing slogan. The values that once guided this term, including equality and true alignment between users and builders, have been diluted to fit whatever allocation scheme the latest token distribution requires.
Summary
- Bitcoin is often hailed as the original “fair launch,” but its early mining concentration, wealth asymmetry, and halvings show that its fairness was imperfect.
- DeFi’s ‘fair launch’ hype in 2020 collapsed into yield farms, forks and insider windfalls – fairness meant little more than ‘no ICO’.
- Most modern blockchains rely on insider pre-sales and allocations, creating deferred inflation and undermining fairness.
- A truly fair launch requires equal treatment of contributions over time, no insider exclusions, and value based on real utility rather than token speculation.
Was Bitcoin a fair launch?
When Satoshi Nakamoto published the Bitcoin (BTC) whitepaper in 2008, the promise was clear. It was positioned as a peer-to-peer electronic money system that would serve as a better global means of payment. More than fifteen years later, that vision has still not become reality. Instead of becoming a widely used medium of exchange, Bitcoin has transitioned into an investment asset, a kind of digital gold that promises outsized capital gains.
Bitcoin is often presented as the original stock market launch, with no VC round, no foundation fund or pre-sale. But when you peel back the mythology, cracks start to appear. For the first year, Satoshi controlled the vast majority of the network, some estimates putting it at 70%. Early mining was essentially pre-mining, and the small number of participants were able to accumulate a huge supply before the concept of the ‘crypto market’ even existed.
So why are we still treating Bitcoin as a fair launch? Because Satoshi never moved his coins and no insider payout disrupted the distribution. For all its imperfections, Bitcoin’s economics were in line with its product. Each block was a unit with an imperishable record, and participants were equally rewarded for producing it. But its scarcity turned it into digital gold, undermining its supposed role as peer-to-peer cash. Fixed supply guaranteed that latecomers could never be on equal footing with early miners. The model essentially planted wealth asymmetry in the DNA of the network. The halving mechanism reinforced this gap and presented a dual reality: on the one hand, a long-term promise that network fees would support security once block rewards decline; on the other hand, a structural rule that miners receive half the reward every cycle, meaning that the system itself has never treated participants equally over time.
The DeFi Summer Mirage
Ten years later, a fair launch was back in fashion. In the ‘DeFi Summer’ of 2020, projects like Yearn Finance proudly declared that their tokens were fairly distributed. Anyone could grow liquidity and acquire governance rights. Yet, providing liquidity was not a universal activity, but rather a financial business product.
Worse, these “honest launches” were vulnerable to vampire attacks. SushiSwap forked Uniswap; PancakeSwap cloned Sushi. Each ‘fair’ fork pumped liquidity by promising higher returns. Early insiders of each iteration were rewarded again and again. A fair launch, as defined in DeFi, was neither fair nor defensible. It created a race of forks and food coins, where honesty meant little more than ‘we didn’t do an ICO’.
The pre-sale standard
The industry has now shifted the definition again. Ethereum’s ICO raised over $18 million in 2015 by selling 72 million ETH, more than half of the current supply in circulation, before a block was ever mined. Solana (SOL), Aptos (APT) and Sui (SUI) repeated the pattern, raising hundreds of millions and allocating large percentages to insiders. After TGE, these allocations are not counted as part of inflation, even though they essentially represent deferred inflation, because these allocations only become part of the circulating supply after the cliff is unlocked.
Users don’t buy into a network; they buy up early backers. ‘Fair launch’ has been reduced to a threshold in this world; A 5% allocation to insiders is now considered fair enough. But whether it is 5% or 35%, the principle is in danger.
The Real Meaning of ‘Fair Launch’
A fair launch has never been about percentages on a cap table. It’s about the alignment of values, and whether the smallest unit of contribution to a network is rewarded equally, whether you joined on day one or ten years from now. The smallest unit of Bitcoin is a block. In identity networks it can be a verified human. In other systems it could be computing power or bandwidth. The test is simple: does the network treat all contributors as equals forever?
Other questions that help determine project eligibility include: Is the smallest contribution unit clearly defined and accessible to every person, not just capital providers? Are equal contributions rewarded equally over time? Are insider/team/investor allocations zero at the network layer (and not just “<5%”)? Is inflation within the chain inclusive and controllable, without the need for overhang outside the chain (vests/releases) to support development?
This is another reason why Bitcoin’s launch wasn’t fair enough. Companies with capital compete with indie miners, making it very expensive to try to join this side of the market. When it comes to values, Bitcoin has a built-in mechanism that makes it more centralized over time.
By that standard, almost every project fails these days. Presales and foundation treasuries create deferred inflation that users have to buy up, and “liquidity mining” stock market launches limit participation among capital-bearing specialists. Unlock schemes and hardcode exit liquidity into the future. They don’t launch to serve a community, but to serve the balance sheets of insiders.
For a truly fair launch, the core protocol must stand alone and deliver real utility independent of token price movements. When it comes to capturing value, founders and developers need to be able to make profits from adjacent ecosystems, whether they are services or businesses that sit on top of the network. The benefit should come from building things that people actually want, rather than relying on the continued appreciation of the token. When the survival of a protocol depends on the demand for tokens, fairness is already at risk.
Ultimately, a fair launch is the only foundation on which sustainable crypto networks can be built. A network that favors insiders will always fall apart, because someone can always fake the code and promise a slightly better deal. But when honesty is absolute and product value is the driving force, there is nothing left to dispute. Communities survive because they are treated as equals, not because of speculative incentives. So a fair launch is crypto’s social contract, a commitment that no matter when you arrive, you’re on equal footing with all other participants.
