Mike Wizowski

I would advise you to think twice about launching a fair launch coin if you intend on using it to fund a long-duration project. Teams need resources to build. Generally, when a team raises a Series A from VCs, they give away 10-20% and keep 80-90% of the initial capital. If the project becomes a unicorn (> $1B) then usually the team owns a significant share of that which they can use for operations. In the current "fair launch" meta, teams end up with 5-15% supply at TGE after giving away 85-95%. This causes a whole range of problems. 1. No supply control means that anyone can just buy the token and start caballing it. Many of the AI projects have a token price set by the cabal choosing to support them which goes to 0 as the cabal farms the user base. In the end, the devs usually get very little, since they feel a moral obligation to go down with the ship. 2. It's really hard to give equity that satisfies teammates with prior expectations-- everyone looks at the big number, compares the "fair launch" projects to projects of old and thinks "wait why are you giving me .1%-.2% of this? That's not fair!" when proportionally it represents a far larger portion of the team's allocation than 1-10% of a more normal project launch. 3. Extremely low liquidity favors early traders but fucks over just about everyone else. Any time the liquidity becomes significant there is a risk of a big whale making an exit and selling into that liquidity, crashing the price a lot. Fair launch coins almost always have a really bad liquidity problem-- this is a feature for traders who want to see major price movements and a nightmare for builders who just want to build drama-free. 4. Fair launch only rewards builders who already have capital to put in and who coordinate smashing the button immediately with their SOL or bundling their launches. Many teams have launched a project and then have had to literally beg the community for resources to have enough to build. The only reason we've been able to get so far is because one whale extremely generously donated 11%. 5. Fair launch for real projects can create legal requirements that cost a lot of time and money retroactively moving to fix. Setting up an offshore token foundation, onshore dev co, hiring multiple lawyers, etc. *after launch* is risky and expensive. 6. Nobody expects a pumpcoin to release revolutionary L1-level tech in 2-3 years. The daosdotfun meta was created to enable traders to casually run a fund for a year and take their carry when the fund closes. We're following metas which reward projects for the first few weeks, then become major albatrosses. 7. Traders have absolutely no idea what goes into building products most of the time, and their expectations are just absolutely unrealistic. When we're building things that have never been built before, it is very hard to assess exactly how long things will take or what the technical risks really are until we've crossed those bridges. Vitalik expected PoS to be finished in 2017 and allocated tokens accordingly, if ETH hadn't shot up to $3k they'd be cooked. 8. There is also just a general problem with open source public goods, which is that people see them as free and rush to capitalize on them without consideration for how to build a sustainable and symbiotic relationship with the creators of those goods. If there were a way that I could continue to work on open source public goods forever and not have to build launchpads and tokenomics and other products to accrue value, everyone else would benefit so much more. But since very very few people are establishing win/win relationships with our project and are just using it for free to make money for themselves, I have no choice but to focus on those things. I've been thinking a lot about how we can balance the spirit of fair launch-- enabling everyone to get what usually only the VCs get-- with realistic mechanisms to enable teams to build real tech. I've been working with some really incredible folks in the space to codify this into a system and we'll be releasing a whitepaper soon.