Cryptocurrency was born with the promise of democratizing access to financial opportunities, just like the internet democratized information.
Cryptocurrency is often praised for its potential to democratize access to financial opportunities, just like the internet democratized access to information. By using open, decentralized, and permissionless blockchain technology, cryptocurrency projects can eliminate intermediaries and level the playing field.
The idea is that anyone with an internet connection and device can participate in crypto's varied opportunities and financial freedom. However, practices like whitelists, pre-mines, and venture capital (VC) allocations benefit a few and rig the market against the general population.
For instance, Initial Coin Offering (ICOs) in 2017 emerged with the promise of egalitarianism only to be exploited by private funds.
This season, the market turned to meme coins to fight against the backroom dealings between projects and VCs, who would dump the coins on retail in the open market at a much higher valuation than the heavily discounted rates they get them for.
But it didn't take long for so-called influencers to take advantage of meme coins' promise of open access and easy profits. By using their followers on social media as exit liquidity, influencers, and celebrities have now, too, more or less killed this new trend.
Despite this, the potential of a fair launch can't be dismissed. Fair launch means giving everyone an equal chance to get tokens regardless of their status.
In fair launches, tokens are earned, owned, and governed by the community from the get-go. The practice ensures no one has early access or allocation of tokens. Also, no one should get a sizable discount on the market price; rather, anyone can acquire coins at the same price, quantity, and time.
This way, fair launch prevents advantages for any specific group, eliminates centralized control, emphasizes decentralization, builds community trust, and contributes to the project's long-term sustainability.
Top 5 ‘Fair-launch' Digital Assets
Now, let's take a look at some of the most prominent examples of ‘fair launch' projects that gave equal opportunity to all participants at inception. These projects had no pre-mined tokens or reserved allocations for insiders. Rather, they had transparency in their goals and tokenomics, distribution methods favouring community participation, and focus on community decision-making.
Based on the latest market data, here are the top five fair launch cryptocurrencies by market capitalization:
1. Bitcoin (BTC)
Bitcoin, the world's largest cryptocurrency with a market cap of $1.7 trillion, is credited with pioneering the digital asset class. The Crypto King was launched in 2009 without pre-mining, embodying the principles of a fair launch.
The Bitcoin whitepaper was published on October 31, 2008, and its pseudo-anonymous founder, Satoshi Nakamoto, mined the genesis block on January 3, 2009, which included a reward of 50 BTC. As a “proof of no premine,” it included a message — “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on the brink of second bailout for banks.”
This genesis made the Bitcoin blockchain a reality and marked the beginning of the world's first decentralized cryptocurrency. Bitcoins were open source from day one, with no presale, insider allocation, or privileged access. Anyone could mine Bitcoins by contributing their computational power to the network.
Nakamoto didn't reserve any coins before the launch either; instead mined them just as the blockchain went live, as could anyone else, though the number of participants was small. This is evident from this quote by Nakamoto:
“It might make sense just to get some in case it catches on. If enough people think the same way, that becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.”
Bitcoin has now come a long way from its early days. Since starting its journey as a fringe asset, Bitcoin has become the face of crypto, paved the way for digital currencies, and is now influencing financial institutions and global economics.
While institutions were initially skeptical, they are now also rushing in to acquire BTC. This shift was caused by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) giving a green light to Spot Bitcoin ETFs in Jan. 2024, which legalized BTC as an investment class. Since the regulatory approval, Spot Bitcoin ETFs have captured $35.8 bn in cumulative net inflows and collectively hold $95.75 billion in total assets, as per SoSoValue.
As Bitcoin awareness and adoption continued to rise along with its price, the crypto asset narrative evolved from being a ‘Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System' to a hedge against inflation. Today, Bitcoin, with its limited supply of 21 million, has solidified its status as a store of value.
When it comes to price, Bitcoin wasn't worth much in its early days. Its market was actually ~ $0 for nearly a year and a half, which means those who mined BTC in the early days were wasting their resources. The first recorded exchange of
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