This article was published by Magna, a Payward company, as part of our TGE Readiness series.
Out of 118 token launches in 2025, 84.7% ended the year below their TGE valuation. The median was down 71%.
It’s not a market problem. Teams that avoided these consequences were not better resourced or better advised. They had the right people lined up before Mint.
So who were these people?
The 6 people you must have lined up before striking
Not all token launches fail for technical reasons. These are the people who need to be lined up before a strike decision is made.
1. Legal advisor
The legal advisor is the one that everyone knows they need and the one who is most often consulted too late. Legal counsel should have confirmed the token classification, issuing entity and jurisdiction before any minting discussion begins.
The channel you build on, the standard you use, the structure of your initial distribution; All of these have legal implications that vary by jurisdiction.
If Legal has not approved keystroke settings before your deployment, you are making legal decisions without a lawyer. This is a different type of risk than a buggy contract.
We’ve walked through the full sequence of legal and operational decisions that must be made before a token goes live in our Legal and Operational Preparation for Token Launch guide. Entity setup and jurisdiction are steps one and two for a reason.
2. Tokenomics Advisor
The tokenomics advisor must have a locked-in procurement design, allocation table, and acquisition schedule. Before hits, not after.
For fixed supply tokens, which remain the norm for most TGEs, the initial supply is permanent. Allocation percentages set at the mint determine every downstream decision: airdrop size, swap allocations, market maker loan, cash reserve. Opposing unfinished tokenomics means that every subsequent conversation with suppliers starts from a shaky foundation.
Sequencing matters as much as design. Teams that treat tokenomics as settled before approaching exchanges or market makers have noticeably cleaner launches than those that conduct these conversations in parallel. We talked about this in our 2026 forecast article; Tokenomics is now an economic architecture, and investors subscribe to tokens like businesses, testing hypotheses and modeling downside cases.
The bar has been raised. If your allocation chart isn’t airtight before these conversations begin, it shows.
3. Childcare provider
The custody provider’s solution must be operational and tested before the tokens exist to be placed there. Live and tested; not selected, not integrated, not in progress. Key ceremonies completed. Documented signing policies. Confirmed wallet addresses.
Most founders underestimate the guard until it becomes a blocker. You can have perfect tokenomics, audited contracts, and enthusiastic investors, but if your custody story doesn’t hold up, everything stops. Among the launches we’ve supported, the gap between “selected” and “live and tested” is consistently longer than teams anticipate.
Onboarding timelines vary from a few weeks to several months, and the sooner you start, the more options you have. Teams that begin childcare integration at T-8 months have fundamentally different launch experiences than those that begin at T-6 weeks.
4. Exchange contacts
The exchange contact should have seen your acquisition schedule and initial supply breakdown prior to minting. The listing date and unlock schedule are not independent decisions. If your exchange contact has not seen the tokenomics chart, you are trading a quote date without the information they need to evaluate it.
This is one of the most consistent patterns of failure in token launches: the team that negotiated the listing date never spoke to the team that set the vesting schedule. More information on this model below.
5. Distribution infrastructure provider
The distribution infrastructure provider must have confirmed chain compatibility, wallet support, and claim contract readiness before minting. If your distribution infrastructure is not compatible with your chosen chain and token standard, your claims portal will not work on launch day.
Once tokens are issued, they must be stored and distributed via already operational and tested infrastructure. Coordination between the strike event and the distribution layer cannot be an afterthought; this is a prerequisite. This means that the distribution provider must be present before the chain and token standard is finalized, not after.
When Espresso launched its million wallet airdrop in February 2026, the claims infrastructure absorbed 8.9 million submitted accounts and processed hundreds of claims per block at peak load – because the distribution layer had been confirmed well before creation.
When Param Labs distributed the offering to over 500,000 stakeholders with a 12-month vesting period for 50,000 recipients, the list of requesters was only finalized 24 hours before launch, a delay that was only possible because the infrastructure was already active and pending, and not yet configured.
In both cases, the distributor was ultimately not involved. They were in the room from the start.
6. Smart Contract Auditor
The smart contract auditor must have completed their review Before hit, not near. Audits take months to plan, not days. If the listener is still working when the typing decision is made, the decision is made without their input.
The chain, symbolic standard, and contract architecture all affect what the auditor examines, meaning the auditor should have been made aware of these three elements before starting, not handed a completed contract and asked to sign it quickly.
What happens when one of them isn’t there
Failure modes are predictable. They occur in variations of the same pattern on launches of all sizes.
The guard gap
The token is issued on a chain that the custody provider’s onboarding schedule cannot support before TGE. Custody setup begins at T-6 weeks instead of T-8 months. The key ceremony takes place in a hurry. Cash operations on launch day are slower and more manual than they should be, exactly in the window where speed and accuracy matter most.
We’ve seen this trend across dozens of launches. This is the most common source of avoidable stress on launch day.
The registration-unlock collision
The listing date is set before anyone has shown the stock exchange the vesting schedule. The unlock cliff is already fixed. The registration date is already reserved. A few months later, someone puts both dates in the same calendar for the first time and achieves the first major unlock two weeks after registration. Until then, neither date is easy to move.
Unmodeled selling pressure
Airdrop size, swap allocations, and market maker lending are agreed upon in separate conversations, by separate teams, without a single model to show what day one selling pressure actually looks like when you add them up. People who needed to compare notes made their decisions in order rather than together.
The most documented version of this failure does not involve an airdrop. This is a market maker agreement signed by part of a team, challenged internally by legal counsel and unknown to everyone else. This resulted in tens of millions of tokens hitting the market on launch day. The contract was real. The coordination was not.
When elements of a distribution are designed in isolation, the overall result is worse than any individual decision might suggest, and by the time anyone builds the consolidated model, the numbers are already locked in.
None of these are catastrophic in themselves. They all make up. And they all start with the same root cause: the right people weren’t in the room before the strike decision was made.
The coordination problem
The above six roles are not new. Every team launching a token knows they need it. Guides exist. Checklists exist.
A study of more than 600 Web3 founders and launch participants describes token launches as “high-stakes coordination schemes” and notes that only a few succeed. The bottleneck is not knowledge. It’s an execution between people who don’t speak naturally to each other.
What doesn’t exist in most launches is a single moment where all six of these people look at the same model before the strike. Legal has approved the structure but has not seen the exchange’s listing requirements. The childcare provider was selected but was not informed of the distribution schedule. The tokenomics advisor has completed the allocation table but has not shared it with the market maker.
You can make all the right technical decisions and still have a bad launch. The contract can be clean. The standard may be correct. The chain may be wise. And yet, if the people responsible for each component weren’t in the same room before the strike, the moment you treated as technical turns out to have been a coordination problem all along.
Most teams have a few of these aligned roles. Look for gaps before deploying and make sure you have them all aligned.
Magna is a key part of Kraken 360. To learn more about end-to-end support, from pre-TGE to scale:
