Fair launch or pre-mined: how the coin got into circulation
A new filter on the ranking separates coins whose supply started at zero from coins that shipped with an initial allocation. The bucket a chain lands in shapes who holds it, who governs it, and who gets to sell it early — three questions market cap does not answer.
Every coin was issued somehow. On some networks the first block was empty and every coin in circulation was earned by mining or validating. On others a portion — sometimes a small one, sometimes all of it — existed at block zero, granted to founders, foundation, ICO buyers, airdrop recipients, or an initial validator set.
That difference is not visible in a price chart. It is visible in what happens next. A chain that ships with a large founder allocation carries an overhang: the people who received those coins can sell them, and the ones who did not have to buy them from someone. A chain that started empty spreads the same way it accrues cost — miner by miner, validator by validator, with nobody structurally ahead.
Three buckets, one question each
The filter uses three curated categories and one honest fallback:
- No premine — no founder allocation, no airdrop, no sale. The chain started empty and every coin in circulation was earned. Bitcoin and its lineage (BCH, BSV, LTC, DOGE) sit here, along with Monero and the PoW privacy family, Kaspa, and the multi-algo fair-launch group (Ravencoin, DigiByte, Vertcoin).
- Premine — coins were allocated without being mined, but none were sold to raise money. Ripple and Stellar (100% allocated at genesis), Dash (an instamine of about 1.9M coins on day one), Decred (half airdropped, half bought by its own developers out of pocket), Horizen, and the airdrop launches — Arbitrum, Optimism, Hyperliquid.
- Presale — the founders raised money by selling the coin. Ethereum's 2014 ICO is the archetype, followed by Cardano, Solana, Polkadot, Avalanche, Cosmos, Near, Algorand, Filecoin, Aptos, Sui, TON and every exchange chain (BNB, CRO, KCS).
- Unclassified — not yet curated. Search still surfaces these rows; the filter simply doesn't claim to know.
A sale is a sale, whatever it is called
Presale does not depend on how the coin was sold or to whom. A public ICO, an exchange launch, a SAFT, a private round, a venture deal: if the founders raised money against the coin, that is a presale. Selling coins also means they were allocated first, so every presale is a premine as well. The filter shows the stricter label.
That rule settles the cases people argue about. Zcash held no sale at launch, and no coins existed at block zero. But the company that built it raised venture money, and its investors were paid 1.65% of the total supply out of the four-year founders' reward. Money in, coins out: presale. Sia never sold a siacoin, but in 2014 Nebulous sold notes that converted into Siafunds, the genesis asset that earns a share of every storage contract. Presale.
The rule also says what does not count. Funding a company is not selling a coin. Kaspa's original developers raised venture money, and the coin still launched with no premine and no sale. Decred's developers bought their allocation with their own money; nobody outside was raising funds. The line is the coin, not the company.
A coin's distribution model is orthogonal to its consensus family, its purpose, and its regulatory nature. Filter Proof of Work chains and nearly all of them started empty — Zcash is the well-known exception. Filter Proof of Stake chains and almost none did. That is not a coincidence: staking requires stake at genesis, and stake at genesis means someone had to give it out.
The new picker sits alongside Algorithms, Ledgers, and Purpose in the ranking's controls row. Every combination stacks — Presale + PoS + Smart contracts is one query; No premine + PoW + Payments is another. Both are worth being able to ask.
Figures are from the current data build and move with every six-hourly refresh. Coverage grows as more chains are curated.