Entity and jurisdiction determines which geographies you can legally distribute to, which exchanges will list you, and what compliance obligations apply to your airdrop. Making it too late, or based on the wrong inputs, forces expensive restructuring later. Usually at exactly the moment you can least afford it.
What to have locked: issuer entity confirmed, jurisdiction rationale documented, token classification determined, legal counsel signed.
2. Token economics, supply design, and FDV discipline — T-10 months
Total supply, allocation split, vesting schedules, and the valuation you’re launching at. The vesting schedule for investors will be scrutinized by your community. The unlock cadence will determine your price chart for the first 18 months. And the FDV you choose will determine whether the market has room to appreciate or nowhere to go but down.
Tokens that launch at inflated valuations relative to their liquidity and organic demand tend to correct sharply and don’t recover. Set your FDV based on what the market can absorb, not what makes your cap table look good. Keep your initial float tight relative to your liquidity depth.
What to have locked: final supply fixed, allocation table signed off by all stakeholders, cliff and vesting schedule confirmed for every stakeholder group, FDV validated against comparable launches and realistic buy-side depth.
3. Get every allocation decision in the same room — T-9 months
This is the most important decision on this list. It is also the one most teams never actually make.
Your airdrop size, your exchange allocations, your market maker loan, and your initial float are not four separate decisions. They are one decision made four times by four different people who haven’t compared notes.
Here’s what that looks like in practice. Your tokenomics advisor finalizes the airdrop allocation. Your exchange contact agrees to separate marketing allocation. Your market maker takes a loan against the token to bootstrap liquidity. Your legal team signs off on the structure. Each number looks reasonable to the person who set it. Nobody has put them in the same spreadsheet. On day one, the combined sell pressure from all three hits the market against a float that was sized assuming each of those numbers existed in isolation. That is not bad luck. That is a model that was never built.
Before any allocation is finalized, the people making each decision need to be in the same room with a single spreadsheet. The question isn’t whether each allocation is reasonable in isolation. It’s whether they’re collectively absorbable on day one.
If you are reading this and those four conversations have happened separately, stop. Get the people responsible for each one on a call this week and build the combined model before anything is signed.
What to have locked: all allocation decisions reviewed together by a single owner, combined day-one sell pressure mapped against realistic liquidity depth.
4. Custody setup — T-8 months
Who holds the keys, under what structure, with what signing policy? MPC vs multisig. Which provider. Who has access in which scenario. This is not a decision to make the week before TGE.
Key ceremonies take time. Onboarding takes time. Most founders underestimate custody until it becomes the blocker. You can have perfect tokenomics, audited contracts, and excited investors, but if your custody story doesn’t hold up, everything stalls. The gap between talking to a custodian and having custody live and tested is consistently longer than teams expect.
Start this conversation at T-8 months, not T-6 weeks. If you’re already inside six months, start it today.
What to have locked: custodian selected, signing policy documented, key ceremony completed, treasury wallets live and tested.
5. Chain and token standard selection — T-8 months
Where are you minting? This decision is permanent. It affects where you can list, how gas works for your users, what bridges exist, and what your claim infrastructure looks like.
Deploy on the chain where your users and product already exist. Launch on chains where major exchanges already support native deposits. Launching elsewhere forces users through bridging and increases abandonment. This decision also needs to happen before your distribution infrastructure is built, before your market maker starts work, and before your exchange conversations progress.
What to have locked: chain confirmed, token contract audited, testnet deployment complete.
6. Market maker selection and alignment — T-6 months
Your market maker is a service provider most of your other vendors have never spoken to. Your exchange contact doesn’t know how much your MM is borrowing. Your legal counsel doesn’t know the loan structure. Your tokenomics advisor has never seen the contract. That’s a coordination problem before it’s a structuring problem.
Get your market maker into the same conversation as your exchange contacts and your distribution team early enough that the loan size and the exchange allocations are designed together. The loan size needs to be in your allocation model from decision 03. If it isn’t, you’re not done with decision 03.
The contract needs specifics: spread, uptime, depth minimums, regime-segmented reporting. Any promise of price targets or volume guarantees is a red flag. But the bigger risk isn’t a bad contract. It’s a perfectly fine contract that nobody else on your launch team knows about.
What to have locked: MM selected, contract signed with granular KPIs, loan size reviewed alongside total allocation model, MM briefed on exchange listing timeline.
7. Airdrops and ecosystem distribution — T-6 months
How are tokens going to reach recipients? Vesting, claims portal, airdrop, or direct distribution? Who is building it? Who is operating it on launch day? These questions have real operational answers that need to be locked before TGE, not figured out during it.
The claim contract should be audited independently from the core protocol. Phishing sites appear within minutes of an airdrop announcement. The official claim URL needs to be published across all verified channels before eligibility details go public. If claims go live before trading begins, recipients sell into thin DEX liquidity.
If you’re doing an airdrop, sybil resistance is not optional. Protocols that apply rigorous eligibility filtering consistently see better post-launch price performance and more durable community engagement than those that don’t. Design eligibility criteria that make farming economically irrational, not just technically difficult.
White-label airdrop portals and compliance-aware token distribution for airdrops and ecosystem incentives are handled through Kraken 360’s Airdrops and Ecosystem Distribution layer, powered by Magna.
What to have locked: distribution method confirmed per allocation type, infrastructure provider selected, sybil resistance approach designed, load testing completed, claim activation timing aligned with listing.
8. Exchange listing coordination — T-12 months to start, T-5 months to finalize
Here is the failure mode. The team that negotiated the listing date has never spoken to the team that set the vesting schedule. The unlock cliff is already fixed. The listing date is already booked. A few months out, someone puts both dates in the same calendar for the first time and realizes the first major unlock lands two weeks after listing. By then, neither date is easy to move.
This happens because listing conversations and tokenomics conversations happen in parallel, with different people, and nobody owns the intersection. Fix the ownership problem before you start either conversation.
On timing: teams that start exchange conversations 6 to 9 months before launch are already behind. Tier-1 exchanges observe projects for months before deciding. Relationships matter and they take time. Start at T-12 months.
Tier 2 to 3 exchanges can be engaged 3 to 4 months out. When you negotiate: be willing to walk away. Founders who demonstrated alternatives or willingness to delay got materially better terms. Listing fees and token allocations have room. Exclusivity windows and geographic carve-outs can often be adjusted. Model every listing cost as sell pressure. Security deposits should be budgeted as potentially unrecoverable.
What to have locked: tier-1 conversations begun at T-12, primary exchange confirmed, listing date range agreed, unlock schedule shared with exchange, listing agreement signed by T-5.
9. Treasury management — T-4 months
Where does protocol treasury sit? Who controls it? What is the governance structure? What is the policy for treasury deployment, yield, liquidity, grants?
On public blockchains, every token movement is visible. Market participants do not distinguish between operational transfers and selling. Label treasury wallets publicly, communicate the purpose of significant movements before they occur, and assume that any unexplained transfer will be narrated by third parties in the least favourable light.
Establish treasury diversification mechanisms, OTC relationships, and structured conversion strategies before TGE while terms are favorable. Most teams defer this until after the token is up. By the time they decide to act, conditions have usually moved against them.
What to have locked: treasury structure confirmed, signatories named, initial treasury deployment policy agreed, diversification mechanisms established.
10. Compliance and jurisdiction review — T-4 months
What geographies are you restricting? What KYC/AML requirements apply to your distribution? Are there MiCA implications if you have EU exposure? Who owns the compliance question?
That last question is the one most teams can’t answer clearly. The compliance owner is usually “the lawyer, kind of.” That’s not an owner. It’s a gap with a name attached to it. One person needs to hold this with real accountability, not shared responsibility that dissolves under pressure.
What to have locked: restricted geographies list confirmed, KYC/AML requirements documented, compliance owner named.
11. Stakeholder communication plan — T-3 months
Who gets notified about what, in what order, through what channel? Investors, team, community, press, exchange contacts. The sequence matters more than the content. Getting it wrong means your investors hear about their unlock on Twitter before you’ve sent them an email. Your listing announcement drops before your team is briefed. Your community feels like an afterthought.
Write the notification plan before TGE. Not the week before. Not on the day.
What to have locked: stakeholder map complete, communication sequence written, pre-approved message templates ready for unlock announcements, listing announcements, and airdrop activation.
12. Token lifecycle and unlock coordination — T-3 months
Unlocks fail when team members sell independently, without coordination, in ways that amplify market impact. This is a coordination failure, not a market failure. Analysis of tens of thousands of unlock events consistently shows team unlocks as the most disruptive category, not because the tokens are being sold, but because they’re being sold by multiple individuals with different financial goals and no coordinated approach.
The solution isn’t a better vesting schedule. It’s a plan that every vesting stakeholder has agreed to before the first cliff hits: who communicates the unlock to the community, who coordinates execution timing, who manages the OTC relationships that keep team members off the open market simultaneously.
Price declines around unlocks typically begin 30 days before the event, as markets price in anticipated selling. By the time the unlock arrives, the narrative is already forming. Your communication plan needs to start a month out, not on the day.
Token vesting, allocation management, ecosystem incentives, and controlled unlock schedules for investors and teams are managed through Kraken 360’s Token Lifecycle Infrastructure, powered by Magna.
What to have locked: unlock communication owner named, coordinated execution plan agreed with all vesting stakeholders, OTC relationships in place, public wallet labelling done.
13. T-7 operational readiness check — T-7 days
One week out: run the full process end to end. Test transactions. Verify custody signing. Confirm claim portal load. Check that every vendor has received every piece of information they need. Confirm treasury multisig signatories are available for the critical window.
The launches that go smoothly have this list. The ones that don’t wish they had.
What to have locked: all systems tested, all vendors confirmed, go/no-go review completed, rollback plan documented, multisig signatories confirmed available.
The sequence is everything
The teams that get TGE right aren’t improvising. They made the same decisions as everyone else. They just made them in the right order, with the right people in the room, early enough to matter.
The edge comes from sequencing and coordination.
Get these right, in this order, and your launch will reflect it.
Sources
Keyrock, December 2024: From Locked to Liquidity: What 16,000+ Token Unlocks Teach Us
Kraken 360, March 2026: Pre-TGE Playbook Parts 1, 2 and 3
Zak Cole and Number Group, January 2026: The Fair Launch Handbook
Magna, April 2025: Token Launch Legal and Ops Prep Guide
a16z crypto, April 2024: Operational Guidelines for Token Launches
Arrakis Finance, February 2026: A Practical Guide to TGE in 2026
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