TGE marketing should aim for holders who are still using the product 90 days later, not for a trending hashtag on launch day. That means designing the week around who gets tokens and why they stay: in Keyrock's study of 16,000+ unlock events, about 90% put downward pressure on price.
Who decides this
The CMO owns the TGE week plan: the audiences, the channels, the budget and the result. The community lead owns execution in the project's own channels, from moderation and AMAs to quests and support. General counsel signs off every public communication about the token before the week starts, because launch week is when promotion rules bite hardest.
What should TGE week be designed to achieve?
Design TGE week to convert an existing community into informed holders and users, then measure that conversion at 30 and 90 days. Launch week marketing cannot create demand that the months before it did not build.
The week is the end of a sequence, not the start of one. By the time tokens go live, the project should already know which users it wants, in which markets, and what those users will do with the token. Our sibling guide on the TGE sequence from lock-up to listing covers the operational steps; this guide covers the people.
Set three numbers before the week starts: target holders at launch, target share still holding at 90 days, and target share using the product, not just holding. Everything in the activation plan should move at least one of them.
Agree the budget split in the same meeting. Money spent on reach before the week buys awareness; money spent during the week should buy first product use. If a tactic cannot be tied to one of the three numbers, cut it, however popular it is with the agency.
Who should get tokens in TGE week, and how do we keep farmers out?
Reward people who used the product before the TGE was announced, filter for duplicate and automated accounts, and avoid incentives that pay for activity alone. Farmers respond to the cheapest path to tokens. Remove it.
The evidence on paid activity is discouraging. A 2025 review of Arbitrum's incentive programs found usage often fell back toward pre-program levels once rewards ended, in some cases within weeks. It linked heavy use of fee rebates and points programs to weak retention, and found better results when incentives targeted new users or new markets.
Keyrock's unlock study is more encouraging on community distributions. Community and public unlocks saw gradual, modest declines, and many recipients held their tokens, while short-term farmers sold quickly. Team unlocks did the most damage. The lesson for the CMO: who receives tokens matters as much as how many.
Filtering is a known discipline. Gitcoin's grant rounds faced coordinated fake accounts and responded with identity checks, a model to flag suspect accounts, and human review before any sanction. Optimism's third retro funding round excluded 967 applications amid spam and an influx of airdrop farmers, and listed weak eligibility criteria among its lessons. Write eligibility rules before the snapshot and publish them.
What we would do: weight eligibility to activity before the announcement date, cap rewards per identity, and review flagged accounts by hand before excluding them. Expect complaints from people you exclude, and answer them with the published rules.
What should the community actually do during launch week?
Give each day one job, one owner and one measure. A busy week with no sequence produces noise; a short sequence produces holders.
| Window | Community activity | Owner | What to measure |
|---|---|---|---|
| T-14 to T-7 | Publish eligibility rules, white paper where required, and the launch FAQ; brief moderators | Community lead with counsel | FAQ views, support questions answered |
| T-6 to T-1 | AMAs with the team; walkthroughs of claiming and the product's first use | CMO and product lead | Attendance, questions resolved, wallet sign-ups |
| T-0 (TGE day) | Claim opens; live support in every channel; one coordinated announcement | Community lead | Claim success rate, support response time |
| T+1 to T+3 | Product-first activations: tasks that need real use of the product, not social posts | Product and community | Wallets completing a product action |
| T+4 to T+7 | Recap with on-chain data; next-quarter roadmap; ambassador programme opens | CMO | Holders retained, repeat product use |
Keep KOLs and paid promotion out of the first 24 hours unless counsel has cleared each post. Launch-day promotion is the hardest to correct once it is live.
What can we say, where, and when?
Say nothing promotional about the token in the EU before any required white paper is published, carry the required disclaimers, and treat UK audiences as a separate regime with stricter rules on incentives. Write a one-page jurisdiction matrix and give it to every moderator, ambassador and creator.
In the EU, MiCA Article 7 requires marketing to be clearly identifiable as marketing, fair, clear and not misleading, and consistent with the white paper. Where a white paper is required, marketing may not go out before it is published. Communications must include a disclaimer that no competent authority has reviewed them.
Free distributions are not automatically outside the rules. MiCA Article 4 excludes crypto-assets offered for free from its offer requirements, but not where recipients must provide personal data or the offeror receives fees or other benefits in return. The exemption also falls away once the offeror says in any communication that it will seek admission to trading. An airdrop that requires an email sign-up, or comes with a listing announcement, needs counsel's view.
In the UK, the FCA bans incentives to invest in cryptoasset promotions, such as refer-a-friend and new-joiner bonuses. Its policy statement says extra free cryptoassets, and benefits available only for a limited time, are likely to count as incentives. Some common TGE-week tactics may fit that description.
The FCA's social media guidance says firms remain responsible for promotions they cause, including through influencers and referral links. Memes can count, and so can posts in invitation-only channels such as Telegram. Firms should keep their own records of communications rather than rely on platforms, and monitor affiliates on an ongoing basis.
How do we brief moderators, ambassadors and creators?
Brief everyone who speaks for the project in writing, approve token-related posts before they go out, and keep your own record of what was said. In launch week, people who are not your employees will be talking about your token.
The FCA's guidance is direct on this. A firm whose referral link appears in a creator's post may be treated as causing that promotion, and so answers for its compliance. The guidance calls little or no ongoing monitoring of affiliates poor practice, and says firms should consider how many partnerships they can realistically oversee.
The EU disclaimer is specific too. Under Article 7, communications must say a white paper has been published and give the offeror's website, a telephone number and an email address. Moderators answering questions in Discord and Telegram need that text to hand.
What we would give each person before T-14:
- A one-page brief: what the token does, what it does not do, and the phrases never to use, such as promises of returns.
- The jurisdiction matrix: which audiences may be addressed, with which wording and disclaimer.
- An approval route: who signs off token-related posts, and how fast.
- A log: every paid creator, fee, post link and disclosure used, kept by the project, not the platform.
Fewer, better-briefed voices beat a large ambassador army in launch week. If you cannot monitor a partner, do not sign one.
How do we measure the week?
Measure TGE week on holders and users, not reach. Report four numbers at T+7, T+30 and T+90.
- Holders retained: share of launch-week recipients still holding.
- Product use: wallets that completed a real product action, and how many repeated it.
- Concentration: share of supply held by the largest wallets, compared with the plan.
- Support load: unresolved claim and access problems, by channel.
Followers, impressions and peak volume belong in an appendix. They are easy to buy and say little about whether the launch built a base.
What goes wrong: distribution left to chance
The common failure is a TGE week that is loud but unplanned. Tokens go to whoever completes the most tasks, the community floods with new members who arrived for the airdrop, and nobody decided which users the project needed.
It looks like this. Quests reward follows, retweets and invites. Thousands of wallets qualify, many controlled by the same farmers who work every launch. Claim day is chaotic and support falls behind. Within days, much of the distribution has been sold, the new community has gone quiet, and the real early users feel rewarded less than the farmers were.
None of that is bad luck. It follows from leaving distribution to whoever turns up. The fix is the plan above: named target users, published eligibility, product-first activations and a 90-day measure.
How Alcyone approaches it
Alcyone plans the launch week as the last stage of a distribution plan written months earlier. Alcyone's marketing and visibility advisory covers the marketing strategy and channel plan and KOL and community activation, and its partners stay on the line through the launch window. In one published case, the first token launch on a major Layer-1 brought 5,000+ new holders. A post-launch report follows within the week.