A chain should sign a launchpad partnership to get a repeatable path from funded team to live token, with vetting, vesting and liquidity handled the same way every time. Incentives alone do not deliver that: a 2025 review of Arbitrum's programs found usage typically fell back toward pre-program levels once rewards ended.
Who decides this
The head of ecosystem owns the partnership: which partner, on what terms, and whether the projects it launches are still building on the chain a year later. The foundation's counsel signs off where the partner will run public sales into regulated markets. The council should approve any token or treasury commitment the chain makes to the partner.
What does a chain actually gain from a capital-formation partner?
A good capital-formation partner gives the chain three things it struggles to build alone: a pipeline of vetted projects, a standard launch process, and a holder base that arrives with each token. Grants and incentives fund activity. A launch partner turns funded teams into tokens with owners on your chain.
The difference shows up after the money stops. A review for the Arbitrum DAO by two research teams found that TVL, users and volume typically rose during incentive programs and then fell back, in some cases within weeks. It found capital attracted by above-market yields left once that advantage ended. Launches are different in kind: a token with vesting and locked liquidity ties its team to the chain for the length of the schedule. The team, its investors and its holders all have a reason to stay where the token lives.
Launch structure also shapes what the market does next. Keyrock's study of 16,000+ unlock events across 40 tokens found that about 90% of unlocks put downward pressure on price. Team unlocks were the most damaging, and ecosystem-development unlocks were among the few with a positive average effect. A partner that sets vesting and lock terms well protects the chain's reputation as a place to launch.
Should the chain build its own launchpad, partner exclusively, or work with several?
Most chains should partner rather than build, and should keep any exclusivity short and conditional on launch volume. Building a launchpad means owning vetting, smart contracts, compliance and user support. That is a product company, not an ecosystem team.
| Model | Control | Time to first launch | Vetting and compliance burden on the chain | Reach to investors | Main risk |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chain builds its own launchpad | Full | Slowest: contracts, audits, team | All of it | Only the chain's own community | A second product to run, and liability for every sale |
| One exclusive partner | High, by contract | Fast if the partner already supports your chain | Shared, set in the agreement | The partner's investor base plus yours | Pipeline stalls if the partner deprioritises you |
| Several non-exclusive partners | Lower | Fast | Uneven: each partner vets differently | Widest | Weak projects launch through the laxest partner |
| Exchange-run launch platform | Low | Depends on the exchange's queue | Mostly the exchange's | Large retail base | Exchange sets terms; few projects qualify |
What we would do: one lead partner with a 12-month term, exclusivity only for a launch quota both sides can measure, and the right to add partners if the quota is missed. Write the vetting standard into the agreement so every partner you add later meets it.
What should the agreement require of the partner?
The agreement should fix the vetting standard, on-chain vesting and liquidity locks for every launch, a compliance process by market, and shared reporting. These are the terms that decide whether launches on your chain build a reputation or damage one.
Vetting. Named criteria: team identity verified by the partner, an audit before any sale, a token allocation reviewed against the vesting standard. The chain should see the pipeline and be able to object to a project in writing.
Vesting and locks. Team and investor tokens vest on-chain, and initial liquidity is locked for a stated period. Low-float launches are a known problem: Binance estimated about $155 billion in tokens would unlock from 2024 to 2030, as reported by Cointelegraph, and warned of sell pressure unless demand kept pace. Your partner's vesting floor is your defence against that pattern on your chain.
Compliance by market. A public sale is a regulated offer in the EU, and promoting it is regulated in the UK. Under MiCA, an offeror making a public offer of crypto-assets in the EU must be a legal person and must draft, notify and publish a white paper. Exemptions cover offers to fewer than 150 persons per member state, offers under €1 million over 12 months, and offers only to qualified investors. They fall away if the offeror signals an intention to seek admission to trading. That matters for any sale planned to lead to a listing.
Marketing has its own rules. MiCA Article 7 bars marketing communications before a required white paper is published. In the UK, the FCA's cryptoasset promotions rules ban incentives to invest such as refer-a-friend bonuses and add a 24-hour cooling-off period for first-time investors with a firm. The agreement should say which markets each sale may address, and who decides.
Exit and change of control. The chain can end the partnership on notice if the launch quota is missed, if a launch breaches the vetting standard, or if the partner changes owner. Live vesting and lock schedules must keep running after any exit, on-chain and outside either party's control.
Reporting. Every launch reports the same data to the chain: holders at launch and at 90 days, share of supply in vesting, locked liquidity and its expiry, and whether the team is still shipping.
How should the chain pay for the partnership, and what should it contribute?
Pay the partner in cash or per-launch fees where you can, and contribute access rather than tokens: co-marketing, grant matching for strong launches, and introductions to your exchanges and market makers. We found no published market standard for launchpad partnership fees, so treat any quote as a negotiation, not a benchmark.
A token allocation to the partner creates the same problem as any outside allocation: a holder with a short-term interest in price. If you grant one, vest it on terms no shorter than the chain's own core contributors, and tie part of it to the launch quota. Our sibling guide on structuring chain, exchange and protocol deals covers the general terms.
Coordinate the partnership with the chain's other programs. The Arbitrum review cautioned against running overlapping incentive programs unless each has a distinct goal and they are coordinated. A launch partner, a grants committee and a liquidity program that each fund the same teams on different terms waste money and confuse founders. Give one person on the ecosystem team the map of who funds what.
The chain's best contribution is often matching capital. A grant or liquidity commitment that follows a successful launch, against milestones, rewards projects that raised and shipped, rather than projects that only applied.
How do we know the partnership is working?
Judge the partnership on what launched projects look like 90 days and 12 months after their sale, not on the number of launches. Ask four questions each quarter.
- Are launched teams still building here? Count deployments, integrations and releases on your chain.
- Did holders stay? Compare holders at launch with holders at 90 days.
- Is supply where the plan said it would be? Check vesting and locks on-chain against what was announced.
- Did any launch cause a compliance or reputation problem? One bad sale can cost more than ten good ones earn.
If the answers are weak two quarters running, rescope the partner or replace it. The data you required in the agreement makes that decision straightforward.
What goes wrong: the strategy nobody could execute
The common failure is a partnership that exists as an announcement. The chain signs a memorandum with a launchpad, both sides post about it, and the ecosystem strategy deck gains a new box labelled capital formation. Nobody owns the pipeline.
It looks like this. Months pass. The partner's team is busy with chains that send it projects. The chain's ecosystem team assumed the partner would source projects, while the partner assumed the chain would. The first project to launch arrives without an audit or a vesting plan, and the sale goes ahead because the partnership needs a first result.
The strategy was sound. It failed because nobody was named to run it: no launch quota, no vetting standard, no reporting, no owner on either side. The fix is to write the operating plan before the announcement, with a named owner for every part.
How Alcyone approaches it
Alcyone's partners built and operate the TrustSwap Launchpad, so they design launch partnerships from the operator's side. More than 80 projects have launched through it, and its record lists $100M+ raised for launched projects. Alcyone's ecosystem and launch advisory case work includes a DePIN consumer app whose results included a Launchpad partnership with its host chain's leading DEX and about 0.5 million monthly active wallets, roughly 10% of all active wallets on that chain. Engagements start with a 30-minute call with a senior partner, and there is no obligation to use TrustSwap products.