In the first 90 days after TGE, the team should manage three numbers every week: how concentrated holdings are, how deep the order book is within 1% of the price, and how much supply unlocks in the next 30 days. Everything else is commentary. The window matters because early selling is fast: a study of nine large airdrops found that in some cases up to 66% of tokens were sold quickly.
Who decides this
The CEO and the head of markets own the first 90 days. The head of markets is accountable for liquidity, market-maker performance and the weekly numbers. The CEO is accountable for what holders are told, for the treasury decisions that follow from the numbers, and for stopping anything that is not working. The board should receive the same weekly page the CEO does, not a summary of it.
What should the team measure every week after TGE?
The team should track a short, fixed set of measures from day one and report them in the same format every week. A metric that changes format each week cannot show a trend.
Depth deserves the most care. Kaiko, a market data firm, measures depth as the resting orders within a set distance of the mid-price, and treats 1% depth as the measure most relevant to longer-term holders. It moved away from 2% depth because that figure, published by the large price aggregators, is more frequently gamed. A market-maker report built on 2% depth alone should be challenged.
| Measure | Why it matters | Where it comes from | Red flag in the first 90 days |
|---|---|---|---|
| Depth within 1% of price | What a real seller can exit without moving price | Exchange order books, market-maker reports, data vendors | Falling week on week while volume rises |
| Bid-ask spread | Cost of trading for every holder | Exchange data | Widening outside the contracted level |
| Holder concentration | Who can move the price alone | On-chain data | Top wallets growing through exchange withdrawals |
| Exchange inflows from known allocations | Early sign of selling by airdrop, sale or investor wallets | On-chain labels | Large transfers to exchanges from one bucket |
| Unlocks in the next 30 days | Supply the market will price in early | Vesting contracts | A cliff landing with no plan behind it |
| Treasury runway | How long the team can act without selling tokens | Treasury reports | Plans that depend on token price holding |
How should the market-maker relationship be held to account?
The market maker should be judged weekly against written obligations on depth, spread and uptime, not against trading volume. Volume is easy to produce and says little about whether a holder can sell.
Kaiko’s 2023 liquidity concentration report shows why the two can diverge. One large exchange’s share of global spot volume had risen to 64.3%, in large part through a zero-fee promotion, while its share of market depth had fallen from 42% to 30.7%. The volume went up. The liquidity did not.
There is a conduct risk too. In October 2024, US prosecutors in Massachusetts charged eighteen individuals and entities, alleging that token issuers paid market makers to wash trade and inflate apparent activity. These are allegations, and the defendants are presumed innocent. A team that reports volume to its holders should be confident about where that volume came from.
Cointelegraph’s review of market-maker deals found that in many loan-option deals, performance indicators were missing or vague. It quoted an adviser describing one project that worked with up to eleven market makers and whose token held up because the team balanced risk across them. We would not suggest eleven. We would suggest more than one, a weekly report against written obligations, and a named person on the team who reads it.
Contracts should also give the team a way out. If the weekly report shows obligations missed for several weeks running, the agreement should allow the team to recall loaned tokens or end the relationship on stated terms. That clause is worth negotiating before TGE, as part of the sequence set out in the token generation event guide. After launch, the team has far less leverage.
What happens to the tokens the team distributed?
Much of the selling pressure in the first weeks can come from tokens the team chose to hand out. The question is not whether recipients sell, but whether the team planned for who would sell, when, and into what depth.
The airdrop evidence is clear. The arXiv study of nine airdrops found that about two thirds of 1inch recipients sent tokens to exchanges within 24 hours of claiming. On the first day, 73% of eligible Arbitrum accounts claimed. The authors also found that activity spikes around airdrops tended to fade, and that per-address activity on Arbitrum fell after the drop. Users move on to the next incentive.
This is why the first 90 days token plan should map every distributed bucket to an expected selling window. Airdrop recipients can sell within a day. Sale participants sell against the gap between their entry price and the market. Market-maker loans can add supply during price discovery. If the team knows roughly when each wave arrives, it can make sure depth is there when it does.
The first 90 days are also when the team decides what to distribute next. The same study recommends running airdrops in phases, so criteria can be tightened between rounds, and scaling rewards to what users actually spent. Its authors also point to incentives with ongoing use inside the protocol, such as fee discounts, rather than one-off payouts. A second round designed with three months of real holder data is likely to be better than one designed before launch.
The market has been unforgiving where that planning was missing. Memento Research, as reported by CryptoSlate in December 2025, found that the median major token launched in 2025 was down 71% from its launch price. Distribution was not the only cause. It was a common one.
How should the first unlocks inside the window be handled?
Any unlock that falls inside the first 90 days should be treated as an event with its own plan, starting a month before the date. The market will not wait for the day itself.
Keyrock’s study of more than 16,000 unlocks, as reported by BeInCrypto, found that price declines often started before the unlock and that prices often settled within about two weeks after. Team unlocks averaged drops of up to 25%. Ecosystem development unlocks averaged a small gain of about 1.18%. Unlocks above 10% of supply formed its largest size band, and larger unlocks brought sharper drops.
A team that is still deciding its first unlock plan after TGE has left it late. The full method is in our guide to planning token unlock schedules, linked below. For the first 90 days, three steps are enough: confirm the market maker’s depth commitments cover the 30 days before the date, tell holders what is unlocking and to whom well ahead, and avoid any treasury sale in the same window.
What should holders hear, and how often?
Holders should hear the same facts the board sees, on a fixed schedule, before they read them elsewhere. After TGE, on-chain analysts watch every large wallet. Silence gets filled by someone else’s interpretation.
We would publish a short monthly holder report for the first quarter. It should cover circulating supply against the published schedule, unlocks in the coming month, treasury movements and any change to market-making arrangements. A report that only appears when the price is rising will not be believed when it is falling.
The same discipline applies to bad news. If a bucket moves to an exchange, or an unlock is changed, holders should hear it from the team first, with the reason. The CEO owns that call, and it should be made within days, not after the next board meeting.
What goes wrong: distribution left to chance
The launch went well. Then nobody owned what came next. The airdrop went out on day one, the sale tokens unlocked a week later, and the first investor cliff landed in month three. Each was planned on its own. Nobody laid them on one calendar against the depth the market makers had agreed to provide.
So the selling arrived in waves the team had not modelled. Depth thinned just as the waves hit. The market maker reported strong volume, which nobody questioned. Holders who stayed watched wallets they could not identify send tokens to exchanges, and filled the silence with their own story.
None of this required bad intent. It required only that distribution be treated as a launch-day event rather than a 90-day process. The defence is one calendar, one weekly report and one owner for the whole window.
How Alcyone approaches it
Alcyone stays on after the launch rather than handing over at TGE. In how an Alcyone engagement runs after launch, partners are on the line through the launch window, and a post-launch report follows within the week. From the second quarter, those partners deliver a quarterly report. In one published case, the first token launch on a major Layer-1 left about $10 million locked in vesting from that launch. Clients are under no obligation to use TrustSwap products.