In our experience, funded Web3 projects that disappoint rarely picked the wrong market. More often they failed between the plan and the launch, in handoffs nobody owned. Of 118 token launches in 2025 analysed by Memento Research, 84.7% were trading below their launch price at the time of the analysis, as reported by Briefs Finance. Losses showed up in every sector tracked, and the largest launches fared worst.
That figure does not prove every one of those teams executed badly. Markets fell, and some products were weak. But the pattern behind the losses is familiar to anyone who has sat through a post-mortem: the strategy was defensible, and the work that turned it into a live token, a liquid market and a held community was split across people who never saw the whole.
Who decides this
The board and the CEO own execution risk, and they cannot delegate it to the advisers they hire. The board approves the strategy and is accountable for whether the organization can deliver it. The CEO is accountable for the sequence: who builds what, who checks it, and who answers when something breaks on launch day. In Web3 the board also inherits commitments that are hard to reverse, because a deployed contract, a published allocation and a market-maker loan cannot be quietly withdrawn.
Who owns the plan once it is approved?
Every part of the plan needs one named owner before it is approved, or it is not a plan. This is the first execution failure, and in our view the most common: a strategy document that reads well but assigns no person to the token build, the exchange process, the liquidity arrangements or the post-launch reporting.
The test is simple. Take each line of the plan and ask who will be blamed if it slips. If the answer is "the team" or an outside firm with no authority inside the company, the line has no owner. We would not let a board approve a launch plan until every line has a name, a date and a budget.
The second test is capacity. A plan written by a strategy firm can assume skills the company does not have, such as on-chain operations, market-making oversight or exchange relations. Either the company hires for those, or it contracts them with clear accountability. Hoping the strategy firm will fill the gap is how the work falls between chairs.
Who checks that the token that ships is the token that was approved?
Someone independent of the builder must reconcile the deployed contracts against the approved model before the token generation event. The second failure is the model that changed on its way into code.
A council approves allocations, cliffs and release schedules. A contractor deploys them under deadline. A cliff is entered in days instead of months, or one investor bucket is released outside the vesting contract because a deal required it. None of this is malicious. All of it is visible on-chain from the first block, and the first person to notice may be an outside analyst.
The fix is sequence and authority. The reconciliation happens on testnet, before launch, by someone who can stop the launch. Any change after that goes back to the council in writing.
Has the launch plan been tested against the liquidity it will actually have?
A launch plan should be built on the liquidity the token will have on day one and in each unlock month, not on the liquidity the team hopes for. The third failure is a plan that assumed liquidity would appear.
Two numbers should frame the conversation. Keyrock's study of more than 16,000 unlock events, as reported by BeInCrypto, found that about 90% put negative pressure on price, often before the unlock date itself. Team unlocks were the worst category, with average drops of up to 25%. A launch plan that schedules large team cliffs into a thin market is a plan to sell into weakness.
Market-making terms belong in the same review. Under the loan-and-option structure, which Tokenomist calls the most common in crypto market making, the project lends tokens and the market maker may later buy them at agreed strikes. Tokenomist's guidance on loan-and-call-option terms warns that the firm's largest return often comes from the option, not from quoting quality. It recommends measurable spread, depth and uptime obligations, a ladder of strikes and a term matched to the actual need. If no one on the executive team has read the draft agreement against those tests, the liquidity plan is an assumption.
Who owns distribution after the first day?
Distribution needs an owner for at least the first two quarters after launch, with a budget and a target that is not just holder count. The fourth failure is distribution left to chance: an airdrop or incentive programme designed once and then left to run.
The evidence on airdrops is sobering. Keyrock reviewed 62 airdrops across six chains and found only eight with positive returns after 90 days. Its examples point the same way. Programmes that rewarded long-term users, filtered out farming wallets and released tokens in stages held up better. Programmes that paid anyone who showed up attracted sellers.
The practical point for a CEO is ownership. Someone must decide who receives tokens, why, on what schedule and how success will be measured at 30, 90 and 180 days. That person should report to the CEO, not to a marketing agency paid on reach.
Could you answer the hard question tomorrow?
The organization should be able to show, from its own records, who decided what, what was disclosed and who controls the protocol. The fifth failure is the question you could not answer, because the records were never kept.
Those questions come from exchanges, investors, auditors and regulators, and they come late. Which exemption did the sale rely on? What did the team tell buyers about vesting? Is control really distributed? On that last point, a European Central Bank working paper studied four large DeFi protocols. It found that, in 2022 and 2023 data, the top 100 holders controlled more than 80% of governance tokens in each one. A claim of decentralization that the token register does not support is a liability, not a talking point.
Key management sits in the same category. Chainalysis estimated, as reported by The Block, that about $3.41 billion was stolen from crypto services and users in 2025 through early December, and that private key attacks at centralized services made up 88% of the amount stolen in the first quarter. Who holds which keys, under what policy, is an execution question the board should be able to answer from a document.
The five failures at a glance
| Failure | Where it shows up | Natural owner | Early signal | What we would do |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| The strategy nobody could execute | Plan approved, work stalls | CEO | Lines in the plan with no named person | Refuse approval until each line has a name, date and budget |
| Tokenomics the contractor rewrote | Deployed contracts differ from the model | Foundation council | No reconciliation step before launch | Independent testnet review with power to stop the launch |
| A launch plan that assumed liquidity | Thin books, falling price at unlocks | CFO | Team cliffs in one month; unread market-maker terms | Model each unlock month; renegotiate loan terms |
| Distribution left to chance | Holders sell, usage does not follow | Head of growth or ecosystem | Success measured only by holder count | One owner, staged releases, 30/90/180-day targets |
| The question you could not answer | Exchange, auditor or regulator inquiry | General counsel | Decisions made in chat, not minuted | A decision log and disclosure file from day one |
What goes wrong: five advisers, one blind spot each
In our experience, the cause of these failures is rarely a bad adviser. It is five competent ones, each hired for a slice, none responsible for how the slices fit.
A law firm structures the foundation. A tokenomics consultant builds the model. A development shop deploys the contracts. A market maker writes its own loan terms. A marketing agency runs the airdrop. Each does good work inside its brief. Nobody checks that the vesting the lawyers described is what the contractor deployed, or that the market maker's loan appears in the circulating supply the agency is promoting.
The board sees five status reports, all green. The gaps only become visible at launch, when they are on-chain and public. Web3 execution fails at the seams between specialists, and seams are nobody's job unless the board makes them someone's job.
We would do two things. First, name one person or firm accountable for the whole sequence, with authority over the specialists' handoffs. Second, ask every adviser the same question at each milestone: what did the others decide that changes your work? An adviser who cannot answer has not been talking to the others.
How Alcyone approaches it
Alcyone was set up to sit across those seams. It is the advisory practice of TrustSwap, and its partners built and operate Team Finance, the TrustSwap Launchpad, The Crypto App and Panthea, so the team has run token launches, vesting and liquidity locks, not just advised on them. An engagement starts with a thirty-minute partner call and a fixed-scope assessment in week two. It then builds a plan over three to six weeks with a named owner for every part, and partners stay on through the launch window and quarterly reporting afterwards. That is the model behind Alcyone’s strategy-to-launch advisory practice. Clients are under no obligation to use TrustSwap products.