Fair launch vs premine
Every chain started with a rule for who'd hold the first coins, set at block zero. Drag the year marker to see who held what, then and now. What matters isn't the starting point: it's how long that grip lasts.
Share of supply held by founders, company, or foundation (not yet public)
Ethereum and Cardano funded a foundation this way. XRP created its entire supply for one company and its founders, with no public sale at genesis.
Kaspa: 0%. No founder, company, or foundation has ever held a share of its supply, at any point on this chart. Everyone else's line starts above zero because Kaspa's line never leaves it.
Solid: documented history. Dashed, past the marker: modeled projection. Each line turns dashed at its own chain's current age, since Ethereum, Cardano, and XRP are years older than Kaspa.
Models how fast a founder's or company's share shrinks toward today's smaller figure, mostly through selling and spending. 1.0× anchors that to each chain's current estimate. Kaspa has no such share to fade.
This chart tracks founders, company, and foundation shares only. DAGLabs itself mined an estimated 2.5–3% of supply after launch, the same way anyone with hardware could: full story below.
| Chain | Founders/company held | Public / open | Status at this year |
|---|
What a premine buys, and what Kaspa's launch actually looked like
A premine isn't automatically dishonest: Ethereum's and Cardano's allocations were disclosed, not hidden. What it buys is a founding team's outsized influence, held tokens or not. Kaspa never had one: its genesis block carries an empty UTXO set, confirmed directly in rusty-kaspa's source. DAGLabs, Yonatan Sompolinsky's company, raised about $8 million (mainly Polychain, plus Accomplice and Genesis Mining) to fund GHOSTDAG development and an ASIC mining-hardware plan that fell through before mainnet. After launch, DAGLabs mined on rented cloud hardware for about five months, the same way anyone else could: an estimated 2.5–3% of total supply, under roughly 850 million KAS, before its funds ran out.
Not established: how that 2.5–3% splits between Polychain specifically and DAGLabs' own team. No public allocation table exists; the only account is a wiki page summarizing Discord messages from people involved, not an official disclosure.