How Should You Price a Token Launch?

Most token launches set their listing price the same way: find three comparable projects, take an FDV somewhere between them, set the float at around 10% because that is what everyone does, list, and find out what happens.

Equity markets solved this problem decades ago. An IPO does not price itself by guessing. The bank spends weeks collecting indications of interest, size and price, from institutional buyers, and the deal prices off that book. The process has a name, book building, and no equivalent exists in token launches.

It can. The mechanics translate better than you would expect.

How does an IPO decide its price?

Before an equity IPO prices, the underwriter runs a roadshow. Institutional investors are shown the company and asked a specific question: at what price would you buy, and how much.

Those answers are collected into a book. Not commitments, indications, which can move or vanish. But enough of them, from enough real buyers, produce something useful: a picture of how much demand exists at each price level.

The deal then prices where cumulative demand meets the size being offered, usually with deliberate room left over so the book is covered several times. The price is not a view. It is an observation of what the market said it would pay.

How do most token launches set price today?

By analogy, which is not the same thing.

A team looks at projects in a similar category, notes what they launched at, picks a figure in that range, and sets the float by convention. Sometimes an advisor or a market maker suggests the number. Sometimes a launchpad does.

None of these inputs is demand. A comparable's launch FDV tells you what buyers paid for a different token in a different market at a different time. It says nothing about who will buy yours, at what price, or in what size.

The result is that the first time anyone discovers real demand is after listing, when the book is live and there is no way to adjust.

What is a demand book for a token?

The same thing it is in equities: a list of the buyers who would actually hold your token, each with an indicative size at an indicative price.

That list has a shape. Plot size against price and you get a curve: a lot of demand at low prices, thinning as price rises, falling off a cliff somewhere. That cliff is the single most useful number in the whole exercise, and almost nobody looks for it before listing.

The curve tells you two things the comparables cannot. What price real money will clear at, and how much depth sits below it. The second matters as much as the first, because depth below the listing price is what absorbs selling in the first weeks.

How do you actually build one?

You go and ask, before TGE, with a structured process rather than a conversation.

The buyers worth asking are the ones who would genuinely hold: funds with a mandate that fits, OTC desks, treasuries looking for exposure to the sector, and market makers who would take inventory. Not retail, not your community, not people who would take an allocation and sell it on day one.

The ask is specific. At $X FDV, what size would you take. At $2X. At $0.5X. Non-binding, written down, with a date against it.

What comes back is usually uncomfortable and always useful. Demand that felt deep across a dozen conversations turns out to sit well below where you were planning to list. Or the reverse, and the number you had in mind was leaving value behind.

Either way you are now making decisions against observation rather than analogy.

What does the book change?

Three things, concretely.

Float sizing. The standard 10% is a convention, not a calculation. With a demand curve you can size float against the absorption that actually exists: enough circulating supply for a functioning market, not so much that the book cannot hold it. How a token launch goes on a DEX covers the mechanics of that first week in more detail.

Listing price. Priced where the book clears, with cover, rather than where comparables sat.

Market-making capital. Most teams size their market-making arrangement from a proposal rather than from need. The book tells you how much depth the launch requires and therefore how much inventory has to be behind it. That changes the shape of the mandate you negotiate, and it is worth understanding how market maker deal structures differ before you sign one.

It also changes the conversation with venues. A listing application supported by a book of named institutional interest reads differently from one supported by a community size.

Where does this differ from an IPO?

In ways worth being honest about.

There is no underwriter. Nobody is committing to buy the unsold portion, so a thin book is simply a thin book.

Nothing is binding. An indication at $20m FDV evaporates when the market turns, and a token launch's timeline is long enough for that to happen more than once.

The buyer universe is smaller and less formal. In equities, book building runs through a syndicate with established relationships and a regulatory framework around disclosure. In tokens, you are running it yourself, and the quality of the book depends entirely on who you can actually reach.

And indications are not audited. A fund that says it would take $500k at a given price may be being polite.

All of which means the book is softer evidence than its equity equivalent. Softer evidence is still evidence, and it is a great deal better than three comparables and a convention.

What it does not do

It does not guarantee a price. Nothing does, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something.

It will not save a launch with no demand behind it. If the book comes back empty, that is the finding, and the right response is to delay or restructure rather than to list anyway and hope.

It does not replace the rest of the preparation either. Vesting, unlock schedules, venue selection and launch sequencing all still have to be right, and the TGE checklist covers that ground.

What it gives you is the shape of the demand you are walking into, while you can still do something about it. A launch that prices into a known curve has made a decision. A launch that prices off comparables has made a guess, and will find out which it was in the first forty-eight hours of trading.

We run a book build ahead of launches as part of our market making work. If you are pre-TGE and want to talk through what it would look like for your token, get in touch.

Not investment advice.