TGE: A Look Inside the War Room… | Nimita, Kevin, Jake & Claire

We made it. It's the last one of the day. Who's been here since morning? Or is it all new faces? Or who was here early in the morning at 10:00?

Okay, good for you. All right, last one of the day. Uh, save the best one for the last. Uh, this panel is titled TGE, a look inside the war room. We have Claire here who was here earlier in the morning but a bunch of new faces.

I would pass it off to the moderator Namita. Namita, am I pronouncing it correctly?

Take it away.

Hello. Okay. Hi everyone. Um, thanks for coming. Let's get started.

So, I want to rewind back a year ago. Market conditions were strong. We were coming off an inauguration rally, ETF approvals, and the regulatory landscape in the US flipped to pro crypto basically overnight. So token projects were racing to launch their tokens to gain some of that momentum alongside that wave. And there was a token listing report that launched last year prepared by Animoka that said about 150,000 token launches per month which is about 5,000 token launches a day each with an average relevancy span of about 12 days.

So in two weeks, you know, from the date of your TGE, you have your token users jumping to the next project, sort of the next hot narrative. And so even with strong market conditions, it was hard to compete amongst all the noise. So sort of fast forward to now to today in a very different sort of market with different conditions, those same projects, a lot of them are down 70 to 80% in terms of their TGE initial trading value. And the report that dropped for this year said about last week that it dropped about 25% of uh token launches are down as a whole. So what's interesting is that there's actually an opportunity right now because there's a lot less competition and a lot less noise.

So projects with strong fundamentals and good product and PMF actually have a decent chance right now to maintain relevancy and market share with long-term token holders. So without further ado, I'd like to share with you guys some war heroes that we have here on our stage. All of who have been involved in launch tokens and have war stories that they're wanting to share with us today candidly. And so let's start with introductions if you want to state your name, your project, and a quick oneliner about your experience in TGE or your role.

Yeah. Hi, I'm Claire Cart. I'm the CMO at Aztec. We're privacy L2 on Ethereum. Um, we are eight days into being a live token, so very much a recent thing for us.

Thank you so much. Um, and what's my oneliner about the state of TGES? I mean, it's just never easy. It that's all I'm going to say. You launch in a bull, you launch in a bear.

And they both have their challenges and it's never easy. My perspective is like launch, get to market, right? Don't try to time the market. We can get into it more.

And congrats Claire. That's awesome. Welcome to the market. It's a great market, the best market. Um, but in general, Jake, VP of GTM at zero gravity.

We have built a operating system for AI comprising of a layer one blockchain, a decentralized storage solution, a data availability layer and a compute network. And those are the meat and potatoes that allow AI to run on chain for all these exciting use cases that we're building today. And of course that instrument of the token secures the value of a lot of the ways that the services are provided, the blockchain is ran and of course we wanted to get it out there so we could go live with the mainet solutions and start scaling the protocol. And now we here are today meeting with great people and talking about the story.

All right, sounds impressive. My name is Kevin March. I'm one of the co-founders of JPEG Trading. JPEG Trading is a highfrequency trading firm. uh that's also done uh quite a bit of market making over the last year.

Um our product is we trade a lot and we try really hard to make money. Um and on on the current state of the market, I'd say it's just as busy as ever. Um like the the the tactics and what the state of the market looks like has changed. Uh but it hasn't changed what the what the pipeline looks like. Um and there there there's still a billion projects and everyone's everyone's looking for their their chance at the plate.

So like Claire said, you know that that the time is as soon as you can. It's it's not trying to time it.

Amazing. Thank you guys for that perspective. So hi everyone. I'm your moderator Namita Parake and I'm the founder of TAC. TGE which is a token launch legal and regulatory advisory.

So let's jump right into the heart of today's panel and its namesake the TGE war room. Um, obviously a project's war room is a mission control. It's where it's frontline troops and standby troops and you know all the third parties that are involved in a token launch come together in a room either virtual or um in real life or a hybrid and they make very important decisions about their token launch um through a lot of chaos. So let's start with the freshest TGE that we have in the room. Claire, you guys launched six days ago.

walk us through your war room and the vibes.

Yeah, so we had a hybrid model. Um, we have a headquarters in London. That's where the original founding team was headquartered, but we're a kind of a we are a remote first kind of hybrid company. So, we had a live room in London. That team was meeting like all week and then really war rooming kind of the 24 hours beforehand.

And then we also had like a hybrid war room which included, you know, all of our employees who aren't coll-located in London like myself. um as well as like third parties, right? So, um a lot of different groups like we did our token sale on Uniswap and like the V4 pool needed to go live at the time of TGE and so there was like lines into Uniswap and market makers and all of that. But we treat everything at Aztec like very very crossf functionally. And so you know we had people from my team marketing as well as um product engineering you know CFO finance obviously the founders and so it was very very crossunctional.

I'd say the vibes were high. Everybody was like really excited um and nervous and you know there's always things that you run into that you just absolutely cannot anticipate and then how do you kind of adjust and go along? So really stressful, but like some of my closest work friends I've made through TGES, you know, where it's like you've gone through hell and you know you're going to be friends forever and it felt like that, right? Building relationships and yeah, getting through it.

You build best friends through the war story. So So Claire, be honest. How much sleep did you actually get last week?

I did not get a lot of sleep. I have the advantage of being a mom to two toddlers, so I never sleep anyway. And so that gives me a huge advantage. And yeah, I can pretty much run on zero sleep and still appear to be somewhat put together. So that's my secret.

Well, you look well rested, so congrats.

Thank you.

All right, Jake. Um, so you know, Zerog took a slightly different approach and you guys had your TGE in Korea alongside Korean Blockchain Week, which for those of you that have been is one of the largest uh conferences in Asia Asia for cryptocurrency. Sounds like a lot of chaos to embed your token launch operations. Walk us through the thought process there and how it all evolved.

So that was a educated decision. When we looked at the community of zerog, there's kind of the segmented groups that exist on Telegram or on certain dedicated X accounts and Korea by far was the largest community that we had regionally. And so we decided to really double down on that region, partner with KBW to have a big shock and awe moment. And that was of course uh a great decision. But leading up to that decision that came from a very dedicated sprint cycle and when you think about what you have to do to launch such a large project, you want to break it into chunks and manageable things that are not overwhelming.

So you have the end goal in mind and then you kind of create a Gant chart. That's a dependency chart of what needs to happen in order for certain things to be fulfilled. And we started with the basics, right? What are the tokconomics? What is this actually priced at?

How are we going to make the most utility for the protocol, the investors and the community? And then you start figuring out what dependencies that you have on the supply side for a layer 1 and for an infrastructure that allows the demand side to be fulfilled. If you want to build on zeroG, of course, we've got infrastructure that we built, but there's a lot of things that exist today such as developer tooling, infrastructure, crosschain, nodes, in uh indexers, etc. that people need to build. So, you need to partner with those folks, go through the procurement process, negotiation, integration cycles, integration fees, making sure that they are able to support you by the time that you need them.

That's a huge effort in itself that then unlocks the demand side. So through I'd say a twice a week leadership sprint and check-in, we were able to do that asynchronously, but leading up to TGE, we all gathered together in Juju Island, which is a little volcanic island off the south of Korea. And the reason that we chose Jju Island is there's nothing that's happening in Ju. It's just a volcanic island, so there's no distractions. You've got restaurants and you've got hotel rooms and you've got a boardroom.

I saw nothing else. I never even saw the volcano. It's probably beautiful, but I was focused on the execution of the protocol and I thought it was a good time to, you know, come together and boy, a lot of midnight oil there for sure and Korean barbecue of course delivered.

You know, Jake, after we chatted, I had to look up Juju Island and it's absolutely beautiful. Sorry that you didn't have a chance to explore any of it. You guys were really preparing for war. It seems like

we stayed at a theme park, JG World, and it was more of the spot that had like a conference center, so it made sense. But I remember, and to put it into context, I got a voucher when I checked into the hotel for a free ride on the roller coaster. I never redeemed it.

That's just going to be your TGE. Did you tell him that?

Yeah. Well, I guess the analogy is definitely present there, but um if anyone wants the voucher, I still have it. So, you know, take the ride. I would like the voucher. You got it.

You got it, Kev.

All right. Thanks, Jake. Kevin, let's turn over to the capital market side. So, if the projects uh TGE war room is their mission control, I'm expecting that you're sort of directing air traffic control on your side. So, talk to us about what a war room looks like from sort of the market making trading perspective and navigate through that process.

So, I like your analogy, but the one that we use internally is that uh the teams that we're supporting are NASCAR drivers and we're the pit crew, right? So, like we we have like our six or seven team members that come out, swarm around the car, they have eight seconds to get their job done. If you it up, you get in trouble very quickly. Um, and you know, they they do this so many times that they get very good and very efficient at exactly what the role is. Um, and and that's very much how how we see this.

You know, we do about one launch a week approximately. So we get in a lot of reps and we have the chance to go through this process. For us, what it really looks like is uh we have our marching orders from the teams ahead of time. Um the day of the launch, the most important thing is working with the exchanges. So we have one team member that that's talking to the project and and helping make sure that uh we're any changes that happen to the plans that that we've made together uh are are being followed.

But the most important thing is working with the exchanges because the exchanges have all sorts of requirements they place upon the market makers the day of launch. You know, you have to deposit tokens on XYZ chain at least eight hours ahead. You have to start placing orders within like an hour before the launch. You know, you have to structure it in a certain way. Um, so pretty much it's on the project to to get it to the point of TGE and then on the day of TGE like all pretty much all the requirements are are on the market makers uh to follow through on the operations that make it actually happen on the exchanges.

Um, so a lot of pressure you only have a few seconds to do it. Our NASCAR team does pretty well on on the crew part of it. Uh, and yeah, it's a lot of fun.

Love the analogy. And you know, I didn't even realize all the pre-oordination steps that you had to do. too. So, thanks for like underscoring that for a lot of the founders in the room here that probably need to get ahead of the game when they're coordinating with their market makers. So, uh TGE war room check, but you know, we want to rewind a little bit back to the decision about when to launch tokens, right?

And that could be based on a number of factors. Claire, I want to start with you guys because Aztec took a very different approach from what I've seen in that the TGE launch date decision was a um community decision based on a governance vote in which the core team didn't seem to have obviously a lot of control over when to launch the token. Walk us through that process and and what was the decision behind that? Yeah. So I I mean I think like Aztec is very much a team that's building like from principles that I think you know are at the heart of this industry, right?

That it should be decentralized and permissionless and that you know no single party or no majority party should control a network. And so our network is controlled by our I don't have the exact count now but about 5,000 sequencers. It changes every minute. There's a live dashboard. So it's controlled by them and they all have the power to participate in the governance process.

So anyone who had bought a token in our token sale, those folks could all vote in the governance process. And what was kind of like hardcoded in was that we could TGE 90 days from the start of our sale. So I mean that was just a fact and someone could propose it and if the community voted on it then it would go through and so that's what happened. Um and so within that, you know, no one on the team could participate in that process because we didn't have tokens from the sale. No insiders could participate.

Um and so it was really token holders as well as primarily our stakers um who you know operate a large portion of the network, own a large portion of the network. Um, so yeah, I think you know, we saw around the time that we tged a few projects coming out and delaying their TGE or delaying ICOs or cancelling it for different reasons. And you know, some of them are good, some of them I didn't think were that good. It's obviously a decision the project makes, but fundamentally we couldn't make that decision, right? Our our community and our governance process had made the decision for us.

And so then it was just a matter of okay, the market is what it is and what can we control and how can we do the best job that we can knowing that like Aztec's been building for eight years and we plan to build for many more. And so if you look at it in a long time horizon, I think there's no reason to feel panicked. Um, and some of you may agree with this, you may disagree with this. I personally love launching in bare markets and that's just me.

Thank you. And you know actually um Claire I don't know if you saw on X but Hib from Dragonfly put out a U post last week. Did did you see that where I saw he he vibecoded a app in which he compared token launches from bare markets to bull markets through I think I don't he used a number of assumptions but I think he looked at Binance listing um announcements and determined that there was no you know statistically um no statistically significant difference between bare market and bull market token launches which I thought was pretty interesting. So

I think a lot of projects decision-m is determined based on their time horizon right if you look at things and you think we think we'll be around for a year that would feel really good for us then yeah maybe you do need to launch in a bull market right but if you're like we're going to be around for a decade you launch when you're ready and then you continue to deliver on your road map um so yeah we felt really confident in our decisions and I think launching in a bull feels good in the short term term and bad in the long run and launching in a bear feels bad in the short term and good in the long run and since we're a long-term oriented project like I wouldn't have done it any other way.

Thank you. Um so Jake, let's pivot to your exchange listing partners. Um Zerog obviously had a largecale launch billion dollar FTV. I think the last time we chatted you corrected me in which you had 30 plus exchanges that you had to coordinate with and two top Korean exchanges up and bit thump which are very difficult to get for day one listings. So I imagine there was a lot of coordination efforts that your team had to go through during the war room experience.

Can you kind of talk us through the process like how far in advance did you connect with the exchanges? Um what was the process like? what are some negotiation tactics that you used, you know, to close all of these exchanges alongside KBW?

Yeah, I think maybe to double down on that last kind of timing question, um, an arrow never lands higher than it's aimed and you need to kind of hardcode an internal objective to reach because otherwise we just keep delaying. And what was great about the way that we approached this is that we had product and tech readiness and a checklist where if we're not ready on the product side, we're not going to launch a halfbaked product. That's very important. That's honestly mission number one. And then there's the external community incentive, right?

I mentioned KBW earlier. That is during a certain time of the year. So we wanted to lean into being product and tech ready by KBW, which really influenced the sprint cycle. We were able to achieve product and tech readiness before the actual KBW went live. But as you alluded to, it takes a lot of coordination across exchanges.

And from what I perceived on the experience, it's all a game of poker. You're sitting there with 30 plus exchanges. You all got your cards tight to the chest. And none of them want to make a move before they know they've got leverage. And the negotiations without leverage are very um let's say cannibalizing to put it in a very blunt term.

They want as much as they can. They want to make sure that they're making money on it and they may or may not see the long-term vision. But one thing that was very paramount with our conversations with exchanges was the utility of the token. They really wanted to dive into the token syncs, the value securing mechanisms, how this all works. And we submitted, you know, documents that were 30, 40 pages to each exchange explaining the protocol, the tokconomics, the investors, how this works, how each layer of the stacks works, and then they evaluate it.

And of course, they need to get back with their own commercials, but there's the integration cycle. We're our own layer 1 blockchain, so these exchanges need to natively integrate our ex or our our blockchain to support our token in most cases. So that has its own time frame. And then what I could at least leave the audience today uh with a kind of key takeaway is that when you have that first name fall, maybe it's a strategic name or just any name, the rest typically follow a little bit easier. So for our uh for the example that I'll allude to, we had Binance spot list our futures market and then all of a sudden cascading amounts of exchanges came in.

They're like, well, Binance must have done their DD. All right, we're in. And then at that point you can be a little bit more proactive with how this is positioned long term. And the way that we took our partnerships with the exchanges into that long-term vision was ensuring that their community, their participants on the platform were able to engage in, you know, let's say um having exposure to decentralized AI, but also in ensuring that there's um fundamentals like staking and and rewards campaigns that keep them along for the the whole journey and not just collecting the short-term incentives and bouncing to the next project.

Amazing, Jake. And that must have been a lot of lastminute momentum in the poker j game analogy that you used with closing all those exchanges at the 11th hour. So, so super, you know, exciting to hear that process. Uh Kevin, quick question for you. So, there's obviously a lot of buzz about, you know, the tier one listings and having strong distribution and it's important to get those, but I think projects are thinking about things a little bit differently in this market in particular.

um can you kind of give us your perspective based on market insights or any data that you're looking at? Like is it um make or break if you have a tier one exchange listing? Is it necessary? Can you still have a optimal TGE, let's say, with a non-tier one? There have been a lot of projects recently that have uh kind of made it like their life's mission not to have to give up tremendous amount of incentives to the exchanges in order to get them to to list.

Um, so a few examples of that recently are like Monad, Lighter, obviously like these like super premier tier one projects uh have kind of risked the house in exchange for having an opportunity to go through the listing process without having uh the tier one exchanges as part of it. Um, since those folks are a little bit less likely to to play ball as as you were alluding to. Um what we found from our research which we've we've compiled research over this for like the last like two weeks we we did a bunch of like historical analysis on this um the tier of exchange like that the the top tier of exchange that does listing for a project uh doesn't really correlate to the financial outcome for the listing which is kind of interesting like you'd expect like oh hey if I listed on the best possible exchange I would expect the best possible outcome uh But that's certainly not what the data says. There's actually a sweet spot right in the middle of uh you know like like from like tiers like one to four like someone that you would eyeball at like 2.5 uh actually historically for for all the launches of of the last like 3 months or so uh drive the best outcomes for everyone.

Um, so food for thought. Uh, you know, there's there the there there's definitely room to be creative um for founders not not to just to uh uh follow the same playbook as everyone else.

Thanks for those insights, Kevin. And I think that's like really important data to reference, you know, for a lot of these projects that are looking to launch and making decisions about the terms and the allocations and so on and so forth. So Jake, quick question for you. Um, what happens if an exchange sort of doesn't honor the terms of your agreement? Let's say they go rogue.

You know, I know ZeroG had sort of a public spat and we won't name the exchanges or anything like that and without tripping any confidentiality or legal wires. Do you have any sort of insights that you can share for founders in this room to sort of protect against or trouble, you know, prevent that from happening in the future? Yeah, I mean if you look at the exchange business model, of course, if they're not supporting your asset, they're not able to generate revenue on the asset and then their competitors will. So, there is FOMO there that helps to the project's advantage, right? If you are listed on all their competitors and they're not supporting it, then well, I guess you're not going to make the revenue off of it.

And that's no skin off our project at this point. But um to directly address maybe the adversities of some exchanges, this gets down to the ethos of web 3 in general. There was paper promises made across all of these different exchanges. I mean, we're talking with them. We're sending a docu sign and we are agreeing on terms that are pencil paper.

when in reality I think we should eat our own dog food and then ensure that the cryptographic guarantees of the way that the blockchain space works perhaps could be implemented into the ways that we interact with exchanges with escrow contracts certain inputs and outputs to ensure that they're living up to their actual deliverables and then of course funds or or inventory can be unlocked based on those proofs to say on chain. Um, so my my key advice to people that are going through this process is do not take every contract at face value. They have a tremendous amount of power and they will act however they want and then you're left holding the bag and trying to, you know, clean up the pieces. But if there's ways that we can implement the tech that we evangelize on every stage here to to make that process more transparent and cryptographically secure, that would be, you know, a step in the right direction. I I think that's a really important thought and and note and you know obviously we want to use you know blockchain technology to prevent against you know those issues.

So thank you for that. Uh Kevin we have very little time left so I wanted to take a little bit of time and talk about market maker and like sort of the liquidity like process with a token launch because it's very critical to a token's success. Right. So given your expertise can you kind of walk us through you know two things. one, as a founder or a project, what sort of like selection criteria should you consider when choosing a market maker?

And two, walk us through the various like business models or ways that you can engage with the market maker and some of the trade-offs of those.

Do we have 30 minutes?

I wish we did. Do we have 30 minutes? No. Okay. Um I guess the the things that founders should look out for um it's really hard to assess the differences between market makers.

Most people don't have the expertise to do so and even if you do most people don't like no one has actually the data necessary to do those comparisons. So the reality is it's pretty much all on referral basis word of mouth. Um, and the the best thing that you can do is do some reference checks. Like find who a market maker has worked with, talk to those folks and kind of get a gut feeling on did they do their job? Did they do it honorably?

Do they did it like did they do it with a level of professionalism uh that makes you inspired that they can do that same job for you with with a high level of quality? I I honestly don't think beyond that that there's a ton that could be done with the current market structure. There are there are a lot of technology firms that are working on solutions for this ways to compare market makers based on trading data based on access to uh to historical deal flow where you can kind of put together a more holistic view of what's happening but they're not there yet. So where the market's at right now is it's pretty much based on trust and the only way that you can really attain trust is based on the the folks that that have worked with them previously. um to to succinctly like break down like most market makers are to do like a load and call option or a retainer model.

Um and the big difference is who's in charge of what gets to happen. In the retainer model, normally it's the project that's in charge of the trading of of the decisions around liquidity. In the low and call option, it's pretty much up to the market maker. Um there are pros and cons of both. Uh you really need to dive into the specs specifics of the deal.

that generally the retainer model is more in favor of what the what the project wants to achieve. Um we probably have to stop there. We probably don't have time to to break it down entirely, but I'm I'm more than happy to talk about it.

Thank you. And I think the point is that the model that you choose is important and it's critical to sort of the success of your token launch. So, you know, walk through the various points that that that Kevin had mentioned and, you know, pick the right model, you know, for your token launch. So, I just want to take a quick minute because this is my favorite part of today's segment. And that is as much planning that you do for your TGE, as much contingency planning that you do and all the work that you put in, there's inevitably going to be things that go wrong.

And so, if you guys could take a quick like 30 seconds to share your oh moment, and maybe there was more than one oh moment, um, but talk us through the war story and you know, what do you want to leave the founders here today with? because they're probably going to go through some of the same things. Claire,

I have to say our our RTG was smooth in terms of again what we could control. Our oh moment was like the market really started to turn down like several days before and of course it made us nervous and you know we were concerned and then there's a lot of parties in a negotiation for TG market makers and exchanges and so you know does anyone now feel that they need to renegotiate things right so it kind of kicked up a big cycle of uncertainty for us um but you know I think my advice is like if you it's like any launch what are you optimizing for and over what time horizon. If you can answer those things and you know what you're willing to walk away from, then your decisions become very easy. And so that was out of our control, nothing we can do except know what we're optimizing for over what time horizon and where we're willing to walk away. And we went forward.

Jake,

find the most missionritical partners to your launch and make sure you have their home phone, their cell phone, their girls friend's phone, their their dog's name, like whatever you can do to ensure that they're on your side and they're going to go the extra mile if some breaks is mission critical. We had that. Thankfully, the relationships that we created in the space went the extra mile for when all of a sudden a brand new uh blocker popped up. They were up at 3:00 a.m.

solving this, moving mountains for us in seconds, and that allowed us to do what we needed to do. So, go off, make those relationships this week. Take them out to dinner, buy them a steak, whatever. Make sure they're going to go the extra mile for you because it's either go or no go, and those people make it happen.

Kevin,

mine's really simple. Redundancy, right? Have multiple wallet systems, have multiple market makers, have have multiple plans for everything that you're trying to do. Um, you know, one of the worst scenarios that happened for us on on a launch in the last like six months or so is, uh, we were market making for the launch of something on Coinbase, we deposit to our Coinbase account. The deposit never showed up in our our Coinbase account.

Coinbase can't launch the the market because there's no market maker for it. We were the only market maker on the launch. And then we have to like go through the process of of figuring out why the deposit didn't show up with the Coinbase team. And and there there was like some some small bug that was related to the integration of of that chain itself. Um, but that whole thing delayed their Coinbased launch by about six hours.

Um, which is horrible. Um, so redundancy is key and like I I say that like, you know, it's it's better for us to be one of at least two trading firms that are that are part of a launch because like we're not perfect. I would really like to be, you know, we're 99.9% perfect, but we're not 100% perfect. Um, or the the systems that we're working with aren't perfect.

So redundancy is key.

Thank you. So, and you know, I think a quick summary is that chaos is part of the process and the teams that win are not the ones that avoid fire, but they're the ones that sort of build the systems, the war rooms, the relationships, um obviously the um the market making partnerships to actually withstand their token launches and be successful. So, thank you to our war heroes today for sharing their stories. Sorry for going over on time and uh thank you guys for coming. Thank you.