How to launch a blockchain successfully in 2025; lessons from the last decade
This post is for the absolute lunatics launching new blockchains in 2025. You’re crazy to do it. Whether it’s an L1 or L2, it’s years of stress, long hours, public controversies, unhappy community members, and enough ball juggling to take the Guiness World Record from Alex Barron (11 balls, 23 catches). Seriously, consider your life choices that brought you to this moment.
But if you are doing it, I wrote this post to help you. I’ve helped launch or run most of the top blockchains since 2019 first at Bison Trails and then Coinbase, including Ethereum, Solana, BNB Chain, Cardano, Avalanche, Sui, NEAR, Polkadot, Aptos, Polygon, and others. I’ve distilled my observations of how the chain launch game has changed over the years and how the meta is shaping up for 2025 and beyond.
Eras
2009–2016 — Technological Advancement
Early chains like Namecoin, Litecoin, Ripple, Monero, Ethereum, and others were focused on technological advancements to expand upon Bitcoin’s functionality. There were few dapp builders, zero institutions, and a small early cohort of highly technical users. Chains sought to differentiate through their capabilities and built slowly with a focus on decentralization. Success was largely determined by the tech and initial technical community that got organically drawn to the chain.
2017–2019 — Early Retail Investment
Ethereum’s ICO and subsequent support for full programmability enabled the next wave of chains to launch. Retail investment in the ICOs of EOS, Tezos, NEO, Filecoin, Polkadot, and others built the initial communities for these ecosystems that were not nearly as technical as in prior years, but what they lacked in coding skills, they made up for in excitement, proselytizing, and willingness to use new chains and applications. Come for the gains, stay for the dapps. This era became less organic due to increased financialization, but was still more on the organic side as almost no chain did business development and there were few apps, none of which were incentivized.
2020–2022 — Post-Launch Business Development
In prior eras, almost no chains attempted to do business development on behalf of the chain itself because it was taboo. It was paramount to be maximally decentralized as early as possible. This was fine until Solana and Polygon changed the game by leveraging their BD teams, grants, and marketing to aggressively pursue builders, institutions, and enterprises to support and build on their chains after launching. Some teams also created dapps themselves or got external teams to clone existing dapps to stimulate growth. New chains that were trying to play the “maximally decentralized” game were quickly overtaken, even if they had ostensibly better tech.
2023–2024 — Pre-Launch Business Development
Once folks started doing BD, it made sense to do it early and often. Base and Celestia defined this era by doing enormous amounts of BD prior to mainnet launch, which was crucial to 1. Continue the community excitement and stay top of mind for partners post-launch and 2. Jumpstart the virtuous builder-user flywheel. Now when a chain launches without a bunch of dapps on it already and more launching daily, it feels like a dud in comparison, which puts it in the vicious flywheel.
Importantly, the meta isn’t just changing; it’s compounding. More and more is expected of protocols to break through the noise and establish long-term traction rather than a splash in the pan. You have to play all the prior metas and also the new one to succeed.
The meta in 2025+
I’ll share the trends I’m seeing and my hypotheses for what will make a new protocol successful in 2025+, but before that, I have a disclaimer. When working on Solana’s devnets and testnets, I thought it was pretty likely it would fall over and ultimately fail when it hit mainnet due to instability. It was Toly and Raj that changed the game and won it. You as the protocol founder know the meta for 2025+ better than I do because you are literally creating it. Don’t take what I say as gospel or a roadmap. Take it as advice from someone that’s been in the protocol game a long time and then make your own path.
1. Get a kingmaker
When it comes to protocols, I define kingmakers as a large enterprise that gives credibility, builds integrations, directs users, does co-marketing, and other important tasks. Ethereum had ConsenSys, Solana had FTX, BNB Chain has Binance, and the Optimism Superchain has Coinbase via Base. Getting a large player to make a concentrated bet on your protocol is extremely difficult, but can also pay immense dividends to fast track the building of a virtuous cycle of builder and user adoption. Note the key word — concentrated. Most of the “we are partnering with X enterprise” are simple pay to play deals where the protocol gets the marketing but the enterprise doesn’t actually do anything and hasn’t made a strategic bet. If you want to get a kingmaker, I recommend being very specific and intentional with the partnership. If they aren’t betting a big portion of the company’s crypto strategy on your protocol, you’re just going to end up as a sacrificial rook.
2. Build homegrown solutions
No one will come to your chain to use the same dapps available on the 10 other chains they’re already on. If your chain is the 11th one they deploy on, how much attention do you think your ecosystem will receive from the core team? You need to do the hard thing — get builders to create homegrown, differentiated solutions that can draw users in. In some ways, you also want to be protectionist like America, South Korea, and many countries were in order to nurture and develop an early industry that isn’t yet globally competitive. Aave is amazing, but it’s like inviting a Walmart to your town and then being surprised when moms & pops don’t want to open up grocery stores. There’s a certain amount of validation a chain gets by having these top defi dapps (and others) deploy, but the downside is that it becomes more difficult for new teams to become successful on your chain even though it is these teams that are most likely to do things that your chain is uniquely capable of.
Homegrown solutions can also have an outsized impact on the chain and its traction when they become successful. Think of the role Polymarket serves for Polygon, Pump.fun serves for Solana, and Friendtech served for Base.
3. Great UX at launch
We haven’t fully crested this wave yet, but it’s coming. Much like people in web2 have lost the tolerance for MVPs and bad UX, people in crypto are starting to as well. As the user base continues to become less technical, and the experience on other chains becomes better, you can no longer go to market with a jank wallet, DIY block explorer, etc. You need high quality dapps, tools, UIs, etc. much earlier than in prior eras.
4. High float, low FDV
The market has been pretty clear that people are tired of low float, high FDV tokens that go down only. This much should be obvious to anyone. In the same way folks doing IPOs very much want them to have a slight pop, protocol founders should be thinking about how they can get to a fair valuation at launch. Public ICOs, private sales via Echo, larger / multi-season airdrops with more sybil prevention, prevention of staking or selling staking rewards by insiders, post-token launch sales by the Foundation with discounts and long lockups, and other options should all be on the table. I am particularly excited by platforms like Echo and Legion because if public ICOs of 2017 never make a comeback, these are the next best thing to give a large number of people the ability to participate in a project’s success from a low valuation.
Put another way — wen token? As early as humanly possible. Don’t run up the price in private markets. Run it up in public. Be like MegaETH.
5. Pre-deposits
Blast revolutionized the pre-deposit model, but fell flat afterwards because it was just pumping TVL into a bridge, and the assets didn’t go into actual dapps on the chain without further incentives. Berachain iterated on this model by having 100% of assets going into dapps, incorporating incentives from Berachain itself (and participating applications and assets) into the Boyco program. If they’re successful, I believe we’ll see this strategy be used by every chain to get early adopters and dapps even before the chain launches, potentially using tools like Veda or Royco. It’s like opening your store with products already on the shelves rather than trying to stock it up after it’s already open to the public. Obviously better. Note, however, this doesn’t mean indiscriminate points programs. Those days are gone.
6. Hyper-targeted user acquisition
Also gone are the days of large scale indiscriminate airdrops (and that’s a good thing). In 2025+, protocols have to be extremely targeted in airdrops and other token distribution, not just for the avoidance of sybils, but to get the right people on the bus. As a protocol, you want to lower CAC, maximize user LTV, and minimize selling pressure on the token. Hyperliquid is a great example where their points campaign was designed for CEX perp power users to lose money on HL, but make money on the CEX, to maximize points generation. This was a win-win-win for everyone, especially since it meant other perp traders on HL were able to make money more easily. Protocols can also leverage tools like Layer3, Coinbase Attestations, Agora Airdrop, and others for additional filters in their user targeting & acquisition.
7. Get infrastructure provider support early
It used to be much easier to get infrastructure providers, exchanges, custodians, wallets, etc. to support new protocols, but over time folks have realized just how expensive and difficult it is to not only support, but have a great product on multiple chains. While the number of new protocols launching every year continues to increase, the cost to support them is going up (they’re more complex, higher throughput, product bar is rising, etc.). This means if you want support from centralized providers, you need to get on their roadmaps much earlier than in prior eras or you’ll find yourself in the difficult position of deciding between a postponed mainnet launch or a limited number of partners ready for launch.
8. Align to an ecosystem
In prior eras there was only one ecosystem that mattered for onchain builders and users: Ethereum. But now as other ecosystems are growing, and as the modular trend continues, there are many more choices a team needs to make. Which ecosystem has users and builders most aligned with who you’re looking for? Where is the TVL you need? Are they growing, will they support your growth, and how do your roadmaps align? You need to place your bet and stick with it in a way that you didn’t have to before. Importantly, do not try to be “neutral” by working with everyone — then no ecosystem’s users, builders, and TVL will feel like you’re part of their tribe and no one will give you preference.
9. Decentralize as late as possible
It pains me to write this, but I think it’s true. The reality is that you can’t do most of the things that it takes to be successful these days if you decentralize too early. We’ve seen this with many flavors of protocols: layer 1’s, 2’s, DeFi, NFTs, etc.. Decentralization is similar to security — it’s extremely important, and you’re fucked if you don’t have it, but if maximizing it results in you not building something people want, you’re fucked anyway. Be ready to make the hard choices about what gets pushed down in the roadmap. Decentralization only matters in that there’s something valuable to decentralize. The only category where this is different is privacy where control is a major liability as devs are being persecuted (donate to Roman’s and Alexey’s legal defense).
Note I didn’t say “don’t decentralize.” I said decentralize as late as you can. Decentralization is non-negotiable. If you take centralizing shortcuts to launch sooner or have better UX, but don’t have a credible plan to decentralize, you’re probably going to end up grifting.
10. Distribution, distribution, distribution
This is the last one I’ll leave you with. The game has already changed and the focus needs to be on distribution. You’re starting to see it in places like the Conduit marketplace, paid placement in wallet UIs, USDC adoption, and *** redacted alpha ***. Many of the points above are part of the focus on distribution, but there are surely many components this post is missing. You need to set up the structural flows of bringing users, builders, and funds to your chain.
Conclusion
If you’re going to launch a protocol, 2025 is a great year to do it. This is low key an evergreen line because every year seems to be great since the L1 trade continues to persist regardless of market conditions. However, this year is actually a very good year since the market is up, users are onboarding, institutions are adopting crypto, and the political and regulatory climate is getting better by the day. Take these observations, use what makes sense to you, and go build the new meta for successful protocol launches. In particular, I think this meta is very favorable to appchains, especially Layer 2s that tend to have easier integrations due to similar codebases, dev environments, tooling, etc. and a more opinionated GTM by default. Good luck!
An enormous thank you to Aaron Henshaw, Joe Lallouz, Austin Federa, Ben Rodriguez, Logan Henderson, Elias Simos, Zaki Manian, Jacob Arluck, James Lofgren, Andrew Allen, Felix Lutsch, Min Teo and Konstantin Lomashuk for providing feedback and reviewing this post.
