Fair Launch (Community Distribution)

A Fair Launch refers to distributing a token entirely to the public, with no pre-mine or early allocations for insiders.

Bitcoin’s launch in 2009 is the classic example – Satoshi Nakamoto did not reserve any BTC for himself;

when Bitcoin went live, anyone could start mining and earning BTC (including Satoshi, who had to mine along with everyone else).

In the DeFi era, Yearn.Finance’s YFI (2020) became a landmark fair launch: 100% of its governance tokens were distributed to users who provided liquidity, with no tokens allocated to the founder or investors.

Fair launches prioritize decentralization and community ownership from day one.

Participants “earn” tokens by contributing work or liquidity to the network, rather than buying them.

This model can galvanize a loyal community and align the project with its users, but it also means the project foregoes raising capital through the token launch itself.

PoG is philosophically aligned with fair launch principles – it avoids insider privileges and emphasizes open participation.

Like a fair launch, PoG typically involves no pre-sale or pre-allocation;

all tokens in the event are up for grabs by the community under the same rules.

Both approaches aim for egalitarian access and transparency.

However, PoG introduces a new form of “work” required: burning gas.

In traditional fair launches, the work might be providing computational power (proof-of-work mining) or providing liquidity/capital (yield farming) to earn tokens.

In PoG, the “work” is provable on-chain activity as measured by gas spent.

One can view PoG as a modern interpretation of a fair launch using Ethereum’s congestion as the resource to be expended (analogous to how Bitcoin uses electricity and hashpower).

It is credibly neutral in that the rules are public and apply equally to all – “no pre-mine, no pre-sale, no insiders” – but it’s not a passive process;

it’s an active competition where fairness is enforced by equal-opportunity cost.

This tends to make PoG launches dramatic and highly engaging.

In a classic fair launch, if you didn’t participate in mining or liquidity provision, you quietly missed the distribution.

In a PoG event, the very act of participation (bidding gas) is public and likely newsworthy: as users compete, network explorers and dashboards will show a spike in gas fees, drawing attention.

The visibility of a PoG launch is a feature – when a token launch congests a network, everyone notices and talks about it, effectively broadcasting the event and inducing further FOMO.

Thus, PoG takes fair launch ethos and injects it with adrenaline.

It’s fair in the sense of no privileged entities, but it demands immediate commitment from participants.

Some will argue this is more fair than random airdrops or slow liquidity mining, since every participant’s outcome is proportional to their verifiable effort (cost) rather than random chance or existing wealth (holding another token).

Others may point out that wealth still plays a role, since those with more funds can afford more gas – a valid critique, though mitigated by the fact that money must be sacrificed, not merely staked.

In any case, PoG firmly aligns with the fair launch movement’s goal of community-driven distribution, while introducing a competitive twist that makes the launch itself a highly visible, engaging event.