Blockchains are sold as open networks, but someone had to pay for the first line of code, the audits and the legal work. These articles look at how that money was raised, how tokens ended up with their first holders, and what the evidence says about who controls a network now. For definitions, see the glossary.
How blockchains are funded
Nobody builds a blockchain for free. Here are the six ways the work actually gets paid for, with real examples, evidence labels on every claim, and a plain list of what we could not confirm.
What is a fair launch?
Everyone calls Bitcoin a fair launch. Few agree on what the phrase means. Here is what publishers say, where they split, and what the launch records of nine networks actually show.
Coming next
These pieces are in preparation and are not yet published: how to measure decentralization five different ways; venture capital versus community funding for blockchain development; how a network can fund development without selling its token; and a comparison index of 20 networks, each described only from documented facts.
How this series works
Three questions are easy to blur, so we keep them apart. Funding is who paid for the work. Distribution is who received the tokens, and when. Control is who can run, change or stop the network today. A network can score one way on one and differently on another, and a claim about one says little about the others.
Every factual claim about a network carries one of five evidence labels, defined below. We do not assign a score, rank networks or recommend tokens. Where nothing is documented, we say “none documented” and move on. Where sources conflict, we show both. We paraphrase sources instead of quoting at length, and we name the primary document wherever we found one. If you can show us a better source, our corrections page says how.
How to read the evidence labels
- Confirmed A primary source and at least one independent source agree.
- Issuer-stated Only the project, foundation or company says so. We did not find an independent check.
- Reported A credible outlet reports it, but we did not find or read a primary document.
- Disputed Credible sources conflict. We give both versions.
- Unknown We looked and found no source either way.
The labels describe sourcing, not quality. A claim labeled Issuer-stated may be entirely accurate; it simply has no independent check we could find. Dollar figures for sales paid in bitcoin or ether are conversions made at some point in time, not amounts the buyers paid.