Most TGE marketing is planned backwards from a single date, as a countdown that peaks when the token starts trading and then stops. The data on what happens next is now too large to argue with. Memento Research followed 118 token generation events in 2025 and found 84.7% of them, 100 of 118, trading below their launch valuation by 21 December, with the median token's fully diluted valuation down 71%. CryptoRank looked at the 113 tokens launched since 2024 that reached a $100 million market cap and found only 8 above their launch price in July 2026, with a median return of minus 95.7%.

The timing of the fall matters more than its size. GSR, a crypto trading firm, studied more than 2,300 token launches going back to 2013 and reported in September 2026 that the median token drops below its offer price within 3 days and is down close to 50% by day 90. Bitquery's study of 51 airdrops in 2026 found that 73% of claimers in the median drop moved their tokens within a day, and more than half within an hour.

Launch day is the least important day in the plan. What you did in the 90 days before decides who holds the token, and what you do in the 90 days after decides whether they keep it.

What is a TGE, and what does TGE marketing cover?

A TGE, or token generation event, is the moment a crypto project creates its token and makes it transferable, usually on the same day as an airdrop claim and the first exchange listings. TGE marketing is everything a team communicates around that event, from positioning and community building about 90 days before to holder retention and unlock communications about 90 days after.

People use TGE, token launch and listing as if they mean the same thing, and the differences matter for planning. The TGE is the creation of the token. The listing is an exchange opening a market for it, which we cover in our piece on why tokens tend to fall after a major exchange listing. The sale or presale is how some buyers got in before either, which we cover in how crypto presales came back as loyalty programs. This article is about the calendar that ties them together, and it builds on our argument that a token launch strategy has to start with the product.

Two terms come up throughout. Float is the share of the total token supply that can actually be traded at launch. FDV, or fully diluted valuation, is the token price multiplied by the total supply including everything still locked. Unlocks are the scheduled dates when locked team, investor and ecosystem tokens become sellable.

How did 2025 and 2026 token launches perform after TGE?

Badly, and consistently. Memento Research found 84.7% of 118 launches in 2025 below their launch valuation by December, CryptoRank found 93% of 113 large tokens launched since 2024 below launch price in July 2026, and GSR found the median launch down about 50% within 90 days. The few that held had working products and wide distribution.

Sources for the table: Hyperliquid's launch design and its July 2026 performance, Monad's sale figures and August 2026 price, Memento's list of 2025 declines for Plasma and Falcon Finance, Decrypt's review of the biggest 2025 airdrops for Berachain and Story, and CoinDesk on Movement's token sell-off and bankruptcy filing.

Low float and high FDV explain most of the damage

GSR's study puts numbers on a pattern founders usually hear as a complaint. Launches with less than 20% of supply circulating fell about 75% over their first year, while launches with 30% to 50% circulating fell about 45%. Tokens that listed above a $1 billion FDV had a median one-year return of minus 81%, and the median float for that group was just 13%. Binance Research flagged the same structure back in May 2024, when it found that tokens launched that year had a market cap equal to only 12.3% of their FDV, with $155 billion of unlocks due by 2030.

The 2025 class confirmed it, with the largest launches on Memento's list among the worst. DWF Labs, citing the same research, described the typical path as a drawdown of 50% to 70% within roughly 90 days of launch.

Airdrop recipients leave within hours, then within weeks

Bitquery tracked 2,023,879 wallets that claimed $809.4 million of tokens across 51 airdrops between 1 January and 29 September 2026. In the median drop, only 23% of claimers still held at least half their tokens after 30 days and 8% after 90 days. Of the 46 tokens at least a month old, 35 traded below their first-week price, with a median decline of 48%. Delphi Digital's five-year sample of 3.7 million wallets says the same thing over a longer period, with 78% to 94% of recipient wallets selling most of their allocation within 90 days.

The Bitquery data also explains why. In the median airdrop the top 10% of claimers received 73% of the tokens, so the float on day one sits with a small group of large farmers who were always going to sell. We cover the design side in our airdrop marketing strategy piece, and for this plan the point is that launch-day sellers are chosen months earlier, when the team decides what earns an allocation.

Unlocks start hurting a month before they happen

Keyrock, a market maker, analysed more than 16,000 unlock events across 40 tokens and found that 90% of unlocks create negative price pressure, that the pressure starts about 30 days before the unlock date, and that prices tend to settle within about 14 days after it. Team unlocks were the worst category, with an average decline of 25%, while ecosystem development unlocks were one of the few with a positive average effect, at plus 1.18%.

Monad shows what that looks like from the inside. Its investors hold about 19.7 billion MON locked for one year from the November 2025 launch, with monthly releases after that. In August 2026, three months before that first unlock, the Monad Foundation offered to buy locked tokens from early investors with a cap of $60 million, and nearly all of them declined. The unlock was being discussed in public three months ahead of the date, which is how early unlock communications have to begin.

What can TGE marketing change, and what can't it?

TGE marketing cannot change the token's supply mechanics, meaning the float, the launch valuation, the unlock schedule and the market-maker terms. It can change who receives the float, what holders expect on each date, how much they know before they trade, and whether they have a reason to stay after day 30.

The left column is settled in legal documents long before the marketing team is briefed, and Movement is the cautionary case. A market-making agreement routed 66 million MOVE tokens through a middleman, and wallets tied to the market maker sold them the day after the token's December 2024 debut, a $38 million sell-off. CoinDesk reported that the contract let the market maker liquidate once the FDV passed $5 billion and split the profit with the foundation. Binance banned the account, the co-founder who brokered the deal was terminated in May 2025, and the developer filed for bankruptcy in July 2026.

The right column is still worth a great deal. Hyperliquid, the onchain perpetuals exchange, distributed 31% of its supply to users on 29 November 2024, gave venture investors nothing and launched without a centralized exchange. The recipients were people who already traded on the product, a case we go through in our analysis of the Hyperliquid airdrop. The best pre-TGE marketing is the work of filling the allocation list with people who use the thing.

What does a TGE marketing timeline look like from T-90 to T+90?

A TGE marketing timeline runs about 180 days in four phases: positioning and community from T-90 to T-30, allocation and partner coordination from T-30 to T-0, a short and mostly operational launch day, and retention, unlock communications and reporting from T+1 to T+90. T is the day the token becomes transferable.

The table below uses a worked example with a TGE on Tuesday 2 March 2027, so the plan starts on 2 December 2026 and ends on 31 May 2027. The dates are illustrative and the proportions are what matter. In this token launch marketing plan the launch day gets one row out of seven.

T-90 to T-30: positioning, waitlist and community

Pre-TGE marketing starts with a sentence most teams cannot write, which is what the token is for. If the honest answer is "to reward early users and fund the treasury", say that, because buyers in 2026 have seen enough launches to spot an invented utility story. Marketing should also read the tokenomics draft at this stage. A marketer will not set the float, but a marketer has to explain it to a community that has read GSR's numbers.

The waitlist is the main asset of this phase, and its value is in the contact details. Followers on X cannot be messaged on unlock day, while an email address, a Telegram handle or a wallet with notifications enabled can. Most teams skip this and discover after launch that they have thousands of wallets and no way to reach them. By T-30 a founder should be able to state how many product users exist and how many of them can be reached directly.

T-30 to T-0: allocation communications, exchanges, market makers and KOLs

This is the month where most of the reputational risk sits. Allocation communications means publishing the final tokenomics, the full unlock calendar and the eligibility rules, then giving people a checker and an appeals window before the claim opens. Berachain's February 2025 launch is a reminder of what the alternative costs, since an airdrop that peaked at $1.17 billion in value drew weeks of complaints from testnet users about allocations and was worth $53 million by December 2025. Disappointed recipients are far cheaper to deal with at T-20 than at T+1.

Exchange and market-maker coordination is mostly about sequence and disclosure. Marketing needs the confirmed listing times, the deposit-opening times and the name of the market maker in writing. The Movement case is the argument for one more step, which is asking leadership whether the market-making terms could survive being published.

KOL sequencing, meaning the order in which paid and unpaid influencers post, should run from the informed to the broad. Researchers and long-form writers go first at around T-21 with the tokenomics in hand, product-focused creators follow with walkthroughs, and the large accounts come last and close to the claim. Every paid post should be labelled as paid, and no KOL should receive tokens that unlock before the community's do.

Launch day: T-0

Launch day is operations with a small amount of communication. The claim has to work, the contract address has to be the same everywhere, and support has to be staffed. Bitquery found that 25 of the 51 airdrops it studied in 2026 attracted counterfeit tokens, which were pushed into wallets 5.4 million times, so the most useful launch-day content is a pinned post with the real address and a warning about fakes. Beyond that, one announcement is enough, because the price will do what the float and the allocation list already decided.

T+1 to T+90: retention, unlock communications and reporting

The first 30 days are when holders decide. Delphi's data shows exit rates rising another 4 to 11 percentage points between day 30 and day 90, which means a meaningful group is still undecided after the first month and can be kept. What keeps them is a reason to hold that exists in the product, such as revenue-sharing staking or fee discounts, shown every week to the contact list built at T-60.

Unlock communications follow one rule taken from Keyrock's finding. Because price pressure begins about 30 days before an unlock, the notice goes out 30 days before as well, stating the date, the amount, who receives it and what the recipients have said they will do. Where the structure allows it, tie releases to results. Delphi notes that MegaETH, an Ethereum scaling network, locked 53% of its supply behind performance targets, which gives the team something concrete to report at every milestone.

Reporting closes the plan. Publish a short report at T+30 and T+90 with holder counts, the share of claimers still holding, product usage and treasury movements.

What we'd tell a founder about TGE marketing

Split the budget 30, 10, 60. As a starting point we'd put about 30% of the launch budget into the 90 days before, 10% into launch week and 60% into the 90 days after. Most launch plans do the reverse, and the GSR curve shows why that fails, since half the value is typically gone by day 90 while the campaign ended on day one.

Sit marketing in the tokenomics meeting. The float, the FDV and the unlock calendar are the message, whatever the announcement says. If marketing first sees them at T-14, the plan is already a damage-control plan.

Measure contacts and holders. Count reachable contacts before launch and claimers still holding after it. Bitquery's 2026 median of 23% still holding half their tokens at 30 days is the benchmark to beat, and impressions on launch day tell you nothing about it.

Publish the unlock calendar before anyone asks. Put every date on one page at T-30 and send a notice 30 days ahead of each one. Monad's experience in August 2026 shows that the market starts discussing an unlock three months out whether the team joins in or stays silent.

Be willing to move the date. Public token sales raised about $58 million in Q2 2026, 85% less than the quarter before, so buyers are scarce. If the product has no unpaid users at T-30, delaying the TGE costs less than launching into the median outcome.

The plan is 180 days long and one of them is the launch

The launch data from 2025 and 2026 says the same thing from every direction. Most tokens fall, they fall fastest in the first 90 days, and the ones that hold got their distribution right before the event and kept communicating after it. A team that treats the TGE as the middle of a 180-day plan is working on the parts that can still be changed, and a team that treats it as the finish line has spent its budget on the one day the outcome was already set.

Frequently asked questions

What is a TGE in crypto?

A TGE, or token generation event, is the point at which a crypto project creates its token and makes it transferable, usually alongside an airdrop claim and the first exchange listings. Monad's TGE on 24 November 2025, for example, unlocked 10.8% of its 100 billion MON supply, with the rest subject to lockups running as far as 2029.

What is TGE marketing?

TGE marketing is the communication and community work around a token generation event, covering positioning, waitlists, allocation announcements, exchange and influencer coordination, and holder retention afterwards. A sound plan runs about 180 days, from 90 days before the token goes live to 90 days after, because GSR found the median token is down about 50% by day 90.

What percentage of tokens fall below their TGE price?

Most of them. Memento Research found 84.7% of the 118 tokens launched in 2025 were below their launch valuation by 21 December 2025, with a median decline of 71%. CryptoRank found 105 of 113 large tokens launched since 2024, about 93%, were below launch price in July 2026.

Why do tokens dump after TGE?

Tokens fall after TGE because early recipients sell into thin demand. Bitquery found 73% of airdrop claimers in the median 2026 drop moved their tokens within a day, and GSR found launches with under 20% of supply circulating fell about 75% in a year, compared with about 45% for launches with 30% to 50% circulating.

What is low float, high FDV?

Low float, high FDV describes a token that launches with a small share of its supply tradable and a large valuation on the total supply. GSR's September 2026 study found tokens listed above a $1 billion FDV had a median float of 13% and a median one-year return of minus 81%, because the locked supply arrives later as selling pressure.

How do token unlocks affect price?

Token unlocks usually push the price down. Keyrock's analysis of more than 16,000 unlocks across 40 tokens found 90% created negative price pressure, starting about 30 days before the unlock date and settling about 14 days after. Team unlocks were the worst, with an average decline of 25%.