Public Sale

Tokenomist defines the category plainly: public sales "are announced to the public and involve public participants, whether through ICOs, IDOs, or IEOs". That is the line separating it from the Private Investor bucket, which covers venture funds, seed buyers and project partners in rounds that are not publicly accessible and are usually priced lower. Both are investors; only one of them had to be invited. The distinction matters for supply analysis because the two tranches carry different sizes, different entry prices and, most importantly, very different lockups.

The size of the category has collapsed over a decade. Tokenomist's allocation research cites Binance's tokenomics work finding that before 2018 many high market-cap tokens sold over 40% of total supply publicly, with Ethereum and Binance at roughly 83.5% and 50% respectively. That era ended badly: Statis Group estimated around 80% of ICOs were scams, and academic work by Benedetti and Kostovetsky and by Howell and co-authors found that on average 54% to 60% of total token supply was dumped during an ICO. Founders responded by cutting the public tranche from about 35% in 2018 to 5% in 2023 while private investor allocations grew. The pattern also splits by size: larger market cap projects allocate fewer tokens to public sales than smaller ones do, funding themselves through other means and holding more in foundation or treasury, while smaller projects sell more publicly to attract initial investors.

What has not changed is the vesting. Tokens sold in public sales generally do not carry long vesting periods, and Tokenomist's research puts 75% of public sale vesting periods as ending before 8.8 months. In practice that means buyers can sell shortly after purchase, so a public tranche tends to reach the market early in a token's life rather than sitting behind a multi-year schedule. Jurisdiction is the common exception, and it can split one tranche in half. Plasma sold 10% of supply (1,000,000,000 XPL) publicly, with non-US purchasers unlocked at mainnet beta launch and US purchasers locked for 12 months to July 28, 2026. On a 50/50 split assumption that lockup was one of the reasons initial released supply came in near 13% of total tokens rather than 18%.

Mechanism and pricing are where public sales now differ most from each other, and both feed straight into cost basis. Coinbase ran Monad's sale from November 17 to 22, 2025 at a fixed price of $0.025, with no auction mechanics, a clear FDV up front, an allocation model favouring smaller orders to reduce whale dominance, and TGE plus mainnet two days after close. Aligned went the other way: a CoinList sale in January 2025 offering 1.67% of supply and raising up to $10M across multiple pricing tranches, then a second public round more than a year later structured as an English auction for roughly 1% of supply, which softened retail sentiment through the long gap to TGE and the perceived dilution of public sale exclusivity. The price set in these rounds becomes the reference every later holder is measured against. Pump.fun's July 2025 ICO sold 330B PUMP, 33% of the 1T cap, at $0.004; a year later its FDV sat about 68% below the $4B valuation that ICO implied, leaving public buyers below their entry while insiders approaching the July 2026 cliff held a far lower cost basis.