TGE is the most important date in a token's history because it crystallizes weeks or months of token allocation planning into a single moment. Before TGE, tokens exist only on paper (in allocations spreadsheets, governance proposals, and legal agreements). At TGE, tokens are minted into smart contracts and distributed to recipients—team members, investors, community members via airdrops, and liquidity pools. The event simultaneously launches public trading (typically on decentralized exchanges), begins vesting clocks for locked allocations, and starts the protocol's emission schedule. TGE structure varies widely. Some protocols (like Uniswap) performed a surprise retroactive airdrop at TGE, distributing tokens to all users who had interacted with the protocol before the snapshot date. Others conducted public sales (like Arbitrum's minimal public availability), early investor rounds, and airdrops. TGE is also when cliff timers officially begin: if founders have a 1-year cliff, the countdown starts on TGE. A protocol's first major unlock event is often its TGE cliff expiry, not the TGE itself. For investors, TGE is the moment of maximum information scarcity and maximum volatility. No historical price data exists, so price discovery happens in real-time. TGE often sets the tone for sentiment toward the token and protocol. If TGE price appreciation is strong, it attracts retail attention and community momentum. If TGE performs poorly, it can signal market skepticism about the protocol's fundamentals or tokenomics structure. Understanding what allocations unlock at TGE versus which remain locked is critical for forecasting supply pressure in the weeks following launch.