As a rule of thumb, we do not discuss price action nor trading activity. Our focus is on the network's utility and what Lava enables now and will in the future. However the community is our top priority, so we are making an exception here to describe how the launch rolled out.
LAVA and the Lava Mainnet have now launched and a new approach was taken to reach as many potential participants as possible:
DEX-first launch
Market-derived FDV
Focused airdrop to 70k wallets
No major project has done this to date. We have received great feedback about the process and are excited to see other protocols follow suit.
LAVA launch recap
Yesterday, Lava took a bold step to reject “low float, high FDV” launches and launch on a DEX, leaving it up to the market to decide who wanted to participate in the network.
Overall, the community sentiment has been mixed, due to the novelty of the approach but the overall great feedback can be used as a playbook for other protocols: to learn from when attempting novel forms of token launches.
Reflections
Launching DEX-first:
Uniswap V3 allows two main ways for maintaining pool liquidity: a curve and a tick. The reason the initial liquidity wasn't on a Uniswap V3 curve was to avoid an artificially high FDV. This way ensured a free market-derived launch approach.
Uniswap V3 on Arbitrum was the DEX. We wanted to reach as many users as possible, and to distribute LAVA with maximum decentralization. While this was designed because Arbitrum is more well-known than Cosmos based DEXs, we acknowledge that it created some confusion that increased negative sentiment.
Reducing bots:
To ensure security, Lava Mainnet ran privately before launch, with unavoidable onchain and public activities. For example, the Cosmos chain registry RPC was public for over a month, and the Keplr RPC Registry was live for 10 days. Community members discussed this in Discord a week before the Public Mainnet announcement. Sniper bots and opportunistic members tracked the LAVA bridging from the Lava network to Arbitrum. Anticipating this, we took steps to minimize the risk, knowing bots are common in DEX launches. It’s a public market and the current situation is an entity or entities that sniped the tokens own ~1.5% of total supply. They are slowly selling but ultimately they are entitled to hold. We will continue to monitor.
To reduce the risk of snipers, we kept the DEX strategy, venue, chain and exact date time of launch stealthy. We also announced the pool on a Discord community call, a few minutes before the main announcement. The call was open to the public but was designed to allow real users to interact with Lava before any bots.
Managing community expectations:
Negative community sentiment is a complicated issue for any protocol that chooses a new launch approach. On one hand, it helps shake out non-believers. On the other hand, real potential participants may be deterred from taking part. We are prepared for the long term and this has been the approach since day 1.
The WETH side of the Uniswap pool was initially low on liquidity. It took time to balance it, which resulted in confusion from community members about the pool's legitimacy.
Focus on the long-term - price is not the focus:
Lava is focused on building core infrastructure that users and builders use in crypto. As already proved in testnet while processing billions of requests daily, in Mainnet. The token is a key part of that utility, and we are confident over the coming years that participants will help further decentralize and shape the network.
What's Next
For those who are new:
Lava offers critical infrastructure such as RPC, which is required for users to interact with any blockchain
handled 50+ billion RPC requests across 30+ networks like Ethereum, NEAR, Base and others
Google Cloud and other major providers are already running nodes on Lava testnet
Already partnered or will partner with top ecosystems like NEAR, Avail, Starknet, Filecoin and others - with almost 5 million tokens, from those chains, coming to incentive pools on Lava Mainnet
We are here for the long-term:
Building: Our focus is the tech. The protocol continues to improve, and will evolve to serve many more chains and services beyond RPC e.g. indexing, oracles and LLMs.
Incentive Pools on Mainnet: Millions of tokens from other chains will be launched on Lava Mainnet, to attract RPC providers and restakers
Delegation Programs: Initiatives to delegate responsibilities to RPC providers and validators.
Bug and Feature Bounties: Incentives for community contributions to improve the network.
Roadmap Update: Detailed plans for future development stages.
Grants: Funding opportunities for innovative projects within the Lava ecosystem.
As crypto moves closer to mainstream adoption, token launches must mature accordingly. Projects should adopt a long-term approach that rejects artificial hype and makes it easier for early contributors to participate.
The LAVA launch aimed to engage and bootstrap contributors for a crypto protocol that can persevere for decades. We are just at the beginning of that journey.
