Before you ever see a new token in a swap interface, it already has a history. Someone deployed the contract, decided how the supply would be distributed, and chose a way to bring it to market. That choice, the token's launch type, shapes who ends up holding the early supply and how much leverage those holders have over the price later. Knowing the basic categories, fair launch, presale, and stealth launch, gives you a quick way to frame the risk before you dig into a specific token.
What a "launch" actually is
A token launch is the point where a contract's initial supply becomes tradable, usually the moment liquidity is added to a pool on a decentralized exchange. Before that moment, the token might exist only as a contract with balances sitting in a handful of wallets. After it, anyone with a wallet and some ETH can buy in. How the team gets from "deployed contract" to "tradable token" is what separates these three approaches.
Fair launch
In a fair launch, there is no early or discounted round. Everyone who wants tokens gets them at the same time, at the same starting price, usually by buying directly once liquidity goes live. There is no private allocation sold to investors ahead of the public and no whitelist that lets a smaller group in first.
The appeal is straightforward: nobody has a head start. It removes the common complaint that insiders and venture buyers get cheap tokens they can dump on public buyers once trading opens. The tradeoff is that fair launches raise no dedicated development funding up front, so the team either self funds, taxes trades, or holds back a portion of supply for the treasury, which is worth checking for in the contract or docs.
Fair launches are also the ones most exposed to bots. Because the exact launch block is often known in advance from an announced time, automated buyers can be first in line ahead of manual traders, which is part of why some projects choose the next approach instead.
Presale
A presale sells tokens before the public launch, typically at a discount, to raise funds for development, audits, marketing, or initial liquidity itself. Presale buyers might be the public through a launchpad, a curated list of early supporters, or private investors, depending on how the project structures it.
Presales solve the funding problem a fair launch does not, but they introduce a new one: a set of holders who bought below the price the public will pay, with an obvious incentive to sell once trading opens. Reputable presales manage this with a vesting schedule, releasing tokens to early buyers gradually rather than all at once. If you are looking at a token that ran a presale, checking whether those tokens are vested or already fully unlocked is one of the more useful things you can do, and it is worth reading our guide on token vesting and unlock schedules if you want to see how to check that on chain.
Stealth launch
A stealth launch skips the announcement entirely. There is no countdown, no presale, sometimes not even a public statement before liquidity appears and trading opens. The token becomes tradable, and word spreads only after the fact, often through the block explorer or a trading bot alert rather than a marketing campaign.
The goal is usually to prevent the exact bot advantage that fair launches struggle with. If nobody knows the launch is happening, nobody can pre-position ahead of it. The tradeoff is that stealth launches ask you to trust a team you likely know very little about, since there was no window for the community to review the contract, ask questions, or flag concerns before liquidity went live. Anything you would normally verify ahead of time, you are instead verifying after tokens are already trading, which changes the order of operations in a way that favors the deployer.
Why the launch type is a starting point, not a verdict
None of these three approaches is automatically safe or automatically a scam. A fair launch can still have a team wallet holding a large hidden share of supply. A presale can be run by a legitimate team with full vesting and public code. A stealth launch can be a small, permissionless project with nothing to hide, or it can be a rug pull whose whole design depends on you not having time to look.
What matters more than the label is what you can verify once the token exists:
- Who holds the supply. A holder distribution where a handful of wallets control most of the tokens is a risk regardless of how the launch was framed, whatever the launch type.
- Whether liquidity is locked. A launch of any kind is far riskier if the liquidity backing it can be pulled by one wallet at will. Our guide on verifying liquidity locks covers how to check this yourself.
- What the contract can do. Owner privileges like minting new supply, pausing transfers, or blacklisting addresses matter more in a token that launched with no public review. See token owner privileges for what to look for.
- Whether the story matches the code. A project claiming "fair launch, no team allocation" is a claim you can check against the actual contract and the initial distribution, not just the announcement.
Our broader guide on researching a token before you swap it walks through this checklist in more depth, and it applies regardless of which launch type brought the token to market.
The short version
Fair launches spread tokens evenly but raise no upfront funding and attract bots. Presales fund development but create early holders with a price advantage, one that vesting is meant to soften. Stealth launches try to neutralize bots by removing warning, at the cost of any chance to review the project before it is already trading. None of the three guarantees safety on its own. The launch type tells you what shape to expect the risk to take, not whether the risk is there. The verification still has to happen on chain, on your own, before you swap.