Premine

A premine is an allocation created before public mining, validation, or other ordinary issuance begins. It may fund founders, investors, a foundation, user distributions, grants, liquidity, or a treasury, and it can be encoded in a genesis state or created before launch.

A premine differs from an instamine, where normal block rewards produce an unusually large early supply, and from a chain split that copies an existing ledger to both resulting networks. Public sales, private sales, ongoing development rewards, and airdrops can overlap with premine distribution but describe different mechanisms.

A premine is neither proof of fraud nor proof of sustainable funding. Relevant evidence includes the amount and percentage, recipients, purchase terms, vesting and unlocks, custody and governance controls, disclosure quality, liquidity, voting power, and whether insiders can change or sell the allocation.

"Fair launch" claims also require context. Even without a formal premine, early notice, specialized hardware, low initial difficulty, private software, or concentrated access can influence initial distribution. Comparisons should describe the actual issuance history rather than treating one label as a complete fairness score.