The following is a guest post and opinion from Corey Billington, Co-Founder and CEO at Blubird.

Most token launches play out the same way. Founders spend weeks buried in spreadsheets, lawyers churn out disclaimers, and influencers start teasing “TGE soon.” Behind the scenes, though, private round investors are just waiting for cliffs to end so they can dump. Circulating supply spikes, token price tanks, and social media fills with threads about “unlock risk.”

Somewhere in the mess, we forget the obvious: tokens are infrastructure, not short-term fundraising tools.

I’ve worked with over 80 teams, and the same pattern keeps coming up. Founders rush to mint a token so they can raise without touching equity. Then they try to backfill utility into the product later — a strategy that rarely succeeds. That backwards approach is what leads to all the usual failures: oversized insider allocations, unlock schedules that make no sense, and “use cases” that no one actually uses.

At that point, every token purchase is just helping someone else cash out.

Why Raising First and Figuring It Out Later Breaks Everything

When your token’s main job is to raise money, you’re walking into two problems: legal risk and market damage.

On the legal side, if your token doesn’t have real utility from the start, it starts looking like a security — and the SEC isn’t known for nuance. You can call it a utility token, but the Howey Test doesn’t care about your pitch deck. And if you pair that with a fast emissions schedule and the token price crashes — don’t be surprised if frustrated holders come knocking.

But the real damage is strategic. Projects that treat the token like a fundraising shortcut almost never have a plan for what happens after launch. They end up building around cliffs, vesting charts, and investor pressure, not product usage or user growth.

And then, they’re bleeding tokens into a market that isn’t ready to catch them. 90% of token unlocks crash prices, even when 5% of the total supply is released. Meanwhile, over the next few months alone, scheduled unlocks will total around $9 billion.

Build the Business Plan First, Not the Tokenomics Last

The best token models start with the business. I mean a proper plan — the kind you’d pitch to a Series A investor and that forces you to map out what the company actually does, how it grows, where revenue comes from, and who benefits.

This clarity gives you the answers. Does this even need a token? Where does the token naturally plug into the product? What roles do users, validators, contributors, or liquidity providers play in creating demand?

Once that’s mapped, you can start modeling out the flow: who earns, who spends, who stakes, and when. Then you stress-test it: ‘What happens in a down market? What if usage explodes? How would fees, rewards, and emissions respond?’

Tools like Machinations can help you out here; so does walking through the model with someone who’s seen a hundred of them. But if the foundation is rotten, all the software and advice in the world won’t fix it.

If the Token’s Not Essential, Don’t Launch It Yet

Here’s what I tell every team: if your product can launch without a token, it probably should. Use equity, milestone-based SAFEs, or rev-share notes to fund early dev. When the product has traction — and there’s a clear role for the token in the loop — then you’re good to deploy.

Launching too early just invites speculation, so you end up spending the next two years defending a price chart instead of growing your user base.

On the other hand, when tokens are essential — e.g., powering blockspace fees, staking access to data feeds, or gating ecosystem rewards — their utility becomes the anchor. Demand grows with usage; the token is earned, spent, and recycled inside the product itself. That’s when emissions don’t destroy value, because you’ve got real activity behind it.

Take Solana: daily unlocks of roughly $14 million in tokens have weighed on its price, yet periods of strong network demand have repeatedly pulled it back up. Sui offers another case in point — after a January 1 unlock that released 64.19 million tokens (about $300 million), the token still surged nearly 28%, reaching a new all-time high of $5.1.

Founders Need to Design for Longevity, Not Launch Day

Founders love vesting cliffs and time-based unlocks — it’s simple, easy to model, and ticks the box for “long-term incentives.” Still, time alone isn’t a great signal. It’s way more efficient to tie unlocks to real milestones: number of active validators, modules shipped, usage targets hit; so the token supply would grow with the network.

Don’t build your model in a vacuum. Add slippage, bear markets, and team delays. If your model can’t survive those shocks, it’s not ready for launch.

And once you think it’s bulletproof, get someone to tear it apart. Experienced builders will spot the incentive flaws and edge cases your team’s too close to see.

Tokens Shape the Whole Market — So Build Accordingly

A lot of this comes down to mindset. If more founders treat token design as actual infrastructure — not cosmetic branding or a fundraising hack — we’d see better launches and stronger networks.

Venture investors are already starting to shift: the best of them focus on demand loops, not hype cycles. Exchanges are favoring transparency and sustainability over mystery unlocks and flash marketing. And regulators are more likely to respect a commodity-style utility token when it’s baked into usage, not just bolted on for optics.

Basically, it all boils down to this: if removing your token doesn’t break the loop, don’t launch. Build the loop first, then the token.