Questions & Alpha: Matt Solomon on What It Really Takes to Launch a Token

Questions & Alpha: Matt Solomon on What It Really Takes to Launch a Token

Authored by James Newell, Foundation & Corporate Communications Director, GSR

This content is intended for sophisticated investors only.

Most founders will only ever launch one token. Matt Solomon has launched around 50, and he still learns something new every time. Perps now set prices before tokens list. Thin pre-markets can push up listing fees. And the market is asking a harder question than ever: where does a token's value actually come from?

In this edition of Questions & Alpha, GSR's interview series spotlighting our partners, clients, and the people building our business, Foundation & Corporate Communications Director James Newell sits down with Matt Solomon, Head of Digital Asset Advisory, GSR, to discuss how launch valuations are set, why market makers should be treated as partners, how to sequence exchange listings, and why tokens should be valued more like airline miles than equity.

In March 2026, GSR acquired Architech to form GSR's Digital Asset Advisory team. Prior to the acquisition, Architech supported token launches totaling over $10 billion in peak fully diluted value, across mechanism design, market maker facilitation, centralized exchange coordination, GTM strategy and fundraising.

In this conversation:

• Perps have changed price discovery. For high-volume tokens, the price is largely set once perps go live.
• Launch valuation is as much art as science: comps, float, exchange listings, the last round and market conditions all play a part.
• Governance alone no longer gives a token value. Buybacks, revenue share and even token-for-equity swaps are on the table.
• Market makers are partners, not adversaries. Loan and option deals with the right KPIs usually beat retainers.
• Thin pre-markets can anchor tier one exchanges to the wrong valuation and push up listing fees.
• Tokens are tools. Like airline miles, they don't need to be worth as much as the company behind them.

James Newell: The Advisory Team has worked on launches totaling over $10 billion in peak FDV. What actually happens in the first 48 hours of a token going live?

Matt Solomon: Price discovery has changed a lot in recent years, mostly because of perpetual futures. Many of the bigger, high-volume tokens now trade on perps, pre-market venues, or some centralized exchanges before launch. And these perps have proven highly accurate. You see the same in traditional markets: for stocks or commodities that trade around the clock on perps, the price is almost exactly right at Monday's open. So for those tokens, price discovery now really happens once the perps go live.

The first 48 hours are still extremely volatile compared with traditional finance. Events that wouldn't move a valuation much in TradFi still do in crypto, particularly major centralized exchange listings. Your price can look very different at hour 48 than at hour one, depending on whether you get listed on offshore venues, which still account for the majority of volume in crypto. And because fundamental value is still missing for a lot of platforms, prices tend to swing hard through the first week.

James Newell: So how do you land on a launch valuation?

Matt Solomon: It's as much an art as a science.

Assuming a token isn't already trading in high-volume pre-market, five things come together. First, where comparable tokens are trading. Second, the float. Most tokens still trade on supply and demand, and a launch with 20% circulating supply will price very differently from one with 60% or 70%. Third, centralized exchange listings, which have historically driven a lot of week one FDV, because access to a user base the size of Binance's brings real buy pressure, albeit less so in bear markets.

Fourth, the price of the last round. Venture valuations aren't always accurate, but the top firms are still good at pricing tokens, so a round in the last month or two carries weight. And finally, market conditions. If Bitcoin is up 10% or 20% in a week, that always bleeds into altcoins. We also like tokens to launch with upward momentum.

James Newell: Where does mechanism design come in? Is there a decision that looked minor on paper but made a big difference to how a token traded?

Matt Solomon: The question on everyone's mind right now, whether retail, institutions or venture firms, is where value accrues to a token.

What gave tokens value in the past doesn't anymore. Many projects have begun looking at buybacks. Governance tokens accrue very little value. With the big legacy governance tokens, there was always speculation that a fee switch would eventually be turned on and lead to buybacks. But traditional governance models just don't work anymore.

For some tokens, we've discussed retiring the governance model entirely: winding down the DAO and moving to a model that reflects real value accrual. That can mean buybacks and revenue share, or retiring the token altogether and giving holders equity rights in exchange.

James Newell: Pre-launch perps and pre-market venues now often set a price before a token even lists. Has that changed how you plan a launch?

Matt Solomon: It doesn't change how we plan, and in most cases we actually try to avoid pre-market. On Hyperliquid, for the majors that traded before going live, such as Monad and MegaETH, there's enough liquidity for accurate price discovery. The problem is when lower-tier, low-volume exchanges list a token pre-market. Volumes can be in the hundreds or thousands of dollars, which gives a very inaccurate view of where the token will price.

The bigger risk isn't market expectations. It's your other listings.

Tier one exchanges look at those pre-market prices and anchor to them. On one token we worked on, a low-tier venue's pre-market, with only a few thousand dollars of volume, priced it at around $100 million when we expected a launch closer to half a billion. Higher-tier exchanges then asked for 2% or 3% of supply as a listing fee instead of 1%. And when a thin pre-market prices a token high, exchanges simply dismiss it as inaccurate. So in many cases, a low-volume pre-market can only hurt you.

James Newell: How do you decide the order and timing of exchange listings? Is a top-tier listing on day one still essential?

Matt Solomon: It depends on the token, its community, its goals and how much volume we expect on decentralized versus centralized exchanges.

As a general point, especially in bear markets, centralized exchanges account for less volume than they used to. Decentralized venues, including the leading perpetuals platforms and a number of smaller ones, account for much more.

So the day one lineup comes down to the type of project. For an L1, where it's much harder to bridge onto the chain than to buy on a centralized exchange and withdraw to a wallet, distribution matters a lot. We target the tier one exchanges with tens or hundreds of millions of users. For a token that trades directly on its own platform and accrues value there, such as a decentralized exchange's native token, centralized exchanges matter much less.

Ideally, you still launch with full global coverage: one US exchange, one major Asian exchange and, because Korea is still a siloed market, one of the leading Korean exchanges.

A lot comes down to fees. If a tier one exchange asks for 3% or 4% of supply, that can be worth paying in a bull market, because the buy pressure from the listing offsets the guaranteed sell pressure from the fee. In bear markets that's rarely the case, especially further down the risk curve.

The structure of exchange deals also matters more than it used to. We now have the data to show that a lot of the tokens paid out through launch pools and community airdrops are sold immediately, while trading competitions tend to drive real volume. Are all the fees paid on day one, or tranched at month three and month six? Can you time those releases with protocol updates or events that should lift volume and offset the selling?

James Newell: Community and public token sales looked like they were coming back as a fundraising route. Are they?

Matt Solomon: They were. But 2026 has seen a sharp decline, and we haven't seen the large public rounds of 2024 and 2025. I do think it's a healthier way for many projects to raise. You want incentives aligned between the project and its community, and the best way to do that is to put tokens in the community's hands.

Distribution has been one of the hardest problems to crack in crypto. Hyperliquid is an outlier: it distributed tokens to the people farming and using the platform in a very healthy way, and because it generates a lot of revenue, the price rose and the community had little reason to sell. For most projects, it's hard to define who the right long-term community members are and get tokens to them. Public sales are a good way to do that.

But be careful with the headline numbers.

When a capped sale of a few million dollars on attractive terms draws tens or hundreds of millions in demand, much of that demand isn't real. People commit knowing they'll get 80% or 90% of their money back. Public sales will come back when liquidity returns to crypto, but today's numbers can be misleading.

Separately, VC raises have gotten a bad name in crypto. But like market makers, VCs provide an important service. Many of the tokens performing best today grew and scaled because they received venture funding, and good firms bring advice and connections that get overlooked. VCs take on a lot of risk, and many funds never return capital to their investors. They will still play a very important role.

James Newell: More projects are adding buybacks or revenue sharing to their tokens. Is that a lasting shift or a response to market conditions?

Matt Solomon: Value accrual is probably the most important conversation in crypto right now. Nobody wants to put money into a token or an equity vehicle without a viable way to see value come back to them, and buybacks are the most obvious route.

But we should remember why tokens were created in the first place. There are three reasons.

The first is decentralization and decentralized governance. For a network like Ethereum to exist, validators need to be paid in a native token, so for L1s value accrual is clear without buybacks.

The second is aligning incentives between everyone in an ecosystem.

The third is directing user behavior, using token incentives to encourage actions that are good for the ecosystem.

The biggest problem is unrealistic valuation expectations. Over the last decade, many legacy tokens with no value accrual traded at billions of dollars in FDV, so the market now expects every token to be worth $5 billion or $10 billion. Tokens should be seen as tools.

I like the comparison with airline miles. Nobody expects an airline's miles to carry the same value as its stock. If a company is worth $1 billion, nothing says its token must be worth $1 billion too. If the token isn't the primary value accrual mechanism and works as a specific tool, like loyalty points, it's fine for it to trade at $50 million or $100 million.

James Newell: Without naming names, can you share a launch where the outcome surprised you?

Matt Solomon: Liquid pre-markets aside, it's impossible to know how a launch will perform before the token goes live.

Investment banks face the same thing pricing an IPO. Look at Circle's IPO, which priced well below where it traded a few days later. You could say the bookrunners did a poor job, or you could say nobody expected how much public demand there would be for stablecoins. The same applies to tokens, and we have gotten valuations wrong at times.

The issue is that many projects like to do treasury management in the first week, when the token is most liquid. If you underestimate how well a token will trade, you can also misjudge how much treasury activity to do in that window. Projects can lose millions or tens of millions of dollars in value through hedging, derivatives and other treasury decisions.

Those cases are outliers, but they happen, in the same way the leading investment banks sometimes misprice an offering.

James Newell: A dedicated launch advisory firm is a fairly new category next to market makers and VCs. Why do projects need an independent adviser between them, their market makers and their exchanges?

Matt Solomon: Most people will only ever launch one token in their lifetime, maybe two or three if they're crypto veterans. But launches change year to year, sometimes month to month. Because the process is so nuanced, specialists can save a project tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars in value.

The exchange landscape shifts constantly: where buy pressure comes from, which exchanges matter most, and how fees move with competition. Because we work across so many launches, we have unusually broad insight into that, and we know what fees a project should pay based on its quality and likely valuation. The same goes for market makers. We know which are best for different types of projects and what each brings.

On token design, projects will always know their own ecosystem best. But you'd never launch a web2 product without A/B testing and receiving user feedback, so it helps to have a second pair of eyes stress test the design and model the economics of the token. And on treasury management, the GSR team comes from top-tier TradFi institutions and trading houses, so we bring capital markets expertise that most teams launching a token don't have.

I've personally launched around 50 tokens, and I still learn something new every time. I can't imagine launching a token without an adviser who has been doing this for years.

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