Token Sales: Four Years in Review

Between Q3 2022 and Q2 2026, crypto projects raised a combined $4.29 billion through 3,989 public token sales. Deal count peaked in Q2 2024 at 496 rounds. Capital raised peaked separately in Q1 2025 at $849 million. Since then, both numbers have cratered. Capital is down 95.3% from peak. Deal count is down 90.5%. Those are not "market correction" numbers. Those are extinction-event numbers.

Where the Money Actually Went

Follow the capital. The report flags two structural shifts, and neither one surprises anyone who's been paying attention instead of refreshing their portfolio app.

For related context, see What Are Real World Assets RWA in DeFi and Crypto?.

First, VCs stopped writing seed checks for pre-revenue teams with pretty pitch decks. Late-stage companies with actual revenue and working products swallowed the bulk of venture capital. That left the pre-revenue, whitepaper-stage projects — the traditional fuel for public token sales — with nowhere institutional to go.

Second, and this is the bigger tell: projects that can raise money are choosing not to do public sales at all. VC funding rounds, launchpool campaigns, community distributions, airdrops — these let teams build a user base before or during token generation, dodge the retail FUD cycle, and grab larger checks with longer runways. Public sales became a niche mechanism, not the default.

Translation for retail: the projects still running public rounds in 2026 are either too small for VCs to bother with, or they need your money because no institutional desk would touch them. Neither scenario is comforting.

A Live Case Study: Catapult

So what does a public token sale actually look like inside this graveyard? I pulled one up that launched yesterday — Catapult's Early Public Sale, which opened July 6, 2026. In its first hour it pulled $1.6 million toward a $2.9 million target. No launchpad allocation, no exchange cut. Just a direct public round running through July 31.

Here's what caught my eye: 100% of tokens unlock at TGE. No vesting cliff. No linear release. You buy, you receive tokens the moment the event ends. In a market where every other presale locks retail into 12-to-36-month schedules while VCs and insiders walked away six months earlier at a 70% discount, a no-lockup structure is either an olive branch to buyers or a signal that the team needs fast liquidity to fund operations. I'll let you decide which.

The mechanics: max supply capped at 1 billion PULT, structured as a "value-capture" model where protocol revenue buys tokens on the open market — meaning supply expansion isn't the only mechanism at work. Omnichain deployment through LayerZero, with liquidity pools on BNB, Base, Solana, and HyperEVM at launch. That's at least a serious infrastructure footprint, not a single-chain joke.

But here's the uncomfortable question: if public token sales are down 95%, why is this one vacuuming up a million-plus in sixty minutes? Either the market isn't actually dead, or the few projects still running public rounds are absorbing whatever retail appetite remains. Probably both.

What I'm Tracking

Public token sales aren't coming back to 2024 levels. The structural shift toward VC-first, airdrop-second launches is permanent. For retail, that means the selection burden just got heavier:

• If VCs passed on a project running a public round, ask why before you write a check. "Decentralization" and "community-first" are not answers.
• No-lockup structures cut your exit risk but also signal zero long-term commitment from insiders. Watch what the team wallets do post-TGE, not what the whitepaper promises.
• A "value-capture" revenue model is only as good as the revenue. I haven't seen audited numbers on Catapult. Until I do, the open-market buyback is a promise, not a mechanism.

The ICO era is over. What's left is the aftermath — and a handful of teams brave or desperate enough to still ask the public for money directly. Tread accordingly.