Token launch marketing is the work of getting a new token found by the people who can use it, and it rests on five levers: PR, KOLs, paid media, community and content, funded in the right order and measured against one agreed number. The market for it is far smaller than issuance suggests: between 14 January 2024 and 18 June 2026, 18,675,645 tokens launched on pump.fun, yet the whole world held only 37 public token sales in the second quarter of 2026. By our estimate, somewhere between 1,200 and 2,500 launches a year can actually buy paid promotion.
The figures below come from CoinGecko lifespan data for pump.fun, tracked up to 18 June 2026, and from CryptoRank quarterly counts of public sales through Q2 2026. The buyer estimate is ours, and we show below how it is built.
What is token launch marketing?
It is the promotion that runs around a token going to market: before a public sale, through the first exchange listing and into the months after. The goal is not attention in general but holders and users who stay, which is why the same budget can look successful for two weeks and still leave nothing behind.
Promotion decides whether a working product gets found; it does not decide whether the product works. Marketing does not rescue a launch with nothing behind it, and we turn those down. That limit is also why the number of real buyers matters more than the number of tokens.
How many token launches can actually buy marketing?
How many tokens launch
CoinGecko tracked every pump.fun token with at least one recorded trade and grouped them by lifespan, meaning the number of days between creation and the last trade an aggregator saw. The distribution is the clearest public picture of mass token issuance.
| Lifespan | Tokens | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Same day | 12,825,175 | 68.67% |
| 1 day | 2,184,433 | 11.70% |
| 2 to 3 days | 770,249 | 4.12% |
| 4 to 7 days | 642,614 | 3.44% |
| 8 to 14 days | 460,697 | 2.47% |
| 15 to 30 days | 382,289 | 2.05% |
| 31 to 90 days | 560,008 | 3.00% |
| Over 90 days | 850,180 | 4.55% |
Within 48 hours, 80.37% have stopped trading. This is not a market with a high failure rate. It is a conveyor belt on which death is the default state and survival is the exception, because creating a token there costs almost nothing and takes almost no time.
If you run a project here, not just research one: If you are one of the launches in this data and trying to work out what a sane budget looks like, we will send a costed plan against your stage and your chain rather than a generic package. crypto PR packages.
How many of those are real projects
A public token sale is the cleanest available signal that a team rather than a script is behind a launch: someone had to prepare an offering, meet a platform’s requirements and raise money from people who could refuse. CryptoRank counts them quarter by quarter, and the trend is severe.
| Period | Public sales | Raised |
|---|---|---|
| Q2 2024 | not published | $375M |
| Q2 2025 | not published | $135M |
| Q1 2026 | 105 | $390M |
| May 2026 | 13 | not published |
| Q2 2026 | 37 | $58M |
Q2 2026 fell 65% against the previous quarter by deal count and 85% by money raised. The thirteen sales completed in May 2026 were the fewest in any month since December 2020, when there were four, a fall reported across the sector at the time. Disclosed fundraising has fallen more than fourteenfold from the Q1 2025 peak.
The buyer estimate: 1,200 to 2,500 a year
Here we are estimating rather than measuring. Public sales run to roughly a thousand projects a year. First-time exchange listings ran to about 1,400 listing events in 2025, but since a token typically lists on two to four venues, that is 400 to 700 unique tokens. Venture rounds run at roughly 1,500 to 2,000 deals a year, and a large share go to companies with no token at all: exchanges, wallets, custody, infrastructure. They buy marketing, but they are not launches.
The right operation is a union of the three lists, not a sum, because the same project appears on more than one. Corrected for overlap, that leaves 1,200 to 2,500 unique launches a year with the means to buy paid promotion, a few hundredths of one percent of total issuance. The overwhelming majority of dead tokens never had a budget and never could have had one. What dies at this scale is not projects with bad marketing. It is scripts.
Two consequences follow. The headline that 99% of tokens die describes a different population from a launch with a team, an audit and a funding round, and carrying it across is a sampling error dressed up as caution. And a market of two and a half thousand projects a year is small and professional, not a market for packaged solutions.
Token launch marketing: the key tactics
With a buyer market this small, you negotiate as one of a few thousand serious projects rather than as one of millions. These are the tactics that hold up at every budget level.
1. Fund one channel properly
Below the point where a full launch is affordable, concentration beats coverage. Choose the channel where your buyers already are, fund it long enough to produce a result you can read, and accept that the other channels stay empty for that period. A campaign appearing everywhere for two weeks leaves nothing behind, because nobody saw it often enough to remember it.
- Best for: launches with a single-channel budget
- Budget: from $4,000 for a focused single-channel campaign
- Metric to watch: the one number agreed before the first payment
- Watch out: extending the campaign because the result is nearly there
2. Choose the channel from evidence
Decide the channel from where your existing users came, not from a list of options. Check which pages brought sign-ups, which communities your first holders came from, and which competitor announcements were actually discussed. That evidence usually sits in your analytics and your own channel already, and reading it costs an afternoon.
- Best for: projects that already have early users or a waitlist
- Metric to watch: sign-ups and holders by named source
3. Run the full stack when the budget allows
A full launch combines PR, KOL, paid media, community and content, timed around the sale and the listing. It only works when every channel is funded long enough to be seen, which is why it is priced over months rather than weeks.
- Best for: funded launches with a sale and a listing date
- Budget: $50,000 to $500,000 over three to six months
- Metric to watch: holders still holding after a set period
- Watch out: funding every channel for too short a time to be seen
4. Buy a plan, not a package
Ask for the plan before the price. A supplier who quotes a package before asking what you built, which chain you are on and when you list is selling inventory rather than a campaign. Ask for work delivered for a project at your stage, with links, and read the results rather than the logos. Ask who does the work, what they will not do, and what happens if the launch date moves, which it will.
- Best for: choosing between agencies and freelance suppliers
- Watch out: a portfolio containing only successes, which has been edited
5. Contract for outcomes and ownership
Put deliverables, dates and approval rights in the agreement, and split payment so the final portion follows delivery rather than signature. Keep ownership of the accounts, the ad accounts, the analytics and the content produced, and keep the list of creators and outlets contacted on your side. Where a supplier takes tokens instead of money, treat it as a financing decision: agree vesting on the same terms you apply to advisors and write down what the tokens pay for.
- Best for: any engagement longer than one campaign
- Watch out: a supplier holding your assets, which makes leaving expensive
How to plan it step by step
- Compare yourself with the right peers: the hundred or so launches that ran a public sale in the same quarter, not mass issuance where the median project has no team and no product.
- Read your own data to pick the channel your first users came from.
- Set one number that means progress and one that means waste, before any money moves.
- Brief suppliers on the outcome, ask for the plan before the price, and ask to see a report from a campaign that did not work.
- Sign with staged payments, asset ownership and a notice period you can live with.
- Give each channel a defined period, report weekly, and move money to whatever produced something.
Timing is on your side in a downturn. Competing for attention in a quarter with 37 sales is structurally easier than in a quarter with 429, and inventory prices at outlets and with creators soften when fewer projects are buying. If your project is still going to market after the second quarter of 2026, the selection has already happened; the question is whether the fifteen hundred people who need what you built ever hear about it.
Token launch marketing timeline
Channels differ most in lead time, so the plan has to start from the slowest one. The lead times below, counted back from launch, come from our token launch timeline on flexe.io.
| Channel | Lead time before launch | Why it takes that long |
|---|---|---|
| Forum reputation (Bitcointalk) | 3 to 6 months | Standing is earned post by post; our longest campaign ran 259 days at two long-form posts a day |
| Search presence | 3 to 6 months | Pages need to be indexed and gain authority before they rank on the token name |
| Task and community campaigns | 2 to 3 months | Capped at roughly 10,000 verified participants a month by design |
| Tracker listings | 4 to 8 weeks | Applications queue, and the major trackers are slower than the second tier |
| PR distribution | 2 to 4 weeks | Scheduling and editorial windows; we distribute releases to 195 outlets |
| Influencer bookings | 2 to 4 weeks | Vetting takes time, and good accounts are booked in advance |
| Paid ads | Days | The only genuinely fast channel, and the reason it gets over-weighted |
A timeline built backwards from listing day tends to buy only the fast channels, so the launch-day crowd is rented rather than owned. Read the result at day 30, not on launch day.
Mistakes to avoid
- Benchmarking against mass issuance, which makes almost any outcome look acceptable.
- Spreading a small budget across every channel for two weeks.
- Starting a campaign without a stated target, so it gets judged on how it felt.
- Extending a channel past its agreed date because the result is nearly there.
- Buying more traffic when every channel produces clicks and none produces holders; that points to your page or product.
How to measure results
Set the measurement before the first payment, because a launch produces noise in every direction and only a decided metric survives it. Pick one number that means progress, usually holders still holding after a set period or applications from people who can use the product, and one that means waste. Report both weekly, to the same people, in the same format.
Watch the signals that move before the price: search volume for your own name, direct visits, channel joins from a named source, and inbox questions showing that somebody read the documentation. These respond within days and tell you whether attention turned into interest. Attribution here is partial, so ask every new holder or applicant where they heard about you, in one field; rough first-party answers still beat a dashboard claiming precision nothing in this market supports.
Record the cost, delivery and outcome for each supplier while the details are fresh. You will meet the same suppliers again, often at the next raise, and your own record will be better evidence than anything published about them.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is token launch marketing?
Token launch marketing is the paid and earned promotion that gets a new token in front of the people who could use it, usually through PR, KOLs, paid media, community and content. It decides whether a working product gets found, not whether the product works, so it only pays off for a launch with a team and a product behind it.
Is it true that 99% of crypto tokens die?
Only for mass issuance. Across 18.67 million pump.fun tokens, 4.55% were still trading after 90 days and 68.67% stopped on their first day. That sample is almost entirely tokens from launchpads where creating one costs pennies. Launches that ran a public sale and listed on an exchange behave differently, and the headline figure should not be applied to them.
How many token launches were there in 2026?
There were 105 public sales in the first quarter of 2026 and 37 in the second, with May producing 13, the fewest since December 2020. Mass issuance over the same period ran at roughly 21,000 tokens a day. These are two different markets, which is why most published statistics about token launches contradict each other.
How much does it cost to market a token launch?
Campaign budgets start from $4,000 for a focused single-channel campaign, and a full-stack launch across PR, KOL, paid media, community and content runs $50,000 to $500,000 over three to six months. Below the lower figure, putting everything into one channel beats spreading it thin, which is the most common way a small budget disappears.
Where does the 1,200 to 2,500 launches estimate come from?
It is the union of three lists: public token sales, unique tokens with a first-time exchange listing, and venture rounds that involve a token. The lists overlap heavily, so we take the union rather than the sum and give a range rather than a single figure. No direct measurement of this quantity exists, which is why it is presented as an estimate.
Planning a launch into this market
If you are working out where a launch budget should go, our guide to token marketing covers the sequence, and splitting a launch budget across channels covers the order in which to fund things. For what individual channels actually cost, see crypto PR pricing and crypto KOL pricing.