Launchpads have been all the rage lately. More and more popped up, they all mooned, and most of the projects that came through them also mooned, depending on the specific pad.

I dislike launchpads in their current state, A LOT.
Pros, cons, and my thoughts on launchpads

@compoundfinance's issuance of COMP kickstarted what would later be coined as DeFi summer. The biggest hurdle until then - liquidity - was suddenly being solved as money poured into DeFi protocols to farm yield and trading volume. With liquidity, friction was removed.

Without friction and with liquidity, dApps were on the rise. Lending and borrowing, sure, but one of the biggest if not the biggest winners were DEXs. Well, @Uniswap. The v2 boom gave way to many new projects, shitcoins and moonshots. 100xs were flying everywhere.

So naturally, with greed and ape culture, scams followed. People got rugged left, right and center. For most, it didn't matter. It was a game, a casino. Ape 10 shitcoins a day, get rugged 9 times, the tenth 50x's and you recouped your investment and then some.

But for most small-time retail, a rug or two were a death sentence. I was actually a member of a community that specifically got together to discuss and evaluate projects to help others, and ourselves, avoid rugs. It was a proto-launchpad so to speak, with a crap token attached.

But the need was certainly there. The need to verify who's launching a project, that liquidity is sufficient and locked, that there's true value proposition, go-to-market plan and product market fit.

Basically, that it wasn't a worthless fucking shitcoin.

Sure, worthless fucking shitcoins moon. Sometimes, they moon the hardest. But for the most part, and for the small-time shrimp, it was death in disguise.

Enter launchpads. They're your best friend, right? They make sure you get ('fair') allocation. They kyc or validate the project's team. They make sure there's liquidity, and a safe token distribution. Maybe a timelock, or a multisig. They're the gatekeepers between rugs and YOU.

But in practice, launchpads are just crap trebuchets. Here's why:
1. The whitelisting / allocation processes are almost always fixed, rigged or botched entirely to the detriment of investors.

2. Many launchpads are created and/or endorsed by public shillers on CT and YouTube. The bigger the shiller, the better the launchpad from the team's standpoint because it means more eyes, more marketing, a bigger community.

These shillers use underhanded tactics to force projects into launching under their conditions (raise and valuation amount, vesting periods, launch date etc.) and threaten to not list and blacklist a team's project if their rules aren't followed. (across other pads too)

More often than not, these shillers push for little to no vesting, bloated valuations and extremely early launch dates to meet 'market conditions'. No product? No whitepaper? Just a couple of buzzwords and a template website? No problem compadre, your project's valuation is $400m

3. Obnoxious pyramid scheme-like marketing tactics to even get a chance to get whitelisted. The whole premise of a launchpad is fairness and equality. Not 'go like, subscribe, RT, tag your grandma, stream on twitch and tattoo on your body to maybe get a $100 allocation!'

After the token is listed, if it weren't botted to shit, thousands of apes who missed the whitelist now ape because they're early, right? FDV $1.4b? That's just a meme man.
Number. Go. Up.
While you're doing DD, someone in the TG writes 'I'm already 15x kek'. So you ape, right?

This creates a positive feedback loop, and more importantly for the shillers, it allows the launchpad to market themselves as a platform that helped launch 'another 50x'.
They get more clout, more teams want to work with them, they exert MORE power on them in turn.

Some projects that spawned from launchpads even rugged or 'got exploited' or 'botted', proving to be the farthest thing away from safe. So not only did you ape the top and bought the shillers' bags, you could end up with absolutely nothing.

I do think launchpads are needed. Someone needs to look out after the COMMUNITY, and vet projects. But it shouldn't be led by paid shillers who exert tremendous power over teams and investors. Even if they do end up bringing the most eyes to the project.

They should be run and managed by a community, for the community. For fairness, and equality. For value. Mooning isn't the only thing that matters, I know that's naive to say, especially in a bull run. But projects need to be vetted for value. Real VALUE.

Peace.