A token launch is a huge event. Some projects are making millions of dollars in minutes. Also, the Ethereum infrastructure is stretched to its limits, and projects that aren’t properly prepared can have users that are phished, confused, frustrated, or repelled.

Some common pains that new projects are experiencing:

The Ethereum blockchain itself can develop a backlog of transactions, with users waiting hours for a transaction to go through. (You can always view the backlog on Etherscan)

Phishing rates spike around token launches, and if users don’t have a strong way to recognize your brand, they might just send to the wrong people.

If you’re relying on MetaMask for a pleasant user experience, it’s possible you surprise our backend (Infura), and your users end up with a less-than-ideal experience. (Scaling up a blockchain nodes takes time!)

Here’s a collection of strategies we recommend to ensure the smoothest token launch experience for your users.

Contact Infura

MetaMask lets users connect to the blockchain right away, because they connect to Infura’s hosted nodes by default. This works fine under normal conditions, but under a traffic spike like a token sale, this can seriously drag down our infrastructure.

One thing that nobody does yet (but would help) is telling Infura before their launch, so they could scale up before the event. Ideally, contact them a full month before your launch, don’t leave it to the last minute! Give your launch a smooth edge by contacting Infura!

Add Your Contract to MetaMask’s MetaData Directory

When a user with MetaMask sends to an unknown contract, by default we render an identicon, which is unique to the address, but if the address is unfamiliar, it’s fairly useless.

We recently added the ability to display a verified name & contract icon in our interface, which can give users added confidence that they’re doing what they intend to. This logo icon will render wherever the identicon would render normally:

The Gnosis Token is always represented, for example.

Get your name and verified icon added by submitting a pull request to the eth-contract-metadata repository:

Add Your Website to the EtherAddressLookup Whitelist

Both MetaMask and the EtherAddressLookup extensions draw blacklists and whitelists from public lists. When you add your domain to the whitelist here, MetaMask and the EtherAddressLookup extension will block suspiciously similar website names, favored by phishers. This is a great way to protect your users from sale-day phishing.

Submit a PR there:

Optimize Your Dapp

Even when your user has a local blockchain node, the Ethereum Virtual Machine is a little slow, so loading a large data table off the web3 API will still be a rough user experience.

If you need to load a ton of data off the blockchain, consider caching it on a secondary indexing server, and hosting off of that, to reduce overall load.

Consider Using a Sale Mechanic That Doesn’t Clog the Network

Smart contracts make token issuance models incredibly open-ended, and the right model can be the difference between a rich community who loves and supports your project, and a single token-holding whale that you’re now beholden to.

Some token sale mechanics are explored in this article by Vitalik Buterin:

Since then, we’ve seen good success from token sales that featured a pre-registration phase, where pre-registered addresses could perform one capped purchase any time during the first day of the sale. This reduces the incentive to rush the door, keeping the network moving smoother, and helps you raise funds from a wider a diversity of investors. We’d love to see more ways of ensuring more people get into token sales, not just more money.

Support!

There are a million other things that can go wrong, and do every token launch. The best planned token launches usually have surprises, and those surprises turn into confused and frustrated users.

The day of your token launch, make sure you have a support team ready to go. Many launches have had no support, or a single intern on twitter support, and that’s not enough.

If you’re hoping to get a community full of investors, prove you deserve it by communicating with and supporting them. Especially if you’re advertising to people new to Ethereum, your token sale will involve an education period. The better your “how to participate” guides are, the easier it will go, but nothing replaces some live hands on deck to help people get aboard.

Donate to Infrastructure!

A lot of these projects that enable your token launch actually do not have tokens of their own, and rely on the kindness of others to keep working. Send some of your newly-minted tokens to some of those projects, and you’ll not only keep their gears moving, you’ll incentivize them to ensure the success of your project, too!

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