A game raises USDC and mints a token. This is the whole mechanism, including the parts that are easy to get wrong, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.
Read this part twice
Phases 1 to 4 carry a refund right you have to exercise, within 7 days of the pool opening. Do nothing and it lapses and you keep the tokens. Tokens that a refund gives up are transferred to the developer. Nothing in this design is ever burned.A developer picks a single figure, the raise in USDC, and everything else follows from it. The supply is always 1,000,000,000 tokens, split three ways: 65% to the developer, 10% as the pool's opening inventory, 25% to backers. The price is the raise divided by the backers' 250,000,000 tokens, and it is the same price in every phase, so the fully diluted valuation at launch is exactly four times the raise.
The raise runs in five equal bands of 20% each, and a phase advances only when it fills, never on a clock. Every phase buys the same 50,000,000 tokens for the same money. The single thing that differs is the refund right each one carries:
| Phase | Share of the raise | Tokens | Refund right |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 20% | 50,000,000 | 100% |
| 2 | 20% | 50,000,000 | 85% |
| 3 | 20% | 50,000,000 | 70% |
| 4 | 20% | 50,000,000 | 45% |
| 5 | 20% | 50,000,000 | None |
So backing early is not a discount, it is a larger share of your contribution that you can ask for back. Phase 5 carries no refund right at all, which is why it can take delivery of its tokens the moment the pool opens instead of waiting out a window.
Summed across those five bands, the ladder puts 60% of the raise in escrow and commits 40% to liquidity. The escrowed 60% is what the refund rights are paid from, and it stays funded and untouched until the window closes.
No USDC from the raise reaches the developer. Ever.
Escrowed money goes to a backer or into the pool, and there is no third destination and no instruction that creates one. What the developer receives is tokens: their own allocation, the tranches that refunding backers give up, and the tokens bought on the pool by the contributions of backers who keep theirs.A raise that does not fill by its deadline pays everyone back in full instead. Backers withdraw their own contribution themselves; nothing about a failed raise depends on us doing anything.
The 10% inventory and the committed 40% of the raise become a Meteora pool. That is the moment the token has a market price, and everything below is measured from it.
Through the refund window at minimum, plus any longer period they chose when they scheduled, which is published before anyone backs. It is not their choice at the time: without it the real float would be several times the sale and every number on the page would be false.
Seven days, hardcoded, never extended. There is no field for it and no argument that moves it. Phase 5 has no right to exercise, so it takes its tokens immediately.
Two options, described below. Choosing nothing is also a choice, and it is the one that keeps the tokens.
Nothing is destroyed
A refunded tranche is not burned and neither are the tokens the window's buys purchase. Both are transferred to the developer, where they are subject to the same lock as the rest of the developer's allocation. If you have read otherwise anywhere, that description was wrong.When the window closes, anyone who never chose is defaulted to keeping their tranche, automatically, and the on-chain record of the backing is collected. That is why a settled launch shows no contribution record for a wallet that took part: the record has done its job and been closed.
Whatever the raise, and whatever share of backers exercise their refunds, the arithmetic lands on both of these. They are the design's actual claims, and they are checkable on chain rather than promised here:
Keeping your tranche rather than refunding it earns 10 points per USDC held. Points are deliberately off-chain and are not a claim on this launch, its token, or its escrow: they are a record of having backed a launch and stayed in it, which future raises can recognise. One row per wallet per launch, written when the tranche is kept.
The token trades like any other SPL token once its pool is open. The swap box on a launch's page routes through Jupiter, and falls back to the launch's own pool when Jupiter has no route for it, which is usually the case in the first hours. You can equally trade it anywhere else that lists it; nothing about the token depends on this site after the window has closed.
The plain version, because a page that only lists the good parts is not documentation:
Every number above is on chain. A launch's page shows the mint address once the raise succeeds, the pool address, how much escrow is still funded, how much has been refunded, and how much has been spent buying on the pool, all of which any explorer will confirm independently of us. The rules are enforced by the launch program rather than by this site: we cannot extend a window, move escrow, or unlock an allocation early, and neither can a developer. See also Tokens for what the SDK exposes to a game's own code.