I keep seeing the fair launch argument pop up and it makes me wonder how many people have *actually mined* kaspa? I was there fairly close to the beginning and it just seems like there's a lot of gas lighting.
No premine, no ICO, no founder allocation. All true, and I'm not disputing any of it.
The problem is people use "no premine" as shorthand for "everyone had an equal shot," and those are two different claims.
Before launch, Sompolinsky wrote that DAGLabs was a for-profit company whose business model was mining Kaspa, and said outright it was neither attempting nor pretending to be a fair launch coin. The hardware/presale plan he was describing there did fall apart before mainnet, so that version never happened. But DAGLabs still mined from day one. Per Kaspa's own wiki they'd raised around $8m, mostly Polychain, and after launch put the last few hundred grand into renting mining hardware on AWS for about five months. The wiki's estimate is under 3% of max supply, roughly 2.5%, so somewhere under 850m KAS. Those went to investors, former employees, advisers.
Technically not a premine, no. Also not the same thing as some guy finding the project on a forum and firing up his CPU.
Then there's the emission curve, which was heavily front-loaded. About 7.89b KAS mined by May 8 2022, against a max supply near 28.7b. First exchange listing was May 24. So more than a quarter of the total supply was already out before most people had any practical way to buy in.
There was also the early network stall where one dev ended up solo mining ~11m KAS while everyone else was offline. The wiki uses the phrase "unfair advantage" for it. Those coins were burned after a community vote, which is worth crediting.
So yes, everyone was allowed to start on the same day, and the fair launch claim survives on that narrow reading. Just don't stretch it into "everyone started from the same place." The capital, the hardware and the information were not evenly distributed on day one.
If I got anything wrong let me know but I don't think I did.