Every month a few dozen projects ask us to list their token. Some are serious teams with shipped products. Others are a logo, a Discord, and a contract deployed last Tuesday. The gap between those two is what our listing checklist exists to close. Here’s the version we’re comfortable sharing.
The contract tells you more than the whitepaper
Start with the contract address and read it on Etherscan before you open the pitch deck. Verified source code is the minimum. From there we look at three things: whether the contract is a proxy that can be upgraded after launch, who holds the mint and pause keys, and what the deployer wallet has done before. A team that has deployed four abandoned tokens in eighteen months is telling you something the whitepaper won’t.
Holder distribution comes next. If the top ten wallets control more than 40% of supply, price is a decision a handful of people make, and everyone else is their exit.
Liquidity you can actually exit through
Market cap is a headline number. What decides whether anyone can leave is the depth behind it. We look at how much of a position can be sold within 2% of the mid price without moving the market, and where that liquidity actually sits. For on-chain pools we check who provided it and whether it’s locked. A team that can pull liquidity on a Friday can end the token on a Friday.
Locking services like Team Finance and Unicrypt publish lock dates on chain, so we verify the dates directly instead of trusting the PDF that came with the deck.
The team and what they’ve shipped
Teams with public track records are easier to list, and shipped code is easier still. We check GitHub activity for the actual product, past the token contracts, and we look for audits from firms like OpenZeppelin or Trail of Bits with published scope and dates. An audit that covers the staking contract but leaves the bridge unreviewed is a partial answer, and we price it accordingly.
When the team is anonymous, the code and the on-chain history carry the whole case. Sometimes that’s enough. Usually it isn’t.
Where the token sits legally
Whether we can list something is increasingly a legal question before it’s a product one. In the EU, MiCA has set disclosure and authorization rules for token issuers since 2024 and 2025, and US guidance keeps tightening around what counts as a security. If a project can’t explain its position in the markets we serve, the listing wait gets long, and we say so early rather than after the announcement.
What we tell people who ask
Every check we run narrows the uncertainty, and a token that passes all of them is still a bet. We say that out loud. Listing here means the contract is legible, the liquidity is real, the team is identifiable, and the paperwork is in order. Price risk stays exactly where it belongs, with the buyer, and no checklist in the industry has ever moved it anywhere else.
That’s the whole philosophy. We do the reading so the questions are answerable, then let you decide with the same information we had.