Starting market cap

Every launch opens at a starting market cap — the price the pool is created at, before anybody has traded. This page explains where that number comes from, what it means for your token's price, and what it does not control.

Why a launch needs one at all

A Runitup pool is single-sided: you deposit your whole supply and no money at all. That is what makes launching free, and it has one consequence — a pool with only one asset in it has no price of its own to discover. Somebody has to say what the first tick is.

A two-sided launch answers this by accident: put in 5 ETH and a billion tokens and you have declared a price. Putting in nothing declares nothing, so the platform sets the opening price instead, the same for everyone.

What it is set to

Two different rules, depending on what your pool is quoted in. Both are read off the contract at the moment you launch, and neither is something you enter.

Paired against ETH — the pool opens at a fixed 1.5 ETH. Its dollar value is whatever 1.5 ETH is worth that day, so it drifts with the market.

Paired against anything else — USDG, a tokenized stock, a memecoin — the pool opens at a fixed $3,684, converted into that asset at the price registered for it on chain. So the same launch opens at:

Different numbers, the same money. Those quantities move with each asset's registered price, so treat the table as an illustration rather than a quote — the launch form shows you the live figure in the pair asset and its dollar equivalent before you sign.

What it means for your token's price

The starting market cap is the value of your whole supply at the opening tick. Your token's first price is simply that divided by how many tokens exist:

first price = starting market cap ÷ total supply

So a 1,000,000,000 supply opening at $3,684 starts at about $0.0000037 per token. A 1,000,000 supply opening at the same cap starts at about $0.0037.

Choosing a larger supply does not make your launch bigger. It makes each token cheaper by exactly the same proportion. The market cap is the number that stays put; the per-token price is the one that moves to accommodate it. This is worth being clear about because supply is the one of the two you choose, and it is easy to read a big number as a big launch.

What it does not do

It is not a floor. Nothing holds the price there. It is the price of the first tick and nothing more.

It is not a valuation. No money changed hands to establish it. A pool opening at $3,684 has had nothing bought in it yet — the figure describes where trading starts, not what anything is worth.

It stops mattering immediately. From the first trade onward the price is whatever people pay. The contract reads the starting figure once, converts it into the pool's opening tick, and never consults it again.

Can I choose it?

No. It is a platform-wide setting, the same for every launch, and it is deliberately not a dial: a launchpad where creators pick their own opening price is one where the number tells a buyer nothing, because it was chosen rather than applied.

What you do choose is your total supply, which sets the per-token price against it, and your pair asset, which decides which of the two rules above applies.

Quick answers

Does a bigger supply mean a bigger launch? No — it means a smaller price per token. The cap is the same.

Why does my ETH-paired launch show a different dollar figure than yesterday's? Because it opens at a fixed amount of ETH, and ETH moved. An equity- or memecoin-paired launch opens at a fixed dollar figure instead.

Can I open at a higher price by seeding liquidity? Not through Quick Launch — it is single-sided by design and takes no money from you.

Is this the same as the price shown on my token page? Only for the first instant. After that the page shows the live price, which is set by trading.