A game raises money and mints a token. This is the whole mechanism, in plain words, so you can check it instead of taking our word for it.
The two things people get wrong
A refund has to be claimed within 7 days of the pool opening. Do nothing and it expires and you keep your tokens. Tokens you give up by refunding are transferred to the developer. Nothing is ever burned.A developer picks one number: the raise. Everything else follows from it. The supply is always 1,000,000,000 tokens: 70% to the developer, 10% to the pool, 20% to backers. The price is the raise divided by the backers' 200,000,000 tokens, the same in every phase, so the token's full valuation at launch is five times the raise. The pool opens at that same price.
The developer picks the raise's currency when they schedule: USDC or SOL. It is fixed from then on. You contribute in that asset, refunds are paid in it, the pool is quoted in it, and the trade fee accrues in it.
A SOL raise is held on-chain as wrapped SOL, an ordinary SPL token. Your transaction wraps what you spend and unwraps what comes back, so your wallet only ever shows SOL. The only visible difference is the allowed size of the raise: 100 to 10,000,000 for USDC, 0.5 to 50,000 for SOL.
The raise runs in five equal bands of 20%. A phase advances when it fills, never on a clock. Every phase pays the same price for the same 40,000,000 tokens. The only difference is the refund right:
| Phase | Share of the raise | Tokens | Refund right |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 20% | 40,000,000 | 100% |
| 2 | 20% | 40,000,000 | 80% |
| 3 | 20% | 40,000,000 | 70% |
| 4 | 20% | 40,000,000 | None |
| 5 | 20% | 40,000,000 | None |
Backing early is not a discount. It is a bigger share of your money you can ask back. Phases 4 and 5 have no refund right, so they can take their tokens the moment the pool opens instead of waiting out the window. (The block of tokens a contribution buys is called a tranche in the launch program and on the chain; here it is just called your tokens.)
Across the five phases, 50% of the raise goes into escrow and 50% into the pool. The escrow is what refunds are paid from, and it stays funded and untouched until the refund window closes.
The developer is not paid out of escrow.
Escrowed money goes to a backer or into the pool. Nowhere else. The developer is paid in tokens: their own allocation, the tokens refunding backers give up, and the tokens bought on the pool with the escrow of backers who keep theirs. The pool does charge its 2% fee on those purchases like any other trade, and 0.8% of each trade accrues to the developer's locked liquidity position. That fee income, earned from trading after launch, is the only way any of the raise's money reaches the developer.If the raise does not fill by its deadline, everyone gets their full contribution back. You withdraw it yourself, from your own wallet; it does not depend on us.
The 10% inventory is paired with half the raise in a Meteora pool. The token now has a market price, and it is the price backers paid, not a new one.
Through the refund window at minimum, plus any longer period they published at scheduling. It is not their choice at the time: without the lock the real float would be several times the sale.
Seven days, hardcoded, never extended, for anyone. Phases 4 and 5 have no refund to wait on and take their tokens immediately.
Two options, below. Doing nothing is also a choice: it keeps the tokens.
Nothing is destroyed
Refunded tokens are not burned, and neither are the tokens the escrow buys. Both go to the developer, under the same lock as the rest of their allocation.When the window closes, anyone who never chose keeps their tokens by default, and the on-chain record of the backing is closed. That is why a settled launch shows no contribution record for a wallet that took part.
The deadline only removes the refund. Taking delivery has no deadline: you can send that instruction during the window or long after it, without waiting for the default to be filed for you. The button is on the launch's page, and indie.fun/claim builds the same transaction straight from the chain if this site is down.
The escrow of every backer who keeps their tokens is spent buying on the pool. That is a lot of buying into a market that is hours old, so it is deliberately not one big buy. The rules are enforced by the launch program, not by this site, so they hold whoever sends the transaction:
These purchases raise the price on the pool: a buy against a constant-product pool moves the price it executes at. The pool trades throughout the window, so anyone buying there is buying into the same pool these purchases arrive in. How much escrow is committed, how much has been spent and what it bought are all readable on the launch account on chain.
Whatever the raise, and however many backers refund, both of these hold. They are checkable on chain rather than promised here:
Once the pool is open the token trades like any other SPL token. The swap box on a launch's page routes through Jupiter, and falls back to the launch's own pool while Jupiter has no route for it, which is usual in the first hours. You can trade it anywhere else that lists it; nothing about the token depends on this site after the window closes.
The plain version:
Every number above is on chain. A launch's page shows the mint address once the raise succeeds, the pool address, and how much escrow is funded, refunded and spent on the pool; any explorer will confirm them independently of us. The rules are enforced by the launch program: we cannot extend a window, move escrow, or unlock an allocation early, and neither can the developer. See Tokens for what the SDK exposes to a game's own code.