Picture a token sale opening at noon. Thousands of people are waiting, wallets funded, tabs refreshed. A few seconds later, the allocation is gone.
That model has long been part of crypt, and it has an obvious flaw: being genuinely interested in a project is not the same thing as being the fastest person (or bot) to buy.
First-come-first-served token sales turn access into a race. Automated systems can submit transactions almost instantly, experienced traders can optimize gas and execution, and large buyers can move aggressively before retail participants have even confirmed their transactions.
One way around that problem is to stop making speed part of the competition altogether.
That is the thinking behind oversubscription sales, where participants are given a fixed period to commit funds and allocations are calculated only after the window closes. Instead of asking who arrived first, the system asks how much total demand there was and divides the available tokens proportionally.
The public sale for $1WIN, the Solana-based token from 1win, is taking this approach.
Under the current structure, 130 million $1WIN is offered at $0.03 USDC per token. Participants will be able to deposit USDC into the sale pool during a two-week window, with a minimum contribution of $10 and no maximum. If demand exceeds the number of tokens available, buyers receive a proportional allocation and unused USDC is refunded.
If investors commit $20 million to a sale with only $10 million worth of tokens available, the sale is twice oversubscribed. A participant who deposited $1,000 would receive roughly $500 worth of tokens, with the balance returned. Someone entering on day one does not beat someone entering on day twelve because of speed.
Crypto has already tested this model at much larger scales. Binance’s Launchpad moved away from purely first-come-first-served sales and introduced subscription-based allocations calculated according to users’ share of the total amount committed. The extremes of demand became clear during STEPN’s GMT sale in 2022. Binance reported that 130,672 participants took part and committed enough BNB to oversubscribe the available allocation by 828 times, forcing tokens to be distributed proportionally rather than simply going to the first buyers through the gate.
CoinList has experimented with the same problem from another angle. Its “Filling from the Bottom” format was designed to prioritize broader participation by filling smaller allocations before larger ones, reflecting the same basic concern: token-sale mechanics can determine who actually gets access long before the market does.
For 1win, the sale structure also fits the broader way $1WIN is being distributed. Rather than building the token primarily around an investor allocation, 51% of its fixed one-billion-token supply is earmarked for user-facing mechanisms, including game reward pools, Wager Rewards and distribution through its Telegram Mini App.
The public sale adds another layer to that distribution strategy. The $10 minimum opens the door to smaller participants, while the two-week window means there is little reason to treat launch day like a high-frequency trading contest.
Oversubscription does not magically remove whales from the picture, however. A buyer committing $100,000 can still receive a larger allocation than someone committing $100. With no maximum contribution, capital still matters. What changes is the way that advantage is expressed because a large buyer cannot take the entire allocation simply by getting there before everybody else.
Every token-sale structure has a trade-off. Lotteries introduce randomness. Hard individual caps can encourage users to spread funds across multiple accounts. First-come-first-served systems reward execution speed. Pro-rata sales still favor those able to commit more money.
There may be no perfectly fair token sale. But there are ways to make one less dependent on bots, latency and who can click fastest. For retail participants, fairness means that not everyone receives the same amount, but that everyone is given the same window to participate.
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