Introducing $GRADE

Tokenization of all financial assets is becoming increasingly more obvious in 2025 as the industry moves beyond achieving regulatory clarity. Permissionless infrastructure for consumer crypto is now cheap, fast, and scalable. Farcaster as a social protocol has established itself - both the primary social network of the crypto industry as well as the go-to-protocol for new products being built on top of the permissionless primitives of the 2020s internet.

These developments in the early 2020s have led to the Cambrian explosion of tokens being launched. It has now become as easy to launch a token as it was to launch a website in the 1990s. That technology boom led to thousands of tech startups – out of which over 90% collapsed within a year. Most companies that started in the dot com boom built nothing more than superficial promises or useless websites. A small minority of them though struck gold. These dozens of companies, led by dedicated and competent teams – came out with real products and real traction - and with compounding growth and monetization, they became the giants in the technology industry that we all know of today. This decade also made the venture capital model of equity investment go mainstream to meet the capital formation needs of a new business.

In the crypto boom of the 2020s, it feels eerily similar to the dot com boom as we see thousands of new tokens being launched every week. Amidst the unending noise of newly launched tokens with a flood of memecoin slop and rehashed hype however, there is still proverbial gold to be struck. I am referring to the legitimate projects of the onchain economy – the real startups with product-market-fit and a competent team – that are taking the route of launching a token for early capital formation to build and grow. There is something both novel and valuable about this recent trend that we should care about – the new companies being born in the onchain economy are using the tokenization infrastructure to pool attention and capital at the earliest stage of the company lifecycle.

For the founders of the tokenized startups, this trend has provided a real alternative to the VC model for attracting the initial capital to support the startup. For the early-stage startup investors, this has also opened up access to a sea of investment opportunities at the earliest stages of a promising startup. In the traditional VC fundraising model of the tech industry, these wealth generation opportunities to be an angel investor in an early-stage tech startup used to be accessible only to a small set of accredited investors. Tokenized startups are here and these tokens are on your trading app and your social wallets. So what now?

What is Tokengrade?

The biggest problem for token investors (and also for the tokenized startup founder) is the credibility gap. In the crypto industry, trust is more of a cherished ideal than an everyday reality. That means – scams of all kinds are rampant. Hype often wins the attention game and retail capital follows. Legitimate products (and their tokens) with real use-cases are either ignored or get anemic support from the token investors. This happens because of overwhelming noise and lack of credibility signals in the industry.

Unless they are an industry insider plugged in to all the token developments, token investors have to spend hours every week to research every project token they are interested in – to do the due diligence on the team, the product, the traction and the tokenomics. Most of the token investors though take the other easier approach – they just follow the hype and gamble or copy-trade other influential people in the ecosystem. This leads to a massive misallocation of early-stage capital - away from the selected legitimate project tokens. This, to me, feels like a major gap in the ecosystem to be filled. Tokengrade has the mission to be the legitimacy layer to fill this credibility gap. With our curated due diligence on project tokens, our 4-pillar standardized grading framework and a network of credible tokengraders from the ecosystem – we are offering a convenient way of assessing the legitimacy of tokenized startups that you might want to support.

Every time when you open up your favorite social wallet to trade a project token, this question pops up in your head: Is this token legit?

Tokengrade App will help you answer this question – confidently and conveniently. Tokengrade will help you avoid getting trapped in the grifts and build conviction to support the legitimate project tokens. As a research terminal for the tokens, Tokengrade will save you hours in doing your due diligence and you will get access to the human judgement of a network of credible graders who are experienced and grounded in the ethereum ecosystem and can confidently differentiate between what is a legitimate wealth generation opportunity and what is a hyped grift that will collapse in a few weeks. Today on October 4th 2025 – we are introducing the incentive alignment engine of that system — the $GRADE token — via a fair launch on Clanker.

The $GRADE Tokenomics

The Road Ahead

The $GRADE launch marks a critical milestone for us. Now, the focus turns to our future roadmap, in pursuit of reaching product-market-fit for Tokengrade.

• Onboarding the first 1000 subscribers
• Releasing the Tokengrade WebApp
• Developing and deploying the smart contract for rewards
• Growing our network of credible graders
• Pursuing integrations with trading apps, token launchpads & social wallets.