Seed round (crypto venture funding)

In crypto, seed rounds typically raise from a few hundred thousand to several million dollars from venture funds, angel investors and sometimes exchanges' investment arms. Deals can take the form of equity in the development company with attached token warrants, a SAFT promising tokens later, or straightforward token purchases with lock-ups. Pre-seed, seed, strategic and Series A rounds may all precede a token launch.

Seed prices matter to anyone who buys later. Tokenomics pages often show the price and allocation of each round, and the difference between the seed valuation and the listing FDV tells you how much profit early backers have on paper and how strong their incentive to sell at unlock may be.

Seed investors take the most risk, since many projects never launch a token or fail outright. For public buyers, the warning sign is a large seed allocation with short vesting, which can translate into heavy selling soon after the token generation event.