Most token launches lean heavily on hype, with the story built first and the foundation coming later. Crafts takes a different route, grounding the raise in a real project and a clearer framework from the start. Instead of treating fundraising as a one-time event, it tries to keep the token tied to the business after launch. The price discovery, ownership, governance, and post-launch operations are all working as part of the same system.
Key Takeaways
- Crafts tries to make token fundraising feel like a real financing process, not just a fast launch.
- Instead of fixing the price upfront, it lets the market help discover the value through a sealed-bid auction.
- The Stakeholder Token Standard is meant to link investments to company potential while still keeping founders in control.
- Token holders get a narrower but more meaningful role, focused on major financial and governance decisions.
- The structure is designed to give founders cleaner cap tables and a more manageable fundraising setup.
- For backers, the appeal is clearer pricing, hidden bids, and less room for insider advantage.
What Crafts is building
Crypto fundraising still has a systemic flaw: teams usually decide the valuation first, and the market only gets a real say once the token starts trading. By then, the launch is already exposed to the usual problems - weak price discovery, poor alignment, and a community that quickly starts questioning whether the raise was priced fairly in the first place.
Crafts is built around a different model. It is a Solana-based platform for tokenized startups that combines sealed-bid auctions with the Stakeholder Token Standard, a legal and on-chain framework designed to connect tokens to real company upside through a DAO LLC and SAFE-style structure. Instead of treating the token as a marketing layer on top of a startup, Crafts tries to make the raise itself more structured, both in how the price is formed and in what token holders actually get after the sale.
In practice, that places Crafts somewhere between a launchpad, a fundraising platform, and a discovery layer for early-stage companies. Startups can tokenize 5–20% of the company, raise from a global pool of backers, and route that exposure through one legal counterparty rather than turning every token holder into a direct name on the cap table. That is an important distinction because it keeps the structure closer to how startups and investors already operate while still giving the on-chain crowd a clearer economic and governance role.
That is also what makes Crafts different from a typical token sale platform. The goal is not just to launch a token and rely on post-launch marketing. The mission is to build a raise where pricing, legal structure, governance, and post-launch rights are part of the same system from day one.
How Craft’s Auctions Work
The auction is the first place where the Crafts model starts to feel different from a standard token launch. Instead of announcing a fixed price and asking the market to accept it, the founder opens a raise process by setting the basic terms: how much equity is being offered, the valuation range, and a data room, which is a set of deal materials, financials, and background information that backers can review before placing a bid. From there, investors participate by submitting how much capital they want to commit and the highest valuation they are willing to accept.
Here is an example on screen, and you can try it in Crafts’ simulator.
The important part is that these bids remain private while the auction is live. All commitments are encrypted through Arcium’s MPC network, then recorded on-chain in a form that can be verified but not read by other bidders, the project team, or Crafts itself. Participants are not reacting to a visible order book or trying to position around whale behavior in real time.
Once the commit phase ends, the auction moves into clearing and settlement. The market-clearing price is calculated on-chain from the encrypted bids, and every winning bidder pays that same final price rather than the maximum number they personally submitted. If a bid lands below the clearing price, the backer is refunded in full, and if the raise fails to meet its minimum threshold, the auction is cancelled and all bids are returned.
The result is a process that rewards valuation judgment rather than speed or visibility while giving the market a direct role in setting price before trading begins. It does not remove risk or guarantee a perfect result, but it makes price discovery more transparent, which is exactly the part most crypto launches usually postpone until after trading begins.
What Is the Stakeholder Token Standard
The auction solves the pricing problem at the start. STS, short for Stakeholder Token Standard, is Crafts’ system for what happens after the raise.
The basic idea is simple, it lets startups partially tokenize company upside via a DAO LLC/SPV while keeping tokens freely tradable and founders in full operating control.
Crafts aims to balance a few things at once: giving holders a real claim on upside, preserving founder control, and making the legal structure easier to manage. In practice, that means a DAO LLC functions between the startup and the token holders, while smart contracts handle unlocks and funding rules.
That is also where the tokenomics live. Instead of relying on vague promises, STS uses transparent vaults, visible allocation buckets, and rules around unlocks and funding changes. The docs also say STS is not a security token standard, not a 1:1 equity wrapper, and not a promise of guaranteed payouts, dividends, or redemptions.
So the point of STS is not just to create a token. It is to connect pricing, company upside, governance, and post-raise rules into one framework that founders and backers can actually work with.
Crafts: Narrower Governance, Stronger Credibility
One of the mistakes many crypto products make is to confuse broad governance with meaningful governance. Crafts is trying to avoid that. The governance surface offered to token holders is narrower than the “community owns everything” rhetoric common in crypto, but it is much closer to the decisions that actually matter in a financial structure.
Token holders can vote on extra capital releases beyond the founder’s fixed monthly stream, on exit and distribution decisions, on secondary raises that would introduce dilution, on liquidation procedures if the project stops performing, and on specific governance parameters within defined bounds. At the same time, founders retain full control over execution. That is a more realistic split than a tokenized community attempting to govern a startup like an open-source protocol.
The safeguards also show that the company is thinking about governance as something that has to survive stress, not just marketing. There is no liquidation in the first four months. Major actions require a 66% supermajority. Liquidation itself includes a 30-day cure period before treasury can be returned to holders pro rata. Those details matter because they slow down panic and reduce the risk that governance turns into mob action in the first bad month of product development.
There is also a DAO Operator in the structure, which acts on behalf of token holders and carries proposal outcomes into the real world. That is important because on-chain voting alone does not move legal instruments; someone still has to sign documents, execute conversions, and make the decision legally effective. Crafts is explicit that this bridge exists and has to be formalized.
Crafts For Founders
For founders, the main appeal is access to capital without giving up operational control. Product, hiring, partnerships, technology, and day-to-day spending remain with the company, while the DAO LLC stands as a single counterparty that can function much like a standard SAFE holder in later rounds.
The setup is also positioned as a guided fundraising system rather than a one-off token launch. Founders move through a structured process that starts with a fit check, then moves into raise design, legal setup, tokenomics, contract deployment, launch, and post-launch operations, with the goal of making a fairly complex system feel operationally manageable.
That matters because much of the heavy lifting is pushed into platform infrastructure. The documentation describes legal rails, vault configuration, allocation logic, settlement rules, disclosures, and launch monitoring as part of the standard flow, so founders are not left stitching together entities, contracts, and token mechanics on their own.
There is also a more strategic benefit in how the raise is priced. Instead of fixing a valuation in advance and then defending it in public, the mechanism is built around market-driven price discovery, with commitments submitted across price levels and a clearing price set at settlement. In oversubscribed raises, allocation can also favor participants with stronger reputations, usage, or longer-term alignment, which gives the launch a more curated feel than a simple first-come sale.
Post-launch, the model is meant to reduce the usual drift from building into token management. Founders keep running the company day to day, while governance only comes in for major decisions like changing the monthly allowance, approving major legal changes or new financings, authorizing extra capital, or managing liquidity events.
The founder pitch, then, is not just “raise money with a token.” It is to raise globally, keep the cap table cleaner, preserve operating control, and plug fundraising into a project that continues working after launch through enforced tokenomics, transparent treasury flows, and the option to unlock more funding as the project proves progress.
Crafts For Backers
For backers, the attractiveness is a cleaner way to enter early without relying on insider pricing. The auction sets one clearing price for everyone, so participants are not chasing a launch number chosen behind closed doors or depending on insider allocation.
What they receive is not just a tradeable token but exposure linked to a legal claim on company upside. That makes the position closer to a backed stake than a purely speculative community asset, while still keeping it liquid and on-chain.
The entry process is also built to be harder to game. Commitments stay hidden until the reveal phase, bids that do not clear are fully refunded, and oversubscription is handled through allocation rules rather than speed or closeness to the team. That makes the raise feel more open than the usual token launch.
Backers are not just buying into a one-time sale. The token gives them a real way to stay aligned with the company’s growth, from funding more progress to sharing in future upside, so their position keeps meaning after launch.
Traction and Early Evidence
It is one thing to talk about fixing crypto fundraising on paper, but it is another to actually prove that the model works in practice. Crafts is starting to do that, it has already launched its first live raise, giving a realistic look at how this approach performs in the real world.
The first company to test the model is ReFi Hub, an energy infrastructure project on Solana. ReFi Hub tokenizes active solar assets to generate USDC yield, and it came to the raise with a reported 14% realized return rate and a pipeline worth more than $49 million.
The early numbers also look promising. It has already drawn $115.5K in commitments from 94 participants, reaching 29% of its minimum target. That kind of response points to a more serious mindset from investors, not the usual short-term flip behavior. At the same time, Crafts seems to be building momentum beyond this one launch, with the waitlist growing and more companies moving toward onboarding.
By focusing on a fair and actual legal system instead of hype, Crafts is trying to build something that can last well beyond launch day, and that makes it worth watching.
The information provided by DAIC, including but not limited to research, analysis, data, or other content, is offered solely for informational purposes and does not constitute investment advice, financial advice, trading advice, or any other type of advice. DAIC does not recommend the purchase, sale, or holding of any cryptocurrency or other investment.
