Pre-Mine

Pre-mining refers to creating several cryptocurrency tokens before the blockchain is released. Pre-mining became very popular during the Initial Coin Offering (ICO) craze, whereby many projects generated large blocks of coins and then sold them to the public. Pre-mining is a complicated and controversial topic. Some people feel that pre-mining many tokens and then distributing them to founders and developers is a fair way to compensate early adopters. Others think that the only 100% legitimate way to do a cryptocurrency project is to release the software wallet node software to the public and let them engage in Proof of Work (PoW) mining, whereby you can only win or earn coins that you mine.