Instamine

An instamine happens when an unusually large portion of a new cryptocurrency's coins is mined in the first hours or days after launch, typically by its developers or a few insiders who knew of the launch. It can be deliberate, for example by setting very low mining difficulty or very high block rewards at the start, or accidental, the result of a bug. Instamines are criticized because they hand much of the supply to a small group at almost no cost, letting them sway the price later. A frequently cited case is Dash, launched in 2014 under another name, in which a fault in its difficulty adjustment led to about 1.9 million coins being mined in roughly the first two days. An instamine is close in effect to a premine, in which coins are created before public launch, and contrasts with a "fair launch". Also see tokenomics.