Would it be possible for a cryptocurrency to have a price before its first block?
It's actually pretty common for new cryptocurrencies to have a &quot;pre-mine&quot; meaning that some part of the future coin issuance is assigned to public keys in advance. Investors pay the development team before the miners start generating blocks at a fixed price (that is not determined by market forces) and provide a public key. Then when the genesis block is released, all these coins are finally &quot;real&quot;.
Ethereum was launched with such a premine. You can see all the coins generated in their genesis block that were paid for in advance.