Would it be possible for a cryptocurrency to have a price before its first block? For example, the cryptocurrency Kin had a price in 2017 according to coinmarketcap.com, but according to its block explorer, its first block launched in 2019 (I got this by typing in &quot;2&quot; in the search bar. Since typing in &quot;1&quot; gave a timestamp in 1970, which is from the start of the Unix timestamp.).
Is the timestamp from the block explorer wrong? If that is not the case, how could such phenomena happen? (The price on coinmarketcap.com must be calculated from trading data (reference), which should be included in the blocks.)
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.