premine

English

From pre- +‎ mine.

premine (third-person singular simple present premines, present participle premining, simple past and past participle premined)

(transitive) To mine (units of a cryptocurrency) in advance of that currency being made available to the public.
- 2014 June 13, Black Market Cryptocurrencies‎^[1]:
  "Premining" is where the currency creator mines a certain amount of coins for themselves before they release the currency for other miners.
- 2020 July 11, Camila Russo, “Sale of the Century: The Inside Story of Ethereum's 2014 Premine”, in CoinDesk‎^[2]:
  Ethereum and other projects that premine their coins are criticized because control of the cryptocurrency’s supply is potentially more centralized among “insiders” who participated in the presale and could manipulate the price or influence governance decisions. […] The sale documents said that once the Ethereum blockchain launched and the premined ether was issued, miners would generate new ether initially at an annual rate of 26% of the amount of ether issued in the crowdsale – the issuance rate isn’t fixed and is capped at 18 million ETH minted per year.

premine (plural premines)

An instance of premining.
- 2020 July 11, Camila Russo, “Sale of the Century: The Inside Story of Ethereum's 2014 Premine”, in CoinDesk‎^[3]:
  Podcast host and Bitcoin enthusiast Matt Odell brought up these criticisms in October 2018 and Vitalik responded on Twitter, “I personally am really proud to have helped set the precedent of small premines being legitimate. […]