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After months of experimenting with its launchpad Genesis, Virtuals has rolled out Unicorn — a new mechanism that replaces presale pledging with immediate market access, seeking to address what the team views as Genesis's core flaw: it became a farming game rather than a conviction engine.
According to Virtuals, Genesis started with the right premise — fair access gated by contribution through a points system, a novel and refreshing mechanism amidst the deluge of generic launchpads coming to market at the time. But in practice, as Virtuals puts it, users rotated between launches, farming points to flip allocations in new tokens rather than backing projects long-term. Quality founders struggled to raise meaningful capital since the system lacked built-in fundraising beyond small trading fees.
Unicorn is their answer: a model designed to reward early conviction, fund serious builders, and make ownership meaningful again. Below, I'll walk through what changed, how the new system works, and whether it actually solves the problems it claims to address.
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