Launch-Day vs Revival Campaigns

The same machinery — a funded pool, tracked pools, a window, a payout rule — does two completely different jobs depending on when you run it. Run it on launch day and you are buying a tradeable chart inside a window of attention you already have. Run it six months later and you are trying to manufacture attention that is currently absent. Those are different problems, and copying the launch-day shape into a revival is the most common way a revival campaign fails.

What each one is actually buying

Launch day has attention and no depth. People are looking at the token; the order book is minutes old. The competition's job is to convert existing attention into two-sided flow fast enough that the chart is worth looking at — so that someone who arrives from a link finds a market rather than a flat line.

Revival has depth and no attention. The pools still exist, the holders still exist, and nobody is trading. The competition's job is to give a dormant community a reason to open the app again, and to give an outside trader a reason to look at a token they have already dismissed once.

Everything below follows from that asymmetry.

The structural differences

Duration

The wizard offers 3 days, 1 week, 2 weeks and a month. Launch day wants the short end: a compressed window makes the leaderboard tense and keeps the contest inside the attention it was funded to exploit. Nothing about a 30-day competition helps a token whose window closes in 72 hours.

Revival wants the long end for the opposite reason. Dormant holders do not check daily. A month-long window gives the campaign several chances to reach the same person, and gives someone who hears about it in week three a reason to still enter.

Note that duration also sets the raffle arithmetic. The reserve is draws × prize per draw, and draws are counted over the window, so lengthening a competition with a daily raffle attached multiplies the reserve. A 14-day comp with a 25-unit daily draw reserves 350 out of the pool; the main pool is what remains. The wizard shows the split as a bar and refuses a reserve that is not strictly smaller than the pool.

Payout shape

Launch day rewards concentration. Fixed rank tiers — top 3 at 50/30/20, or top 5 at 40/25/15/12/8 — create a visible podium and give a large trader a reason to size up. A podium is also a story, and on launch day the story is part of the product.

Revival rewards breadth. Pro rata splits the pool by each trader's share of counted volume, so it pays everyone who qualifies rather than three people. That matters when your goal is number of wallets that came back, not biggest single trader. It also fails more gracefully: with a small field, fixed tiers pay the same three cheques whether four wallets or four hundred entered, while pro rata concentrates automatically into whoever showed up.

The full comparison, including thresholds and top-percent buckets, is in choosing a payout structure for your campaign.

The daily cap

A per-trader, per-day cap on counted volume is the lever that decides whether size wins or consistency does. Volume above the cap is still tracked and displayed as raw volume; it just stops earning points.

One practical caveat before you plan around it: the cap is not a field in the self-serve launch wizard. The wizard never sends one, so a competition launched that way starts uncapped; the value lives on the campaign record and is set by Voltrade. Treat it as something to ask for when you brief the campaign, not a slider you will find on the create screen.

On launch day, a tight cap protects the campaign from a single wallet resolving the leaderboard in the first hour, which kills the contest for everyone else while the attention window is still open. In a revival, the cap can be looser — you generally want size to turn up, and a dormant token's risk is an empty leaderboard rather than a dominated one.

The raffle

An optional raffle draws a fixed prize among traders who cleared a minimum volume in that period, with one entry each and a uniform draw, so a small trader who clears the bar has the same odds as the leader.

On launch day this is a nice-to-have. In a revival it is close to load-bearing, because the failure mode of a long campaign is that everyone outside the top few stops trading in week two once the podium looks settled. A flat-odds daily draw gives the tail a reason that does not depend on their rank.

Sizing the pool

The pool minimum is $50 and the platform fee is 10% by default, quoted as one funding total — a $500 pool is a $550 transfer. Beyond that, no honest multiplier exists: the volume a pool induces depends on how interesting your token already is, and anyone quoting you a ratio is quoting someone else's campaign.

What is structural: the pool pays out regardless of turnout, and there is no pause button. That risk is larger in a revival, because a revival is a bet that latent interest exists. The mitigation is not a bigger pool — it is a longer window and a pro-rata split, which together let a small field still produce a defensible result instead of a screenshot of three wallets splitting real money for very little volume.

Two things that do not change

The tracked pool set is fixed at creation — with one exception. For a plain token competition, the pools resolved at creation are the pools scored for the campaign's whole life, so if a revival involves migrating liquidity to a new pool, migrate first and then launch: a pool deployed after the start is out of scope. The exception is the two launchpad tracks. For a pump.fun coin or a ranks.fun category, the Solana sync re-imports the source URL on every tick and rewrites the stored pool list whenever it has changed, so a pool the launchpad adds later is picked up without anyone touching the campaign.

Publish before you need the attention. A competition is invisible to traders until its funding transfer is verified, and it can be scheduled to start later. Launch day especially: fund and schedule ahead so the page exists when the announcement goes out, rather than racing a transfer confirmation.

Which one you are running

The test is one question: if you ran no campaign at all this week, would anyone be looking at this token? If yes, you are running launch-day and buying depth. If no, you are running a revival and buying attention — and the short, top-heavy, high-tension structure that suits launch day will produce a two-day spike and a return to zero.

For the launch-day case in full, read trading competitions as token launch marketing. For what to measure afterwards in either case, measuring campaign ROI covers the two numbers that survive contact with a retrospective.