What is Pre-Mine?

Pre-mining is a practice that creates a specific number of coins for a blockchain project before a public sale occurs, often awarding them to the developers and founders of the project. Pre-mining is similar to selling a stake in a company to existing founders and employees prior to the company going public. Without a pre-mine, a project's first coins usually go to investors who participate in the public Initial Coin Offering (ICO). Pre-mining has sometimes been criticized for allowing founding teams to have too much impact on the price of an asset prior to exchange listings and initial release.