Taste Test

Overview

Taste Test is a token launch platform that lets a new project and its community set a token's opening price together before trading begins. Anyone can deposit funds during an open event window, and the pooled deposits decide what the token is worth on day one. No auction, no insider pricing: the opening price forms in public.

Taste Test was built by Sundae Labs, the team behind the SundaeSwap decentralized exchange on Cardano, and runs what is called a Liquidity Bootstrapping Event, a structured deposit period that ends with the automatic creation of the token's first trading pool¹. Development was funded through Project Catalyst, Cardano's community-run grant program, and the platform completed its funding milestones with a pilot event run alongside the governance project Clarity²³.

Key Features

• Community-set opening price. During an event, the launching project locks its tokens into a smart contract while participants deposit ADA. The ratio between the two sides when the window closes becomes the token's first market price¹.
• Deposits, not bets. Nothing is swapped while an event runs. Participants can withdraw their full deposit at any point before the close, so the forming price reflects real demand rather than trapped speculation¹.
• Instant trading pool. When an event ends, all locked tokens and deposited ADA move directly into a new SundaeSwap liquidity pool, so the token starts trading with deep, community-owned liquidity instead of a thin market¹.
• No middleman holding funds. The Project Catalyst proposal behind the platform specifies a non-custodial design: no company or individual holds participant deposits, can cancel the pool creation, or can tilt the final price².
• Open-source contracts. The smart contracts that run each event are published in a public GitHub repository for anyone to inspect³.

What to Expect

For projects planning a token launch, Taste Test works as an alternative to launchpads that sell tokens at a fixed price. Instead of guessing a valuation, a team hands that question to the market: it commits a token allocation, opens an event, and lets deposits find the price. Sundae Labs' own market research into token launches (most surveyed buyers reported losing money to launch-day volatility, and deep liquidity ranked among their top concerns) describes the gap the model is built to close⁴.

For everyday users, joining an event feels closer to pledging than trading. You connect a Cardano wallet, deposit ADA, and receive receipt tokens that track your share. You can watch the implied price move as others join or leave, and withdraw at any time before the event closes¹. When the pool goes live, you claim liquidity pool tokens, a receipt for a slice of the new trading pair that holds both ADA and the launched token, rather than a simple balance of the new asset. Economically, it works out as if everyone bought in at the same shared price¹.