According to Odaily Planet Daily, the TEA (TEA) protocol pre-sale has officially started on Coinlist and is open to Chinese users. The subscription will be open at 1:00 am on September 26, 2025 (Beijing time). The pre-sale will be up to 4 billion TEA (accounting for 4% of the total), and 100% will be unlocked at the TGE.

The project is dedicated to building a global open source incentive economy to help AI technology reshape the application development and security landscape. It is driven by Max Howell, founder of Homebrew (whose development tools are used by over 100 million developers worldwide), and Timothy Lewis, founder of Ikigai.

TEA performed well in the testnet stage: the Assam testnet generated 385 million wallet addresses, and then the Sepolia testnet attracted 177,000 wallets that completed KYC verification and 11 million total wallet addresses, and it is expected to have covered more than 1 million real users.

The platform has introduced an innovative commercial open source licensing mechanism to address the "value-looting crisis"—the situation where large cloud service providers profit from open source projects without providing any return to the community. Through the dynamic rating system, teaRank, developers will be incentivized based on project impact, while tamper-proof verification and GPG signing technologies ensure secure application distribution.

After the mainnet launch, TEA tokens will directly reward developers and provide multiple incentives such as staking, donations, and node participation. Node operators will receive a proportional share of transaction fees based on their contribution to software distribution.

"AI is accelerating app creation at a speed that traditional app store security mechanisms cannot match. TEA ensures that the open source ecosystem becomes a transparent, incentivized, and secure infrastructure in the new era," emphasized Tim Lewis, co-founder of TEA and CEO of pkgx.

The token distribution plan is: 28% for incentives/airdrops, 21.8% for ecosystem construction and governance, and 18.6% for protocol development.