Kingmakers and the Limits of Liquidity Attribution

Liquidity supplied to a token launch can be associated with its transition to a trading pool without establishing that the supplier caused the transition or benefited ordinary users. This revised observational study examines those distinctions in an existing archive of bonding curve launches. An event-time analysis removes a future-spending covariate from an earlier design and compares receipt of liquidity from a previously identified address group with no receipt yet. In the main four-parameter cohort, 216 matched pairs yield graduation rates of 11.57% and 6.94%, a difference of 4.63 percentage points with a retained connected-component bootstrap interval of -1.40 to 10.34 points. Restricting matches to the same launch day changes the difference to -1.50 points. Earlier-window analyses also vary with the matching specification, and pre-arrival diagnostics show selection in observed flow. A separate description of 153 graduated launches finds a first sale within five seconds of pool initialization in 150 cases, but the first seller belongs to neither the frozen liquidity-provider group nor the creator group. These results support investigation of launch-market structure while limiting causal and identity claims. Graduation is not a measure of financial inclusion or user welfare, and incomplete asset flows do not identify realized profit or victim losses. The release supplies aggregate outputs, de-identified matched outcomes and calculation checks. It is a revision of the Kingmakers research line, not an independent replication or a finding of unlawful conduct. Preparation of this report was assisted by Codex. The research programme is directed toward human agency, financial inclusion, and evidence-based accountability. Intended social benefits are distinguished from measured technical results in the manuscript. The manuscript and newly authored analysis are offered under CC BY 4.0. Any supplied source files retain the license terms stated in the supplement; the record license does not replace third-party source licenses.