How far ahead of a TGE should liquidity be sorted?

Before you list, not after. Your market maker needs the unlock schedule, a realistic view of day-one float and the price levels you care about, with the depth tested while you can still change it.

What is the most common launch-day mistake?

Going quiet. Teams pour everything into the build-up, then disappear the moment the token is live, which is exactly when people are watching most closely.

Can a token recover if the first few days go badly?

Sometimes, but it is much harder. The market settles on a story quickly, and changing that story later costs more time and money than getting the first 72 hours right would have.

Why most TGEs leak value in the first 72 hours

Most teams spend a year on the product and about three days on the launch. Then they are surprised by what the chart does by Friday. The first few days of a token's life decide how the market reads it, and for a lot of projects the value drains away in that window for reasons they could have sorted out beforehand.

I have taken tokens to market on both centralised and decentralised exchanges, and I have had to manage liquidity live while a project was dealing with a security incident. You see the same things go wrong over and over. It is rarely the product, and often not even the price. It is the order in which things happen. People treat the TGE as the day they have been working towards, when it is really the moment the clock starts on the hardest week they will have.

So here is where it tends to fall apart, and what I would do instead.

Nobody is buying when everyone is selling

Every launch has sellers on day one. Early contributors, airdrop wallets, people who were only ever in it for the listing. That is normal and you should expect it. The trouble starts when there is nothing on the other side. No market maker who has been properly briefed, no real depth in the book, no plan for liquidity beyond the fact that you are now listed.

The price gaps down on fairly modest volume. Then the people who were undecided see the candle, decide they have missed their window, and sell into the gap as well. By the time anyone reacts, the market has already settled on its story: the token dumped.

How to avoid it

Sort the liquidity out and test it before you list, not after. Your market maker should know the unlock schedule, roughly how much will be tradeable on day one, and the price levels you actually care about. Work out the likely selling in advance and make sure there is a real bid waiting for it.

Your incentives are paying people to leave

A lot of token designs reward the exact behaviour you are trying to avoid. Heavy early emissions. Unlocks bunched into the first few weeks. Farming programmes that exist to be dumped. You pull in liquidity that was never going to stick, it does what that kind of money always does, and the people left holding are the community you wanted to keep.

This is not an argument against incentives. Point them in the right direction. For every emission and every unlock, ask one question. Is this paying someone to stay, or paying them to go?

If the numbers only add up while the price is climbing, you have not designed a token. You have set a timer.

The silence after launch

This is the one nearly everyone gets wrong, and it costs almost nothing to fix. The team throws everything at the build-up. The announcements, the threads, the noise. Then the token goes live and they go quiet, usually because they are shattered, or relieved, or they have run out of the posts they wrote in advance.

The days right after launch are when people are watching you most closely. The price is moving, everyone is making up their mind, and silence looks either like you do not know what you are doing or like you have already checked out. Momentum after a TGE does not gently level off. It drops, and the drop is usually self-inflicted.

Plan the days after launch with the same care as the build-up. Decide what goes out in the first hour, that evening, the next day. Decide who is sitting in the community answering questions. And have something ready to say if the price goes against you, because it will, and "heads down building" is not going to cut it.

It is one job, not one day

All of this comes back to the same mistake. Treating the TGE as a single moment instead of a run of work with a before, a during, and an after that matters more than the launch itself. The teams whose tokens hold up are not luckier. They planned the weeks around the launch, not just the launch.

The 72-hour checklist

Liquidity arranged and tested before you list, with the market maker briefed on float and unlocks.
Day-one selling estimated, and a real bid ready to meet it.
Every emission and unlock checked. Does it reward holding or selling?
The first few days of comms written before launch, hour one to day three.
Something ready to say if the price drops.
One person owning the community in real time, rather than the whole team half-watching.

None of this is complicated. It is just work that has to happen before launch, when it is the least fun to do and the easiest to put off. That is why most teams skip it, and why the ones that do not tend to still have something worth talking about a month later.