The tea (TEA) protocol presale has officially launched on Coinlist and is open to Chinese users. The subscription period begins at 1:00 AM (Beijing Time) on September 26, 2025. A maximum of 4 billion TEA (4% of the total supply) will be available for presale, with 100% unlocked at the TGE. The project is committed to building a global open-source incentive economy and leveraging AI technology to reshape the application development and security landscape. The project is co-led by Max Howell, founder of Homebrew (whose development tools are used by over 100 million developers worldwide), and Timothy Lewis, founder of Ikigai. TEA has demonstrated impressive performance during its testnet phase: the Assam testnet generated 385 million wallet addresses, and the Sepolia testnet subsequently attracted 177,000 KYC-verified wallets and 11 million total wallet addresses, reaching an estimated 1 million real users. The platform has innovatively introduced a commercial open source licensing mechanism to address the "value extraction crisis"—the situation in which 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. Tamper-proof verification and GPG signature technology will also ensure secure application distribution. After the mainnet launch, TEA tokens will be used to directly reward developers and offer multiple incentives, including 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 application creation at a pace unmatched by traditional app store security mechanisms. tea ensures that the open source ecosystem becomes a transparent, incentivized, and secure infrastructure for the new era," emphasized Tim Lewis, tea co-founder and pkgx CEO. The token distribution plan is: 28% for incentives/airdrops, 21.8% for ecosystem development and governance, and 18.6% for protocol development.