From what I see, to develop a serious cryptocurrency project, you need a minimum capital of at least US$100,000. Now, let's be realistic: whether you're a company or have contacts with investors and are in the middle of this, how many hundreds of very interesting projects are there every month? Sure, some are just scams, but among those, how many are serious and could become an investment or add value to the ecosystem?
Only some projects were serious about creating something. The rest was just trying to be exist scam. Plenties of project raised 7 - 8 figs from CV, but they cease their operation due to the lack of operational budged, which i guess most of them are only scamming.
In 2017, I imagined it would be possible to do something like Bitcoin and that it could be done in the same way, but the reality is brutal. The truth is that there's no way to do something like that without a heavy investment, servers, nodes, a whole ecosystem that will initially require a lot of money. Nowadays, you need to list on well-known, reliable, and regulated exchanges, and for that you need to pay a fee that in some exchanges starts at US$10,000, plus liquidity fees.
I had a lot of prejudice against pre-ICOs, or pre-mined coins, but if you don't have the capital to seriously move a project forward, what do you do? What are the options?
If you don't have capital, then appli for a mentor ship from exchange sites program. Binance has been binance academy, which let a project with limited fund to get mentorship and funding by them. So it offers an opportunity for a project with good innovation, but lack of infra.
Wait for the community, where there are all sorts of people whose intentions you don't know? Hope for good faith? There are many who sabotage projects, make false accusations, and use that to copy projects; I've seen this happen dozens of times.
Would the best way be to raise investment? Sell pre-mined coins? Pre-ICO? What would your idea be? Are there more viable solutions?
If you have a solid one, then start to send an application to VC. You can also try to tell your intention to do launchpad on exchange site, it will help you to raise fund.