Just as I thought it was ‘so over,’ I found in me a little bit of ‘we’re so back’ — A trench dweller who is probably liquidated.

Over the past few weeks, the markets have shown some real signs of life, led by our lord and saviour, BTC.

The second we see glimmers of hope, it’s time to crack open the monsters and bring out the adderall because new narratives emerge at the speed of light.

If you blink, you’ll miss it.

The talk of the crypto town today is ‘Internet Capital Markets’. I’ve seen my fair share of buzzwords over the years, but if there were ever a buzzword to truly get the vulture capitalists and the TradFi boys erect, it would be this one.

What is ‘Internet Capital Markets’?

The fancy way to explain it is that it’s the democratization of creating and managing capital markets on the Internet by using blockchains to cut out the middleman and go straight to the masses.

So what does this look like in practice?

Imagine you’re a dev who’s made a simple yet addictive computer game. Your game has a good amount of users and attention, which means you naturally want to keep improving it while also earning something from it.

Option 1: Go to the Silicon Valley VC tech bros drinking their soy milk matcha lattes. Sit through long negotiations where they either rip off your idea or buy up a significant amount of your company, such that you lose any meaningful say in the product's development.

Option 2: Go to X.com. Simply post “$APES + @launchcoin” for example, and there are applications that run on-chain, which will launch a coin for you with a pre-determined bonding curve and fee structure. Now you can skip over the middleman and get directly funded by the attention you generated.

Option 2 is Internet Capital Markets.

It’s like turning a traditional farmers’ market into a global digital bazaar.

Rather than having accepted vendors, in a physical marketplace, interacting with only licensed buyers to sell their goods, the Internet Capital Markets products allow anyone with access to the internet to get 24/7 access to the goods (tokens) that are being sold by companies that they like or believe in. Everyone has the same opportunity.

So, is Internet Capital Markets a Gift or Grift?

Well, this is crypto, so there is no straight answer, but as a concept, I’d lean more towards gift.

Why?

For starters, the idea of capital formation with such ease around an idea or a small business is something very powerful.

The number one killer of new companies is the cold start issue. The product and idea might be good, but there is simply no easy way for capital to form around it.

Opening up access to capital for anyone with an Internet connection is really powerful stuff.

Another reason it is a gift is for the users themselves. It is now trivially easy to back an idea/concept in its early stages if you believe in it. Simply purchase the token they’ve launched, and you’re a part of it. To an extent, it levels the playing field.

Furthermore, if we zoom out on crypto as an industry, it is a perfect segue for the industry to transition from the infrastructure phase into the application phase.

Think about how many disgruntled whizkids in the web2 world have had their ideas crushed, struggled to raise funds, or had their work stolen. There are probably tons of potential billion-dollar businesses that were crushed early purely due to unfortunate circumstances.

Now, by allowing instant access to capital at early stages, we will likely see a lot of mindshare migration to the crypto world, which can only be a good thing because at least a handful of these can become huge things.

But now the other side of the coin. It is crypto after all, so there is almost always an element of grift.

Firstly, the issue of greed. Yes, a few might be genuine and actually turn out to be honest successes. Still, I would bet good money that many of the launches will be opportunistic grifters trying to scam money out of a popular narrative.

Another issue is the products themselves. For example, it is very possible that the platform that makes it easy to launch the token could exit scam or create some sort of grift.

We have seen it numerous times from so-called ‘reputable players,’ so it’s important to keep your wits about you.

That said, let’s quickly examine some of the players at the forefront of this narrative.

What projects are building in the Internet Capital Markets space

Okay, so you understand the narrative. Now, what about the popular coins and players in this emerging sector?

Believe App

Led by Ben Pasternak, Believe App has been the leader in this narrative.

The Believe app allows anyone to post “$TICKER + @launchcoin” and the platform will automatically generate a coin for you. The coin will launch on Solana and will be available on all the popular Solana DEXes.

The coins all start on a bonding curve. Once it crosses $100k market cap, it graduates to Meteora to access deeper liquidity. To avoid snipers, fees for the early buys are extremely high and they eventually drop to 2% as trading stabilizes.

The fees generated are split 50/50, i.e., 50% goes to the coin's developer/founder, and the other 50% goes to Believe.

The Believe team tends to share certain projects on their social media and feature them on their phone applications' homepage if they deem them credible. So it’s a good idea to give the team a heads-up before going live.

Believe has a lifetime volume of $246 million, with 2,463 coin launches at the time of writing. The total market cap of the coins is roughly around $214 million, and roughly $2.03 million has been generated in fees. So yeah, it's still early.

Launchcoin

Launchcoin is the bot associated with the Believe app.

Users on X must tag Launchcoin to create their token. This is great because it maximizes visibility as part of the product. When a user creates a coin using Launchcoin and it does well, everyone else can see how easy it is to do and won’t hesitate to imitate.

It’s the simplest form of kickstarting a user flywheel to attract more people to the Believe App.

Dupe

Dupe is a great concept.

Have you ever looked at a sexy piece of furniture and thought, “That would fit perfectly in my house?” Then you look at the price tag, gasp, and forget that you ever saw it.

Well, with Dupe, you simply paste the URL of the product you’re looking for, and instantly, Dupe finds you a similar or identical product for significantly less.

Using the Believe app, Dupe launched the DUPE coin. It has a $57 million market cap and has registered $24 million in volume in 24 hours. The coin will be integrated into the platform, allowing users to get steeper discounts.

It’s a pretty neat concept.

Creator Buddy

Creator Buddy can be thought of as your personal AI marketing assistant. It is the culmination of 11 different AI tools, specifically catering to being your buddy to grow your account and engagement on X.

It allows you to ask the AI any questions about your own content. The AI already knows what content of yours does well, gives you ideas, creates posts, and is constantly up to date with the algorithm, so it will know if your post will do well and be blessed by the algorithm even before you post it.

Crater Buddy recently launched the token BUDDY through the Believe app and has already started working on integration with the product itself.

Noodle

Do you remember the popular computer game agar.io? The one where you slither around as a snake, eat small items to grow bigger, and ultimately kill other players in the same map to grow even bigger.

Well, Alex Leiman has brought this to the crypto world through a game called noodle.gg.

The game works the same way as most of you know it, but this time, it has the affiliated token NOODLE, which was launched through Believe.

You put up tokens to start the game and can pick them up in-game. If you kill another player and eat their remains, you take their tokens, so whoever lives the longest makes the most money.

Within two hours of launch, players had already won $30k through the platform. There is pretty cool stuff going on.

Concluding thoughts

This is just a quick rundown of what's happening in the space. The narrative is still very much in its infancy, and there is a lot of room for growth.

I expect a lot more cool stuff and a lot more grifts to come with it, so stay vigilant. But all in all, I’m looking forward to what comes out of this.

As always, we will do our best to keep our fingers on the pulse and keep you updated with all the latest developments.

Until then, happy trenching.