Internet Capital Market ICM: New Trend or Another Hype?

The Internet Capital Market ( ICM ) is a crypto-native alternative to the traditional Capital Market, allowing entrepreneurs to raise funds directly from the online community through tokenization, bypassing cumbersome procedures such as venture capital and IPOs. Platforms represented by Believe App are leading this transformation on the Solana blockchain, where users can easily issue and invest in projects by simply @-mentioning the platform on social media.

Despite criticisms of regulatory shortcomings and low barriers to entry, ICM still has strong potential for mass adoption, especially in promoting Web3 through a streamlined user experience, fiat payment gateways, and viral marketing. For long-term development, the ICM platform needs to promote founder accountability mechanisms, optimize the token economic model, build community governance, and achieve real utility, thereby transforming ICM from short-term speculation into a new paradigm of capital formation.

Limitations of Traditional Capital Markets

In traditional Capital Markets, entrepreneurs often rely on expensive and time-consuming financing methods, such as IPOs or venture capital. This path presents many challenges:

Entrepreneurs must deal with lengthy application processes and complex legal procedures, making it difficult to focus on product development or community building. Early investment opportunities are essentially monopolized by large institutions, making it difficult for ordinary investors to participate. This model is inefficient and lacks openness, leading to a serious misalignment of incentives between creators and supporters. These issues reflect the urgent need for more open, direct, and participatory financing methods in the market.

Definition and Characteristics of ICM

ICM is a new narrative in the cryptocurrency industry, allowing entrepreneurs to raise funds for their products directly through the internet, without going through the cumbersome processes of traditional Capital Market. Entrepreneurs only need to tokenize their ideas to gain support from investors.

Unlike traditional markets, in the ICM model, investors hold assets directly through self-custody wallets, fully mastering ownership and liquidity. This not only lowers the threshold for ordinary people to participate in investments but also allows project parties to more efficiently obtain startup capital.

ICM Ecological Status

Currently, the leader of the ICM ecosystem is the Believe App on Solana. This platform allows founders to issue tokens through social media @ accounts, attempting to disrupt traditional venture capital models and provide a decentralized, community-driven alternative.

Believe originates from the $Pasternak token issued by Web2 entrepreneur Ben Pasternak through the Clout platform in January. At the end of April, the platform was renamed Believe, shifting its focus from "individual" to "creativity and projects," and launched a new core token $launchcoin.

After being retweeted by well-known founders, Believe quickly gained attention. Multiple projects like $GOON and $NOODLE successfully launched and achieved high market valuations, temporarily pushing the platform's overall market value to $314 million.

Success Factors of Believe

Compared to the competing product Clanker, Believe has advantages in many aspects:

1. Ecological Impact: The activity level of the Solana chain far exceeds that of the Base chain, providing greater growth momentum for Believe.

2. User Experience: Believe operates more simply, has a more intuitive interface, supports fiat payments, and lowers the entry barrier to Web3.

3. Narrative and Vision: Believe emphasizes supporting the development of real projects rather than pure speculation, which is more likely to resonate.

Challenges Faced by ICM

Despite its appealing concept, ICM still faces numerous challenges:

1. Founder responsibility deficiency: low issuance threshold and lack of fulfillment guarantee mechanism.

2. Disconnection between tokens and projects: To avoid securities risk, tokens often become mere souvenirs, lacking real value.

3. Narrative is abused: Many projects package themselves as ICM, but in essence, they are still meaningless hype.

The Future Development Direction of ICM

For long-term healthy development, the ICM platform needs to:

1. Optimize the economic model and set up a penalty mechanism to incentivize founders to continue updating.

2. Establish DAO mechanisms to improve transparency and accountability.

3. Build a deeper practical value around "Internet Capital Market".

4. Promote meaningful community governance.

5. Integrate projects with real-world application scenarios to attract mainstream users.

If ICM can make breakthroughs in these areas, it is expected to transform from short-term speculation into an innovative platform that promotes the popularization of Web3, achieving long-term value.