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After the DeFi explosion in 2020, the NFT wave of 2021, and the AI Agent fever of 2024, the crypto market has continuously "changed its clothes" with new keywords. Entering 2025, the term Internet Capital Market – ICM appears densely on the Twitter timeline, trailing hundreds of new tokens born each day with just... a single tweet.
At first glance, ICM resembles a "Decentralized Wall Street" – where anyone can raise capital, invest, and trade financial assets 24/7 without banks, brokers, or "powerful" connections. But if you look closely, you'll find behind that glamorous picture are countless questions: is the technology truly breakthrough or just a new skin for memes? A game changer or a trick to suck liquidity at the end of the cycle?
The Thread Connecting ICO 2017 to ICM 2025
Crypto history is like a fast-forward machine for financial experiments.
ICO 2017: Ethereum opened the "on-chain crowdfunding" era, but high fees and processes still required developers to deploy contracts.
Launchpad 2019-2021: Binance, CoinList standardized token sales, but still strictly selected projects.
Pump.fun 2023: For the first time, anyone could create a memecoin on Solana using a no-code interface, laying the foundation for "launch-in-seconds".
Believe / LaunchCoin 2025: Ben Pasternak transformed one tweet into one token; low fees & high speed of Solana helped this idea explode, creating the Internet Capital Market concept – a decentralized "capital market" for all ideas, not just memecoins
If the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) represents the 20th century - standardized, strict, and closing at 4 pm - then ICM is like a global night market: lights on 24/7, stalls changing every hour, and almost instant order matching.
- Intermediaries are replaced by smart contracts; lengthy KYC/IPO gives way to anonymous wallet addresses.
- Brokerage fees drop from several percent to fractions of a million; share transfer time reduces from T+2 to a few seconds.
- Transparency through public on-chain data, but also making mistaken transactions irreversible.
ICM doesn't break the rules - it just compresses all Wall Street processes into "one click". And as barriers disappear, quantity of projects explodes, leading to extreme quality variations: among serious builders, countless "serial ruggers" wait to drain liquidity and vanish.
Numbers Tell Stories
In less than two months, LaunchCoin has "sponsored" over 3,200 tokens, pushing LAUNCH's market capitalization to over 200 million USD at times. Leading tokens like DUPE (price comparison app) surged above 50 million, and BUDDY (tweet AI assistant) around 15 million. Behind them, a forest of meme projects: $NOODLE, $GIGGLES, $FITCOIN… - where unique ideas can push market cap from 0 → 1 million USD in just a few hours.
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