Hyperstition #12 — May 16, 2025
Anti-startup coins sweep Solana's trenches, Coinbase suffers breach, and more.
‘Internet Capital Markets’ meta spawns crop of pure memecoins
The strongest performers of Solana’s hottest meta are ironically tokens that intentionally contradict it.
From Launch Coin on Believe (LAUNCHCOIN) to Startup (STARTUP), the Internet Capital Markets (ICM) meta’s biggest runners are effectively pure memecoins.
Starting in May, the ICM narrative has captivated Solana’s trenches by reimagining memecoin launchpads as something akin to permissionless startup accelerators.
“Internet capital markets allows everyone to inject capital into apps and websites from Day 1, directly from the people who would eventually become your users,” hitesh.eth, founder of crypto market researcher DYOR, said in a May 12 X post.
The ICM posterchild
Believe.app has been the ICM posterchild. Launched on April 28, the crypto-native “Kickstarter for ideas and projects” has hosted coins worth approximately $300 million in aggregate, according to data from Believescreener.com.
But, on closer inspection, the storyline starts to unravel. More than two-thirds of that market cap figure — roughly $200 million — are attributable to one token: LAUNCHCOIN, the data shows.
And LAUNCHCOIN isn’t a startup token at all, at least not yet.
Created in late January, LAUNCHCOIN was originally dubbed PASTERNACK in reference to Believe’s founder, Ben Pasternak.
It was renamed LAUNCHCOIN in late April, shortly after Believe (formerly Clout) launched in its current form.
Despite being Believe’s mascot token, LAUNCHCOIN has no in-app utility — although that might change, according to Pasternak.
“It’s definitely possible that we integrate the coin into the app in the future — but we’re not going to force it,” Pasternak said in a May 3 X post.
“We’d rather wait for the right use case to emerge organically.”
The anti-startup coin
The irony of the leading ICM token being a de-facto memecoin has propagated a meta of its own.
Enter STARTUP.
It’s the anti-ICM coin, and — as of May 15 — STARTUP has bootstrapped a more than $20 million market cap and more than $30 million in trading volume in less than 48-hours, according to data from DexScreener.
As Him Gajria, a memecoin influencer and a STARTUP purveyor, puts it:
“It has its own TAM (∞), with its own team (not), with actual revenue (not), with a real product (the market cap). Execution risk was eating up PNLs — Startup fixes that.”
Now, a litany of apparent STARTUP derivatives dominates DexScreener’s trending token charts.
They include UNICORN (a “mythical” startup “wrapped in optimism, storytelling, and zero EBITDA”); LAUNCHPAD (hint: it’s not an actual token launchpad); and Useless Coin (USELESS), among others.
Flight to quality?
To be fair, plenty of *actual* startup tokens continue to top the charts, including YAPPER (the most popular deepfake platform) and DUPE (“the internet’s most goated shopping hack”), among others.
Believe seems aware of the risks posed by too many psuedo-startup coins launching too soon. It’s temporarily halted promoting new projects until the existing roster has time to take off.
“[W]e’re going to pause on featuring new projects for now to focus on supporting the ones already building,” Pasternak said in a May 14 X post.
“Our priority is making sure they have the tools and resources they need to succeed.”
In Other News…
Coinbase suffers insider breach, $20M extortion attempt
Coinbase disclosed Thursday that cybercriminals attempted to extort the company for $20 million by bribing overseas customer support contractors to leak user data. In a May 15 blog post, the crypto exchange said the attackers gained limited access to internal systems through a small group of compromised support agents. The breach affected account information for less than 1% of Coinbase’s monthly active users. No passwords, private keys, funds, or Coinbase Prime accounts were compromised, the company said. Coinbase did not pay the ransom.
