Internet Capital Market ( ICM ): New Trend or Another Round of Speculation?

The Internet Capital Market ( ICM ) is a crypto-native alternative to traditional capital markets, allowing entrepreneurs to raise funds directly from online communities through tokenization, bypassing cumbersome procedures such as venture capital and IPOs. Platforms like Believe App have taken the lead in promoting this transformation on the Solana chain, enabling users to easily launch and invest in projects by simply @-mentioning the platform on social media.

Despite criticisms regarding regulatory shortcomings and low barriers to entry, ICM still has strong potential for mass adoption, especially in promoting Web3 to Web2 users through a streamlined user experience and fiat payments. To achieve long-term development, platforms like Believe need to move beyond short-term speculation, promote founder accountability mechanisms, optimize token economic models, build DAO governance, and realize genuine utility, thus transforming ICM from a speculative frenzy into a new paradigm of capital formation.

Background of Traditional Capital Market

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:

For the financing party, it is necessary to deal with lengthy application processes, complex legal procedures, and continuously cater to investor preferences, making it difficult to focus on product development or community building.

For investors, early investment opportunities are basically monopolized by large institutions, and ordinary investors can hardly participate, often waiting until the project valuation skyrockets before entering the market.

This model is inefficient and lacks openness, leading to a serious misalignment of incentives between creators and supporters. These structural issues reflect a pressing demand in the market for a more open, direct, and participatory form of financing, which is the core issue that ICM aims to address.

ICM Ecosystem Status

Currently, the leader of the ICM ecosystem is the Believe App on Solana. This platform allows founders to directly publish their tokens by @ mentioning an account on social media, attempting to disrupt the traditional venture capital model, providing a decentralized, community-driven alternative that empowers creators and entrepreneurs.

The development of Believe quickly gained attention after being shared by well-known founders. Subsequently, the tokens of multiple projects achieved success on Believe and reached a high market value, which pushed the overall market value of the platform to as high as 314 million dollars due to this viral spread and user growth.

Advantages of Believe

Compared to other similar platforms, Believe has significant advantages in the following areas:

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

2. User Experience: The issuance process of Believe is simpler and the interface is more intuitive. It has also developed a mobile application, allowing users to purchase token assets directly through wallets or credit cards.

3. Narrative and Vision: Believe emphasizes the importance of real ideas and project releases, supporting their development rather than merely speculating on memes with no actual value. This higher-level vision is more likely to resonate with the community and attract users seeking long-term value.

Challenges Faced by ICM

Although the ICM concept is attractive, there is a trade-off between efficiency and security. The main challenges include:

1. Founders are not required to commit liability: Unlike traditional markets, in ICM, founders have no delivery commitments or legal obligations, and there is a lack of safeguards to ensure the goals are met.

2. Abused Narrative: Many projects borrow the narrative of "supporting entrepreneurship" as a cover, while in essence, they are still creating meme hype. Some tokens that lack constructive significance receive more attention than projects that genuinely need financial support.

The Future Development of ICM

For long-term development, the ICM platform should consider:

1. Optimize the token economic model and establish a penalty mechanism to incentivize founders to continuously update the project.

2. Establish DAO mechanism to enhance transparency and accountability of the founding team.

3. Provide a simpler and more intuitive way of use to attract Web2 users.

4. Strengthen the platform's unique positioning to become a platform that drives project incubation and real value creation.

5. Build deeper practical value, such as promoting meaningful community governance, founder accountability systems, etc.

6. Integrate projects with real-world application scenarios to attract a broader mainstream user base.

If it can evolve in these directions, ICM is expected to shift from short-term speculation to a new capital formation paradigm, promoting the popularization and development of Web3.