Compiled by Waiwai Y.

Guest:

Ryan Connor, Head of Blockworks Research

Host:

Jack Kubinec

Podcast Source:

Lightspeed

Original Title:

The Solana Token Launchpad Coming for Venture Capital | Ryan Connor

Air Date: May 16, 2025

Highlights

This week we're joined by Ryan Connor to discuss the launch of the Believe app. We deep dive into is Believe a new model for VC, the memeification of capital markets, finding product market fit, Pump's sniping problem & more. Enjoy!

• Memecoins offer a similarly fast form of capital formation.

• Pump is extraordinarily successful. I'm a big fan, but some people won't participate because they can't play the trench game. I think that there is a sliver of the market that's looking for a more curated experience. So if you combine independent developers on the supply side plus a curated experience for users.

• Independent devs want to monetize equity or raise small amounts of capital, and there’s demand from retail investors for venture-like upside in small projects.

• We see it with deep in projects where you have to manage a business, you have to manage sales, you have to manage a dev team, marketing, and you have to manage a community. And the community might not be the most sophisticated group of investors or patient group of investors that you want.

• I think it's important to reason about who should be launching a token on a case by case basis. You'll obviously have to manage community expectations. And I think of ways to drive value to the token over time.

• Believe is very different in that these are actually scarce units of value. Cash flow stream is scarce.

• If you have free and open capital markets and someone launches a arbitrary unit of value for this, I think the market prices it pretty appropriately.

• I think today, because of the middle ground that we're, in terms of regulatory clarity, we see it on the horizon. Nothing's been passed yet. You need to remain compliant. You know launching a token will be beneficial for your product and the users and the owners of that token. You want to give it utility, but you can't.

• So what do you do? You wait until the moment that it's made legal? But the move and tech actually is to front run legal regulatory change.

• If you wait, someone else is gonna pick up that opportunity. If Believe not gonna be the leader in this kind of Launchpad for independent devs. It's gonna be someone else.

• I think Pump clearly a fun game of chicken that's in achieved incredible PMF and people are gonna play that. And I think you could have a subset of people who want to play the growth hacking startup game where you're investing in hyper micro cap tokens that like have a real future. There's obviously gonna be some overlap between the two markets cuz just at the end of the day, a lot of people in crypto just want the 10 x or 1000 x.

• I think the game on Believe could run dry. Like the timing could be poor. If it fizzles because there's just not enough people, there's not enough capital, perhaps there's not enough ideas.

• I don't think novelty matters at all. Pump.fun did nothing new. They observed high latent demand over ten years in crypto for launching arbitrary assets, giving them funny names, trading them, and hoping for the next thousand X. They bundled these popular features into a product, minimized friction, and it became its own thing.

• Consumer crypto is here, objectively, for anyone willing to see it. It’s highly financial. It’s not decentralized Instagram or decentralized Twitter. It’s fun, gambling-adjacent consumer apps with unique unlocks. It’s here, and it’s going to be super exciting as regulatory clarity improves.

Solana’s Latest Launchpad

Jack:

Today we want to talk about Believe, which is a new Salana app. It's a new kind of meme coin launchpad that gives you pseudo equity and startups.

I tweeted this morning that of the top 25 new Salana token launches this week, 14 of those 25 came from believe. Only seven of them came from Pump.fun, which is a big anomaly if you look at the past year of memecoin trading, which is one of the biggest uses of the Solana blockchain currently and for the past several months believe is seen $724 million in 24 hour trading volume according to Believe Screener, which is a tracker someone made that's been going around.

Ben Pasternak has already founded an alternative food startup that had fake chicken nuggets called nuggs, which I think is awesome. And now he's doing this.

Believe is a memecoin launchpad. There are many memecoin launchpads. So why is this one special?

Ryan:

I think that's a question worth asking. It's very easy to say that a startup is going to fail. And I always have to constantly remind myself of that. So it's helpful to separate the bad ideas that are just never going to work from the things that if you squint and if they execute the go to market correctly, and they do the right marketing, get the right viral loop going that the thing, yeah, you can actually see the thing having legs.

I firmly believe that Believe is in the latter category. I do envision a world where this could work out.

The reason why it's like just another or not just another memecoin launchpad is I think kind of two reasons. The first is that there is a clear distinction in terms of the go to market strategy here that makes a lot of sense. And the go to market is to target a supply side that is essentially indie app builders and growth hackers who historically either undermonetize or can't monetize. And to be able to do that via tokens is a interesting unlock for that group of builders.

The second reason is that there's a curation level on top. So if you look at the problems with Launchpad platforms in the past, I'd say a common gripe against launchpads is that the curation level or the curation layer is absent.

Pump is extraordinarily successful. I think it's going to continue to be successful. I'm a big fan, but some people won't participate because they can't play the trench game. And I think that there is a sliver of the market that's looking for a more curated experience. So if you combine independent developers on the supply side plus a curated experience for users.

A New Model For Venture Capital?

Jack:

Just quickly give an overview. The way that Believe works is anybody can launch a token with it. If you tag at launch a coin or something like that, and then put it like the ticker and the name of the token.

So anybody can, but the curation that Ryan is speaking about is that the Believe team will kind of filter through all the tokens that are launched and ones that are attached to interesting startup or app ideas will feature on the Believe app.

I think they’re really trying to scale back on some of the equity-like language that could get them into legal issues. I think the big question then is why should venture-like projects be funded with memecoins?

Ryan:

That’s actually the interesting part. The supply side here cannot get venture funding, and venture is not interested in this cohort. Empirically, you see these independent app devs being targeted by Believe to launch their tokens there. They’re launching these tokens alongside an independent app project.

independent app devs are people who don’t work for a company or have a side project, launching anywhere from a handful to a couple dozen apps per year to generate income for themselves or potentially get a high-value exit. Data shows that most independent app devs make less than $1,000 per app. The top decile earners make somewhere between $150,000 to $180,000 per app, and the top percentile can reach $7 million in revenue. However, less than 1% of the apps they make can achieve venture-like outcomes. These devs don’t raise money or spend on marketing; instead, they rely on viral and targeted marketing to make their apps go viral and generate income. The only way they can monetize is through the free cash flow of that project, with no ability to monetize equity or raise venture capital.

This creates an underserved segment in capital markets. There’s latent demand on both sides: independent devs want to monetize equity or raise small amounts of capital, and there’s demand from retail investors for venture-like upside in small projects. This demand was evident during COVID trading and in crypto markets. The strong demand on both sides is what makes this exciting.

Jack:

I would underscore your earlier point that it’s easy to be a pessimist. It’s hard to be an optimist in some cases. I have many qualms about Believe. It’s easier to be skeptical because you’ll be right most of the time, but where’s the fun in that?

My version of squinting at this thing is that it’s capital formation in the vibe coding era. It used to be that you have an app idea, raise funds, spend months coding, create a working app, and bring it to market. Now, with improved tools, you can create an app in minutes.

Memecoins offer a similarly fast form of capital formation. A founder can vibe code an app or idea, launch a coin on Believe, and test market resonance. If the memecoin trades well, they can create the app and bring it to market. If not, they can pivot attention elsewhere. Memecoins and vibe coding are faster at pricing ideas than traditional methods.

There was a weird situation last week where Jeffy faked his own death to try to kind of escape that world he'd been in. My guess is like once you're involved with these meme coin people as you're capital backers, like it's they have really crazy demands and it can probably be like not the types of people you want investing in you. So I wonder if the juice is worth the squeeze, even though there is something interesting there.

Ryan:

There's something to be said about the complexities that come with issuing a token. We see it with deep in projects where you have to manage a business, you have to manage sales, you have to manage a dev team, marketing, and you have to manage a community. And the community might not be the most sophisticated group of investors or patient group of investors that you want.

There's also like some negative signal. Like if the token goes down in your public, or sorry, if the stock goes down, your public company, you know, people will write, like people could safely assume that the market is pricing and something bad for your company. Not necessarily the case with crypto. There's a lot of leverage. Prices move in very unpredictable ways. So yeah, you're adding, you're potentially adding a lot of baggage there.

I think it's important to reason about who should be launching a token on a case by case basis. You'll obviously have to manage community expectations. And I think of ways to drive value to the token over time.

That's kind of the confusing part right now. Docs on believe are scarce. It's obviously in early stages. It's only been around for a few months. And in the current iteration, essentially just a few days, a few weeks, what's this platform going to evolve into overtime? Will issuance or token allocation for the issuing team be standardized? Will vesting be standardized? These are some things where like I've seen public comms from the team on X talk about implementing them, like their heads in the right place.

There needs to be some standardization around issuance. But I think that like one of the cool things about the curation on the on from the believe team is like they kind of give you best practices as a token issuer and what to expect, which no platform has done today. So they're clearly thinking very carefully about this because remember, their customers are the, on the supply side, our web 2. These guys are unfamiliar with crypto and there's gonna be a handholding and education process that they need, that believe needs to go through.

The Memeification Of Capital Markets

Jack:

JellyJelly spiked overnight, and then has gone down a lot. Interestingly, I was looking at it this morning, it is far from its high still, but it's been like spiking in recent days as the believe app is taken off. And partially, I think cuz it was of outsized importance, but it wasn't actually very liquid and like no one wanted to really trade it. So I wonder if that like all PR is good PR when you're doing this memecoin thing, or if that's like gonna actually have negative business outcomes for that guy once he brings the video app to market.

Ryan:

I don't know too much about the JellyJelly situation. I do think that there's this obvious problem which is getting ironed out over time, and you're seeing it normalize where crypto capital markets are very adjacent to memecoin markets, which are a game of chicken and market manipulation and games and retail behavior. So I think weird things are going to happen. And you kind of see it in CEX listings where they list a token, where they list. I forget what it was like when Bonk got listed on Coinbase. It traded at like 50 cents for a moment or something ridiculous. It wasn't that egregious.

But wild price swings because the participants in the market are buying first and asking questions later. And you're seeing that normalize, right? You're seeing fewer moves that look like JellyJelly. You're seeing fewer L1 tokens that trade at these insane premiums, the inability or the ability of people to just spin up in L2 and get multi billion dollar valuations is increasingly, is becoming less common. So the market's gonna normalize, it's not going to normalize tomorrow. And that's gonna make for like a lot of good content and, you know, people on X to complain, but like the reality is like it's going in the right direction.

Does The Zora Model Make Sense?

Jack:

One question for you, Ryan. You went on the podcast circuit and critique Zora. For Zora repackage, and you kind of made the case that content is worth zero. And so there's no point in coining things on Zora. Most startups arguably, or most ideas, I guess you could say, are also arguably worth zero. So why is it the case that you're bullish on Believe but bearish on Zora?

Ryan:

So the bearishness on Zora is that content is hyper abundant. It's non-scarce, so that the value should not be with the content creator, but with the aggregator for curation.

The more important point about Zora was that it was a token launchpad. And in order to appease like ETH natives who are more focused on like Big Tech versus little tech fight and creator monetization to like appease that cohort of people. They removed all the useful features for a launchpad. A launchpad launch units of value, you can trade those units of value. You need a price chart and you need a grid view to assess the relative ROI of different tokens. And they remove those features. And then they instead put very visual features, which are not useful for assessing relative financial returns. So there was a mismatch between the feature set that you need for a launchpad and, you know, the features that you need for a launchpad were absent from Zora.

Believe is very different in that like these are actually scarce units of value. Cash flow stream is scarce. And again, if you squint and look into the future, you can imagine some sort of revenue share with token holders or rights to token holders. And. Most importantly, I can look at the price chart on the believe app and I can assess the relative financial characteristics of the tokens in the believe app. So it's a launchpad where the features for trading and assessing potential financial outcomes are there.

Zora can fix those things tomorrow if they want. They can actually be honest about the fact that they are a launchpad and they don't have to mask it in a new Instagram and creator monetization and they can write that . But so far I haven't seen them do.

Regulatory Arbitrage

Jack:

I will add. I think you and I have talked since the beginning of Pump.fun of curation for memecoins is really an opportunity. If you go on Pump, it is not a website I like to be on. It's gross. Most of the meme coins are just stupid. And so using the Believe app, it's like all of these are curated. You click on them, that it's like an interesting startup. I saw one that was like an AI bot that can access your social media history and I'm like upset that grok can't do that. Maybe there are privacy issues there.

I think from a thousand foot view, you're a founder with an idea, you are asking people or allowing people to invest in a memecoin related to your idea with the sense that you may build an app in the future or maybe you already have or something like this, but you're given no actual equity rights. What we know about memecoins is they always trend to zero. The point is when you enter an exit, they do have an anti sniping mechanism on believe. I would think that insiders would figure out ways to trade these things just cuz that's the gravity of the world. I went to Believes, creator docs or whatever, and I was like reading kind of their F&Qs and one of them said, quote out if you're not promise. This is written to founders who could list their tokens on Believe. It said, if you're not promising returns, ownership or financial rights, and the coin is clearly meant for fun. You're likely operating in a safe zone. So I think that's avoiding legal risk, but it's also like, man, like you're telling retail kind of to go invest in this thing, but not giving them returns, ownership or financial rights.

Presumably, the founder makes a bunch of money off this. Like, isn't that pretty unethical?

Ryan:

I think it's context specific. If you have free and open capital markets and someone launches a arbitrary unit of value for this, I think the market prices it pretty appropriately.

I think today, because of the middle ground that we're, in terms of regulatory clarity, we see it on the horizon. Nothing's been passed yet. There's been signaling from lawmakers and regulators and frankly, the president, but we don't have that regulatory clarity yet. It puts token issuers in this kind of like messy middle where you don't know what to do. You need to remain compliant. You know launching a token will be beneficial for your product and the users and the owners of that token. You want to give it utility, but you can't.

So what do you do? You wait until the moment that it's made legal? But the move and tech actually is to front run legal regulatory change. Imagine if Uber played by the rules or if Airbnb played made by the rules, those businesses do not exist. The point is to kind of front run them or make the make kind of like the regulatory regime come to you. Because if you wait, someone else is gonna pick up that opportunity. If Believe not gonna be the leader in this kind of Launchpad for independent devs. It's gonna be someone else.

So the app builders are like, they're gonna be behind if they wait. So I think it's very context specific. Obviously, on a case by case basis, you have to assess the opportunity. It's permissionless open market. But I see Believe with their curation tools on top. And I see regulatory clarity like in the not too distant future, and that's exciting to me. And I'm willing to give, you know, most of the issuers the benefit of doubt.

Jack:

It feels like you're taking the cost of that risk and offloading it to your users, essentially, where like you probably could add some kind of promise. For example, access to future equity for the people who hold your memecoin or something.

But like there might be a world in which you can still make that work. I think like Trump's memecoin has security like functions with how he's offering a dinner in exchange for like, or or for the top 220 holders or something like that. But it seems unlikely that Trump himself will face legal recrimination for this. So it's like you might be okay if you believe, but you're taking the legal risk and you're saying, well, we'll just let our users bear the cost of that in terms of they get a no actual rights or benefit from holding these tokens, but they're okay with it because as you mentioned there were some buyers like no matter how much you insist that this token is not gonna have value, people wanna trade it.

Ryan:

If you go to the Trump website, the Trump coin website, you'll see that they like say like this is, you know, this is purely a collectible. And I think they are like I'm not a legal expert, but like clearly, a lot of token issuers can get away with, like gated access to things. It looks like a membership card rather than a security card, something that you'll one day have the rights to cash flows for. I think there's probably a good line in the stand and you can defend yourself in the court of law.

Jack:

As I was playing around on Believe, there's like a new tab and a feature tab for believe projects. And as you mentioned, there's this curation around the memecoins that they will list, which is maybe a bit over something like Pump.fun for user experience. But if that's the case, your power users are going to run out of tokens to invest in. And while the vibe coding era does allow you to have many mini apps or projects more quickly. It is still more finite than uploading a JPEG and then launching a token. And that was the kind of thing that propelled Pump.fun.

So is there a ceiling on Believe? Are people gonna in 3 days be like, hey, there's no more fun ideas to invest in. I'm all done with, venture meme coining and I'm gonna go back to Pump.fun.

Ryan:

I think no. Each have their own niche. I think Pump clearly a fun game of chicken that's in achieved incredible PMF and people are gonna play that. And I think you could have a subset of people who want to play the growth hacking startup game where you're investing in hyper micro cap tokens that like have a real future. There's obviously gonna be some overlap between the two markets cuz just at the end of the day, a lot of people in crypto just want the 10 x or 1000 x.

I think these market caps should be small. A 20 million dollar outcome in a market cap terms, let's assume it's reasonably valued, is a fantastic outcome and a great evaluation to have a tokens.

Multi million dollar market caps in the hundreds of millions are far too high for this niche that Believe is targeting on the supply side. So any moderation lower in market cap for the current set of believe tokens, I think is healthy because that would be a realistic assessment of the financial outocme for the things that are launching on the curation layer of Believe today.

I think the game could run dry. Like the timing could be poor. If it fizzles because there's just not enough people, there's not enough capital, perhaps there's not enough ideas. I do welcome any moderation in the market caps that we're seeing coming out of Believe because of course, they're a little ahead of their skis. They need to moderate to small business levels.

Does Believe Have PMF?

Jack:

I think most social media apps have this concept of the infinite scroll, which is enabled by an algorithm where it'll just keep feeding you stuff forever and it literally never ends. But Believe is finite, it will end.

I do wonder if this becomes another thing that we talked about for a week and then never talked about again as maybe the case with Zora right now.

Ryan:

Believe is is not a social app. Iit's a financial app, io it doesn't need DAUs. I think ideally you're a weekly active or a monthly active user of Believe. You're not an everyday user of Believe. And if you're not targeting everyday users, you don't have to be infinite scroll. And I think that's why you don't see infinite scroll on a lot of financial apps because it's just like, you know, you shouldn't be investing every day. It doesn't make sense in in these hyper niche consumer markets. So I don't think that it needs it, it doesn't need that type of engagement.

Pump.fun’s Sniping Problem

Jack:

Believe have some kind of partnership with Meteora where the bonding curve that these believe tokens trade on have an anti bot mechanism where the fees are initially higher until it gets to a certain market cap and then the fees drop.

And this is meant to discourage I think, the worst thing about Pump.fun, which is that a majority of tokens are bought immediately after they're launched. Meaning that if you are just a user who's browsing the meme coins looking for 1,000 x, like chances are you're already late the moment the token launches. So if you could make it economically infeasible to flood the zone and snipe up all the supply would be a good thing. No one seems to be talking about it. Do you think users really care either way?

Ryan:

At such low market caps, users don’t care about fees. Speaking as a user and someone who’s observed a lot of memecoin behavior, the amounts people put into these things are small, and it’s a lot like sports gambling. At these ultra-low market caps, especially for Pump.fun projects, people expect a payoff similar to a multi-leg parlay. So paying fees is irrelevant; the people playing this game have money to lose.

That said, I think the mechanism is unique and exciting. You need some sort of Sybil resistance, and even more sniper resistance in Believe than in Pump.fun. Pump.fun still works with snipers, though that might be controversial. But for Believe, you don’t want a token that’s pseudo-equity or one-day equity to be sniped and distributed, which could lead to massive down candles—that would be bad.

Jack:

I agree that these things can and will still be sniped. Even if fees are higher, someone could set up a script to immediately buy when a Silicon Valley growth hacker launches a coin. Maybe it’s less random than Pump.fun, but it’s still possible.

If you know the creator being sniped is likely to end up on Believe and have good outcomes, it’s profitable even with higher fees. I don’t think sniping goes away entirely, but as you said, it’s nice to have mechanisms to mitigate it.

Ultimately, though, this stuff is good for Twitter engagement, but I’m not sure it changes user behavior much. Tokens are still heavily sniped or insider traded, which is discouraging for personal use. But the market just wants to find the next 1000x opportunity before everyone else.

So many of these tokens are, which is sad and discourages my own personal use of them. But I think about the market and just want to look for the next thousand x before everyone else has found it.

Ryan:

From a builder’s perspective, there are so many issues with all these apps, even the good ones. Bugs, unethical behavior, Sybil attacks—these are all major problems. But at the end of the day, one core feature matters. For Pump.fun, it’s the ability to participate in the game because it’s fun and financially attractive (or potentially financially attractive).

Builders want to solve these issues, and they’ll find ways to mitigate them over time. It’s going to be a cat-and-mouse game, but it won’t stop Pump.fun from being successful. Just like MEV doesn’t stop a chain from being successful or doesn’t stop NASDAQ from being successful. There are costs and benefits, and the benefits outweigh the costs.

Final Thoughts

Jack:

Believe reminds me of Kickstarter with meme coins. The idea of crowdfunding for people who wouldn't have venture-like outcomes or don't have access to other forms of fundraising already exists in Web2. Kickstarter is on Stellar now, so it actually isn't in Web3, which is a very random thing. To our earlier conversation about securities laws, Kickstarter promises you a T-shirt or a version of the board game that you're funding or whatever it is, and they seem to have done fine.

So what is meaningfully different about this thing, Kickstarter? And if Kickstarter did the security thing, why can't Believe?

Ryan:

I'm not familiar with the Kickstarter product enough. I would assume that there's some KYC and some accredited investor screening to participate in. I believe there's a carveout in the law where, if you're raising a low enough dollar value from a few enough investors, you don't have to go through that normal flow. But again, not a legal expert, but those may be the core differences.

I don't think novelty matters at all. Facebook got its name because it was a copycat of college Facebooks that showed incoming class members who they'd be in class with. Snapchat did a cool thing with the reels-like feature, and Instagram copied it, made it stories, and it became successful. Pump.fun did nothing new. They observed high latent demand over ten years in crypto for launching arbitrary assets, giving them funny names, trading them, and hoping for the next thousand X. They bundled these popular features into a product, minimized friction, and it became its own thing.

A lot of consumer apps are the same way. They observe demand for a service, package it better, market it better, create better viral feedback loops, and succeed. Believe is not novel, but the little things they do on the edges could take it from here to there.

Jack:

These past few days of Believe mania, has it changed the way you think about consumer crypto? Or is there a big takeaway you'd give the audience about consumer crypto?

Ryan:

Consumer crypto is here, objectively, for anyone willing to see it. It’s highly financial. It’s not decentralized Instagram or decentralized Twitter. It’s fun, gambling-adjacent consumer apps with unique unlocks. Pump.fun is the best example, having generated $700 million since launch. Founders are increasingly leaning into what consumer crypto is—highly financialized experiences. It’s here, and it’s going to be super exciting as regulatory clarity improves.