
Jack Niewold 🫡|May 15, 2025 20:28
Internet Capital Markets will be bigger than DeFi, NFTs, memecoins, or even Web3.
Each crypto adoption cycle has been driven by a new mental model that captured retail imagination:
• 2013: Digital Gold
• 2017: ICO Supercycle
• 2020–21: DeFi and NFTs
Each offered a clear, intuitive value proposition. Each minted a generation of believers.
The next iteration is Internet Capital Markets: crypto as a global, open-access investment layer, where individuals can fund, trade, and support early-stage ideas directly.
This is not a niche thesis. It was core to Solana’s founding vision of an open, decentralized NASDAQ: equity markets.
Now it's being reactivated by founders like @nikitabier and @pasternak not for short-term gain, but to experiment with a financial architecture that bypasses traditional gatekeepers.
Why now?
• Retail has been locked out of meaningful upside: AI, biotech, and infrastructure companies are raising billions privately and remain entirely inaccessible to the public.
• Gmaestop revealed just how little power retail actually holds in traditional markets.
• Founders are increasingly rejecting VC — not because capital is scarce, but because the cost of alignment is too high.
This new model, the spark lit by projects like Launchcoin, offers something novel. A new DeFi primitive: LP-fee-based funding. No equity dilution. No cap tables.
Projects fund themselves via usage, not speculation. Holders are participants, not exit liquidity.
It is not a coincidence that right now Solana chooses to go to war over tokenized equity.
The best teams are choosing this path not because they have to, but because it's better. I think that we will likely see the first fair-launched, fee-funded unicorn within the next 30–60 days. Infrastructure players would be wise to adapt.
Crypto’s core promise has always been disintermediation and democratization. Internet Capital Markets bring that promise to investing itself.
The narrative is here. The primitives are here. Fade at your own peril.
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