Long before ‘ICM’ was coined into the crypto vocabulary and ‘the trenches’ were a place where real soldiers fought real battles, ICO’s were the bread and butter of token launches.
While Solana’s onchain economy is undoubtedly best known for its bonding curves, DeFi participants are evidently eager to experiment with alternative launch mechanics.
MetaDAO and Metaplex may have taken a commanding lead in the ICM sector, but the competition is catching up.
As it stands, Solana is arguably the world’s greatest free market. Anyone, anywhere in the world is capable of dreaming up an idea, or business, and bringing that vision to open and accessible markets. This is the ICM thesis in a nutshell.
Bonding curve based launchpads offer the most seamless path for business seeking to leverage ICM to expedite growth. Unfortunately, nefarious players have ruined that promise for everyone.
Rugs, farms, snipers, and cutthroat micro-market structures have inevitably resulted in a race to the bottom for everyone involved. Fatigued traders now turn to alternatives, with the likes of MetaDAO and Metaplex leading the charge.
Enthusiasm for MetaDAO’s ‘unruggable’, futarchy-governed ICOs reached a fever pitch during the $UMBRA ICO, which saw investors commit $154M to the sale. Umbra ultimately returned $151M to contributors, keeping $3M in funding after initially targeting a $750k raise.
MetaDAO’s recent successes have attracted the attention of some of crypto’s biggest VC players, with 6th Man Ventures purchasing $1.5M worth of $META tokens.
Meanwhile, fellow ICO providers Metaplex generated $95k in monthly revenue through Genesis, its proprietary launch stack.
Living up to its name as the DeFi superapp, Jupiter is expected to join the ICO boom in the near future. On October 2md, Jupiter announced yet another product for its expanding orbit. Jupiter DTF, or Decentralized Token Formation, promises to bring users “the best of the ICO meta, while protecting [them] from the worst”.
Perhaps the biggest differentiator between ICM launchpads like Metaplex and MetaDAO, and bonding curve-based platforms comes down to permissions. While pump.fun, and even fellow ICM-geared launchpads like Believe enable anyone to launch anything, Metaplex and MetaDAO strictly vet which tokens launch through their platform.
This poses a significant obstacle for would-be scammers and extractors, who would likely be rejected by their host’s criteria. While this helps to protect contributors from malicious behavior its hardly a premissionless system.
With ICO’s and other alternative launch mechanisms like capped vaults and dutch auctions gaining traction, its likely that Solana’s mass of launchpads are already scrambling to implement permissionless ICOs. This will invariably lead to a saturation of the meta, galvanizing trust in permissioned platforms like MetaDAO, Metaplex, and eventually, Jupiter DTF.
Competition flares among aggregators
