LAUNCHCOIN broke through a market value of $200 million today, and the long-absent liquidity and such a high market value of "meme" almost brought half of the on-chain crypto circle CT into participation. The community is frantically discussing this token, with half FOMO and half FUD. This token, originally issued under the personal identity of Believe founder Ben Pasternak, has transformed into a new platform token after renaming.
From once being zeroed to a $200 million market value, what happened in between?
Pasternak's Confidence
On January 8, 2025, Ben Pasternak, a 25-year-old Australian young entrepreneur, posted a tweet on social media X saying "Buy me on Clout APP". At that time, not many people in the Crypto circle knew him. Two weeks later, on January 24, the token met the fundraising conditions on the Clout platform, becoming the first token launched on the platform and suddenly reaching an $80 million market value.
We then learned that Ben had developed the popular game 'Impossible Rush' at 15, founded the social platform Monkey at 17 with over 20 million users, and launched plant-based chicken nuggets NUGGS at 20, successfully entering the Walmart market. When he turned his attention to the crypto field, he introduced the "SocialFi" concept of Clout.
At that time, Clout's core concept was to convert "personal influence" into tradable digital assets. When a social media account's followers reach a certain threshold, the system automatically generates a corresponding token contract, making influence a quantifiable and tradable asset. Ben compared Clout to "Wall Street and Hollywood in the Web3 era".
As the first token on the Clout platform, $PASTERNAK broke through an $80 million market value within 5 hours of going online, largely due to investors with multiple influences and Solana community members, notably Imran Khan from AllianceDAO. Not only did AllianceDAO publicly support the project, but Imran's token also became the second token launched on the Clout platform. Referring to AllianceDAO's previous investment or support history of "dYdX, Pumpfun, etc.", the market was extremely FOMO about this.
Mobile App Front-end Crashes, Disappears
Unfortunately, the good times didn't last. Besides $PASTERNAK, the community's impression of the platform was that the possibility of making money was extremely low, and the market almost always suffered when participating in all celebrity tokens. The situation worsened when the mobile app was launched - the front-end crashed, and tokens that should have been launched externally were not launched at all. Internal participants were in an awkward situation where they couldn't trade or receive tokens.
$PASTERNAK created a trading volume of $250 million within 24 hours, but the token price began to decline the next day. Just a week later, its market value shrank to 1/30 of its peak. By March, it had fallen to an $18,000 market value, and everyone thought the platform would fall like many previous SocialFi platforms, a scenario the market had long been accustomed to.
Believe in the Power of Belief
On April 28, Clout announced renaming to Believe with the text "Believe in someone → Believe in something". The official deleted all previous tweets, representing a new beginning. The platform's concept shifted from a "Nasdaq of celebrity social traffic economy" to a "Silicon Valley tech independent investment Silicon land" value investment-driven approach.
The next day, $PASTERNAK was renamed $LAUNCHCOIN, matching Believe's launcher on X, which confirmed the community's speculation that PASTERNAK would become the official platform token.
Nikita Bier, a former Solana, xAI, and Coinbase product growth and advisor, extensively praised Believe, calling it a "killer viral spread APP" and listing a series of data to prove this point. Nikita, also a super entrepreneur whose previous products were acquired by social tech companies like Meta and Discord, made his words more convincing. Due to Nikita's community presence, the token's market value quickly rose from $1 million to $22 million within 24 hours.
In the following two weeks, new projects continued to appear on LaunchCoin without significant impact. However, around May 12, with entrepreneurs like $GOON, $BUDDY, $NOODLE appearing in the market and achieving good market values, market attention gradually returned. By the time of writing, the token's market value had exceeded $260 million. Thus, LaunchCoin completed its comeback.
Community Reaction
Well-known on-chain player James recently shared on social media X his experience of losing $340,000 on LaunchCoin, a sentiment shared by many players who participated in the Clout ecosystem. After being severely "hurt" last time, the distrust caused many to miss this genuine surge.
Trading is such an "anti-human" behavior. Famous "leader" Gake, better known as "DNF", demonstrated her trading philosophy on this token. According to on-chain data, after LaunchCoin's first heat dissipated, she chose to "buy the dips" $20,000 at a 70% drop from the high point of $25 million.
However, the price did not rebound as expected but continued to fall to an $280,000 market value. At this point, DNF chose to "buy the dips" again with $3,500. The price had dropped 90% from the last dip, and her position was only 17.5% of the previous one. She then sold out partially at 50%, 400%, and 800% price increases, reducing her position cost.
After that, she patiently waited for 2 months and sold in batches after Clout renamed to Believe. Currently, her address has only about 13% of the position left, with a total profit of $1.3 million. This may not be DNF's most profitable or highest multiple trade, but her approach to determining holding targets, when to hold long-term, and when to buy the dips is representative of what all traders need to consider.
This 100X retrospective of LaunchCoin is not a particularly "glorious" project but a hundred-fold coin with a dark history. However, it is a microcosm of the "zero-sum game" in tens of thousands of token trades. From "influence Clout" to "trust Believe", this represents Ben's transformation in understanding the first principles of currency after the last failure, and what is currently happening in the market.
Our market doesn't lack influence; it lacks trust.
