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Why ICMrun is open-sourcing alpha
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We’ve got a treat for you from The Drop newsletter today. Kate Irwin is popping round to give us the scoop on a Solana-focused startup incubator. Enjoy!
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Opening the ICM box
A Solana-focused startup incubator wants to help projects cut through the noise on Crypto Twitter and deploy tokens in a way that sets teams up for long-term success.
ICM.run is focused on Internet Capital Markets-related projects, which ICMrun’s founder, who goes by Mercy, sees as “an evolution of the ICO era.”
The incubator counts Pudgy Penguins CEO Luca Netz and others from the Meteorite Collective, Seedify, and ProtoKOLs among its list of 20 mentors.
ICM recently announced the first project it’s incubating is Zynga co-founder Justin Waldron’s Open Game Protocol (more on this tomorrow!).
“ICM is a normie-coded term for tokenized utility products onchain,” Mercy told me in an interview. “ICM’s just the evolution of the 2017 ICO era that got over-regulated in 2018. All the onchain capital moved to off-chain venture capital to create this kind of gray zone for projects to get tokenized.”
“That black box of off-chain capital [has] created a parasitic environment,” he added. “Most of these Web2-to-Web3 advisory firms are so parasitic.”
The incubator believes the crypto startup scene desperately needs an open-source approach where information is a public good. But strategies on how to launch a token are being withheld by gatekeepers who profit off selling that information.
Other teams may simply be going the launchpad route, releasing tokens via Pump or Believe, without having a clear gameplan.
From Blockworks Research: Very few new tokens released via launchpads pass the $1M MC mark each week, but Pumpfun sees the most
“Web2 teams are just succumbing to the Crypto Twitter gauntlet,” Mercy said. “Because they didn’t understand what was going on, or they didn’t have access to information, real-time information, they just succumb to the Crypto Twitter gauntlet, which is holder demands.”
ICMrun has been building out its own community of believers with a token and an NFT collection.
The ICM token has a market cap of roughly $18.5 million as of this morning, and its Milady-inspired NFT collection has a floor price of 3 SOL ($666 each).
ICM plans to have a DAO at its core. Projects accepted to the incubator have to commit 1-5% of their total token supply to the DAO’s treasury.
Ultimately, the goal is not to keep information siloed to those accepted by the incubator.
“Big crypto does not care about indie onchain,” Mercy said. “But I don't judge our incubator success by the market cap or projects we incubate. I judge our success by the projects we never interact with that get access to our research information, and are able to go to market better because of it.”
There has been a Cambrian explosion of Digital Asset Treasury companies.
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