LaunchCoin 20x in One Day, How Did Believe Create a $200M Market Cap Gold Dog After Going to Zero? | 100x Retrospective

LAUNCHCOIN has today surpassed a $2 billion market cap, with the long-lost liquidity and such a high market cap of this "Memecoin" causing almost half of the on-chain crypto community CT to join in. The community is crazily discussing this token, with half being FOMO and half being FUD, this token, which was issued by Believe founder Ben Pasternak in his personal capacity, has transformed into a new platform coin after a renaming.

From nearly zero to a $2 billion market cap, what has happened in between?

The Rise of PASTERNAK

On January 8, 2025, Ben Pasternak, the 25-year-old Australian young entrepreneur, posted a tweet on the X social media platform, "Buy me on Clout APP," when not many people in the Crypto community knew him, and two weeks later, on January 24, the token met the fundraising conditions of the Clout platform, reaching 100%, becoming the first token launched by the platform, and skyrocketing to an $80 million market cap.

It was then that we learned Ben had developed the popular game "Impossible Rush" at the age of 15, founded the social platform Monkey at 17, with a user base exceeding 20 million, 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 Clout concept of "SocialFi."

At that time, the core concept of Clout was to transform "personal influence" into a tradable digital asset. When a social media account's follower count reached a certain threshold, the system would automatically generate a corresponding token contract, making influence a quantifiable and tradable asset. At that time, Ben likened Clout to the "Wall Street and Hollywood of the Web3 era."

As the first token of the Clout platform, $PASTERNAK's market cap surpassed $80 million within 5 hours of launch, with a significant portion of it coming from multiple influential investors and Solana community members, notably Imran Khan of AllianceDAO, not only openly supporting the project, Imran's token also became the second token launched by the Clout platform, referencing AllianceDAO's brilliant history of previous investments or support such as "dYdX, Pumpfun, etc.," causing extreme FOMO in the market.

Mobile App Frontend Crash and Disappearance

Unfortunately, the good times didn't last long. Apart from $PASTERNAK, the community's impression of the platform at the time was that the money-making potential was extremely low, with almost all celebrity tokens on the platform experiencing a "baptism by fire" during participation. To make matters worse, after the mobile app was launched, the frontend crashed, causing all tokens that were supposed to be listed on external exchanges to not be released, leaving internal participants in an awkward situation where they couldn't trade and didn't receive tokens.

Within 24 hours, $PASTERNAK had generated $250 million in trading volume. However, the token price started to decline on the second day, and just a week later, the market cap had plummeted to 1/30 of its peak. By March, it had dropped to a market cap of $180,000, and everyone believed that this platform would fall just like many SocialFi projects before it, a scenario the market had already become accustomed to.

The Power of Belief

On April 28, Clout announced a rebranding to Believe with the caption "Believe in someone → Believe in something." The official account deleted all previous tweets, symbolizing a new beginning. The platform's concept shifted from being a "Nasdaq of celebrity social" dominated by traffic economics to a "Silicon Valley tech independent investment Silicon Ground" driven by value investment.

On the following day, $PASTERNAK was also renamed to $LAUNCHCOIN, aligning with Believe's launcher on X, solidifying the community's speculation that PASTERNAK would become the platform's official coin.

Nikita Bier, former Product Growth at Solana, xAI, and Coinbase, praised Believe as a "killer viral APP" and provided a series of data points to support this claim. As a super entrepreneur, Nikita's past products have been acquired by social tech giants like Meta and Discord, adding credibility to his words. Due to Nikita's significant influence in the community, the token's market cap rose from $1 million to $22 million within 24 hours.

In the following two weeks, LaunchCoin saw the emergence of several new projects, but none had a significant impact. Around May 12, with the appearances of $GOON, $BUDDY, $NOODLE, and other entrepreneurs bringing products to the market and achieving decent market caps, the market's attention gradually returned. At the time of writing, the token's market cap had exceeded $260 million. Since then, LaunchCoin has completed its own comeback.

Community Response

Renowned on-chain player James recently shared his experience of losing $340,000 in LaunchCoin on social media platform X, a sentiment believed to resonate with many players who participated in this ecosystem during the Clout era. The distrust stemming from the last major "injury" caused many to miss out on this genuine surge.

Trading is such a "counter-human" behavior, with the infamous "front-runner" Gake, more commonly known by her other name "DNF," showcasing her trading philosophy on the token. From on-chain data, it is seen that after the initial hype of LaunchCoin faded, she chose to "buy the dip" at the $25 million market cap level, down 70% from its peak, with $20,000.

However, instead of the expected rebound, the price continued to drop to a $280,000 market cap, at which point DNF chose to "buy the dip" again at $3,500. With a 90% drop from the previous dip-buying price, the dip-buying position also shrunk to 17.5% of the initial, followed by three instances of profit-taking at 50%, 400%, and 800% price increases, lowering the cost basis of some positions.

What followed was two months of patient waiting, and after rebranding from Clout to Believe, DNF began "offloading" in batches. Currently, the address holds only about 13% of the position, with a total profit of up to $1.3 million. This wasn't DNF's most profitable or highest multiple battle, but it exemplifies key considerations for all traders: holding assets, knowing when to hodl, and when to buy the dip.

This 100X retrospective of LaunchCoin was not a very "glorious" project but a hundredfold coin with a dark past. However, it symbolizes a microcosm of the "zero-sum game" in countless token trades. From "Clout influence" to "Believe trust," this represents BEN's fundamental understanding of currency after the last failure and is happening in the market today.

Our market is not lacking in influence but in trust.