Introduction

Today, we see many launchpads and consider them to be places where we can launch coins, discover new ones, and trade them to make or lose money. This is fun to do for a while, seeing the numbers in your wallet go up and down rapidly, making life-changing money or losing it all, emotions swinging left and right. While sitting hours on end behind your laptop in your bedroom, either feeling euphoric or down bad when the market isn’t moving in the way you wish for.

However, this world only exists for those who actively participate in crypto, since most people are not in a position to play with their money nor have the time to look at charts all day. For quite some time now, we’ve all been talking about attention (markets) but the average human has an actual life, meaning that as long as we optimize for speculation and attention, we also stray further away from new users and mainstream adoption while leading away our current users with intensified speculation and smaller gains.

Most launchpads that exist today ultimately mainly cater to traders, who generally also move to the places with the most attention or liquidity in order to get the highest possible gains. Yesterday it was friend.tech, today it’s pump.fun, and tomorrow we'll have believe.app.

Optimising for traders is fun but if we want to onboard the masses to crypto this isn’t the way.

Mindshare ≠ value

We need to think beyond launchpads, beyond speculating in a constant pvp environment. We need to bring internet native value in the hands of actual users by creating experiences that solve problems, innovate within the current landscape, and remain long-term viable. We won’t see some institutions or big web2 companies come in and do this for us, we need to create this new landscape ourselves with all kinds of new experiences with actual use cases enabled by this new tech.

Zora is one of those platforms going into the right direction, they recently introduced creator capital markets into their app, completely reshaping their previous experience. There were many mixed emotions towards this sudden shift by them but in the long-term we believe it’ll be a net-positive change. As they continue building more features, expect them to shift coins into a behavioural pattern rather than emphasizing speculation only as that would ultimately make the platform unusable since they’re positioning themselves as an onchain social network and not as a launchpad.

Similarly, we’re building locol, a communications environment to nurture your ideas into product. A place where we collaborate towards the future we want to exist, and allocate funds to those who are building this future. We’re planning to do this by creating an app that blurs the lines between the internal and external comms to provide an efficient experience for building (in public), allowing everyone to be a close spectator into the journey of product creation. While we create value here for teams and their users, we also allow them to quickly bootstrap a solid network of people and capital using productcoins.

Here too, we focus on solving problems and creating value rather than focusing only on speculation since attention is fleeting and trying to hold onto it is futile. 

Create for progress

Just like us, there are many amazing teams building great consumer products, and we urge you all to think beyond just launchpads and mere speculation. Instead create value that solves actual problems, that can be used daily by the average user, and to build for mainstream crypto adoption.

An entire internet with internet native value and actual people using it sounds a lot more fun than daytrading some slop that inevitably reduces to zero over time. This won’t happen overnight but if we create towards this direction, we’ll definitely see progress within our industry to a point where people will actually get value out of crypto that isn't just money, and i’m looking forward to see that happen soon!

With this piece and state of the market in mind we’re building locol and we hope for you to keep an eye out for us and to support us on our journey towards creating this vision.

Introduction

Today, we see many launchpads and consider them to be places where we can launch coins, discover new ones, and trade them to make or lose money. This is fun to do for a while, seeing the numbers in your wallet go up and down rapidly, making life-changing money or losing it all, emotions swinging left and right. While sitting hours on end behind your laptop in your bedroom, either feeling euphoric or down bad when the market isn’t moving in the way you wish for.

However, this world only exists for those who actively participate in crypto, since most people are not in a position to play with their money nor have the time to look at charts all day. For quite some time now, we’ve all been talking about attention (markets) but the average human has an actual life, meaning that as long as we optimize for speculation and attention, we also stray further away from new users and mainstream adoption while leading away our current users with intensified speculation and smaller gains.

Most launchpads that exist today ultimately mainly cater to traders, who generally also move to the places with the most attention or liquidity in order to get the highest possible gains. Yesterday it was friend.tech, today it’s pump.fun, and tomorrow we'll have believe.app.

Optimising for traders is fun but if we want to onboard the masses to crypto this isn’t the way.

Mindshare ≠ value

We need to think beyond launchpads, beyond speculating in a constant pvp environment. We need to bring internet native value in the hands of actual users by creating experiences that solve problems, innovate within the current landscape, and remain long-term viable. We won’t see some institutions or big web2 companies come in and do this for us, we need to create this new landscape ourselves with all kinds of new experiences with actual use cases enabled by this new tech.

Zora is one of those platforms going into the right direction, they recently introduced creator capital markets into their app, completely reshaping their previous experience. There were many mixed emotions towards this sudden shift by them but in the long-term we believe it’ll be a net-positive change. As they continue building more features, expect them to shift coins into a behavioural pattern rather than emphasizing speculation only as that would ultimately make the platform unusable since they’re positioning themselves as an onchain social network and not as a launchpad.

Similarly, we’re building locol, a communications environment to nurture your ideas into product. A place where we collaborate towards the future we want to exist, and allocate funds to those who are building this future. We’re planning to do this by creating an app that blurs the lines between the internal and external comms to provide an efficient experience for building (in public), allowing everyone to be a close spectator into the journey of product creation. While we create value here for teams and their users, we also allow them to quickly bootstrap a solid network of people and capital using productcoins.

Here too, we focus on solving problems and creating value rather than focusing only on speculation since attention is fleeting and trying to hold onto it is futile. 

Create for progress

Just like us, there are many amazing teams building great consumer products, and we urge you all to think beyond just launchpads and mere speculation. Instead create value that solves actual problems, that can be used daily by the average user, and to build for mainstream crypto adoption.

An entire internet with internet native value and actual people using it sounds a lot more fun than daytrading some slop that inevitably reduces to zero over time. This won’t happen overnight but if we create towards this direction, we’ll definitely see progress within our industry to a point where people will actually get value out of crypto that isn't just money, and i’m looking forward to see that happen soon!

With this piece and state of the market in mind we’re building locol and we hope for you to keep an eye out for us and to support us on our journey towards creating this vision.