LAUNCHCOIN has today broken through a $200 million market cap. The long-awaited liquidity and such a high market cap for a "Memecoin" have almost drawn half of the on-chain crypto community into participation. The community is frantically discussing this token, with half driven by FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) and the other half by FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt). This token, originally issued under the personal identity of Believe founder Ben Pasternak as "PASTERNAK," has now transformed into a new platform coin after its rebranding.

What happened from near-zero to a $200 million market cap?

On January 8, 2025, 25-year-old Australian entrepreneur Ben Pasternak posted a tweet on social media X saying "Buy me on Clout APP." At that time, not many in the Crypto community knew him. However, two weeks later on January 24, the token met Clout's fundraising conditions at 100% and became the first token launched on the platform, surging to an $80 million market cap.

At that time, we learned that Ben had developed the popular game "Impossible Rush" at age 15, founded the social platform Monkey at age 17 with over 20 million users, and launched plant-based nuggets called NUGGS at age 20, successfully entering the Walmart market. When he turned his attention to the crypto space, he introduced Clout, a "SocialFi" concept.

At that time, Clout's core idea was to transform "personal influence" into tradable digital assets. 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. Ben likened Clout to "Wall Street and Hollywood of the Web3 era."

As the first token on Clout, $PASTERNAK's market cap broke $80 million within five hours of launch, largely due to support from influential investors and Solana community members, including AllianceDAO's Imran Khan. Not only did AllianceDAO publicly support the project, but Imran's token also became the second one launched on Clout. Given AllianceDAO's previous successful investments in projects like dYdX and Pumpfun, the market was extremely FOMO-driven.

Unfortunately, the good times didn't last. Besides the community's initial skepticism about the platform's profitability, the situation worsened when the mobile app's front end crashed. Tokens that were supposed to be launched on the external market failed to do so, and internal participants found themselves in an awkward situation where they couldn't trade or receive their tokens.

After creating a $250 million trading volume in just 24 hours, $PASTERNAK's price began to decline sharply the next day. Within a week, its market cap shrank to 1/30th of its peak. By March, it had dropped to an $180,000 market cap. Everyone thought the platform would fade away like many other SocialFi projects, and the market had grown accustomed to such outcomes.

On April 28, Clout announced it would be rebranded as Believe, with the caption "Believe in someone → Believe in something." The platform deleted all previous tweets, signaling a fresh start. The concept also shifted from a "Nasdaq for celebrity social media" dominated by traffic economics to a "Silicon Valley tech-independent investment hub" focused on value investing.

The next day, $PASTERNAK was renamed $LAUNCHCOIN, matching the name of Believe's launcher on X, confirming the community's speculation that PASTERNAK would become the official platform coin.

Nikita Bier, a former product growth and advisor at Solana, xAI, and Coinbase, highly praised Believe, calling it a "killer viral app." He cited a series of data to back up his claims. Nikita, who had previously created products acquired by Meta and Discord, added credibility to his words. Thanks to his influence in the community, the token's market cap soared from $1 million to $22 million within 24 hours.

Over the next two weeks, LaunchCoin continued to see new projects emerge but without significant impact. However, around May 12, with the appearance of projects like $GOON, $BUDDY, and $NOODLE, which achieved notable market caps, market attention gradually returned. As of this writing, the token's market cap has exceeded $260 million. Thus, LaunchCoin completed its remarkable comeback.

Famous on-chain player James recently shared on social media X that he lost $340,000 on LaunchCoin, a sentiment likely shared by many who participated in the ecosystem during the Clout era. After being severely "hurt" last time, distrust led many to miss out on the real surge.

Trading is often a "counterintuitive" act. The well-known trader Gake, better known as "DNF," demonstrated her trading philosophy on this token. Chain data shows that after the initial hype of LaunchCoin faded and the token fell 70% from its peak to a $25 million market cap, she chose to "bottom fish" at $20,000.

However, the price did not rebound as expected but continued to fall to a $280,000 market cap. At this point, DNF chose to "bottom fish" again at $3,500, a 90% drop from her last entry point, reducing her position size to 17.5% of the previous one. She then exited her position three times as the price rose by 50%, 400%, and 800%, respectively, to reduce the cost of her remaining position.

After that came two months of patient waiting. Following Clout's rebranding to Believe, she sold her holdings in batches. Now, the address retains only about 13% of its original position, with a total profit of $1.3 million. This was not DNF's most profitable or highest multiple campaign, but her judgment of when to hold, when to bottom fish, and when to exit is very representative and something all traders need to consider.

This 100X LaunchCoin is not a very "glorious" project but a once 100x token with a dark history. It is a microcosm of the "zero-sum game" of tens of thousands of token trades. From "influence Clout" to "trust Believe," this is Ben's transformation of understanding the first principles of money after the last failure and what is happening in the market now.

Our market is not short of influence but lacks trust.