From early beliefs to the full chain of capital formation: Four stages of the Internet Capital Market

The early forms of capital formation are undergoing a profound structural transformation. Internet Capital Markets (ICM) are redefining the way funds are gathered online, shifting capital formation from a traditional gatekeeping system to a more open, transparent, and global model. It constructs a new pathway from the germination of an idea to becoming a publicly listed company through four consecutive and interconnected levels: early formation, community issuance, market infrastructure, and real-world bridges. Bloom Protocol, The Meteorite Collective, and Meteora jointly present this research, hoping to systematically depict this rapidly maturing financial stack.

In this system, Bloom Protocol focuses on the upstream “early formation layer,” responsible for identifying and verifying genuine community support; Meteora plays a key role in the “community issuance layer,” allowing attention to be quickly converted into tradable capital; Solana's infrastructure provides an institutional-level execution environment, ensuring fairness and consistency in transactions; while the real-world asset bridge layer connects on-chain capital with the traditional financial system, allowing the growth of the internet capital market to extend into the trillions of dollars in the real economy.

The market scale of ICM is rapidly expanding.

Between 2024 and 2025, the growth rate of the ICM-related ecosystem far exceeds industry expectations. The Token Launch platform, along with the ICM-related infrastructure, handled hundreds of billions of dollars in transaction volume, and many platforms demonstrated stable and sustainable revenue capabilities.

Among these platforms, Meteora's DLMM (Dynamic Liquidity Market Maker) stands out particularly. It has increased Solana's liquidity infrastructure from under $1 billion in TVL to over $20 billion in cumulative trading volume within two years, gradually becoming one of the most efficient adaptive liquidity mechanisms in the crypto space. Meanwhile, a series of Launchpads aimed at ICM, such as BAGS, Believe App, and Help.fun, have facilitated hundreds of Token issuances, contributing massive liquidity to both the primary and secondary markets.

According to data from Blockworks Research and Token Terminal, the revenue of the Launchpad category is expected to grow more than tenfold year-on-year by 2025; leading platforms have annual fee revenues ranging from 5 million to 15 million USD. Although most of ICM's current traffic comes from Meme and cultural tokens, its underlying structure is eerily similar to the early days of DeFi: first experimentation, then scaling, and finally solidifying into infrastructure. The difference this time is that the driving force of liquidity is not mining incentives, but attention itself—narratives, communities, and culture have become the new asset pricing basis in on-chain markets.

Overall, during the period from January to November 2025, the ICM-driven trading volume of Solana and other ecosystems has exceeded hundreds of billions of dollars, indicating that attention is moving towards a mature financial vernacular, while the internet Capital Market is in the early stages of rapid formation.

The four stages of the Internet Capital Market

As AI drives the cost of product development to extremely low levels and the number of “individual entrepreneurs” skyrockets, competition among founders intensifies. In an era where products are easy to manufacture, the real bottleneck shifts from “creating the product” to “how to raise early capital and gather genuine community belief.” Traditional fundraising methods—whether VC or public issuance—fail to meet this speed and scale. Founders need a faster, fairer, and more market-relevant way to form early capital.

In this context, a new financial architecture begins to emerge: Internet Capital Market (ICM). It is built on a simple yet powerful premise: anyone, anywhere, can convert real community support into tradable capital.

The architecture of ICM consists of four interconnected layers:

• Early Formation —— Let real support be seen and verified;
• Community issuance (Community Launch) — allowing attention to be transformed into capital in an instant;
• Market Infrastructure — Enabling sustainable market depth for capital formation;
• Real Asset Bridges (RWA & Traditional Bridges) — Connecting on-chain capital with the trillion-dollar real financial system.

These four stages reinforce each other, ultimately forming a complete and sustainable system of capital formation.

Phase One: Early Formation - The Missing Foundation of the Past

Although hackathons, developer communities, and educational platforms have made it easier to create product prototypes, very few mechanisms can transform the initial community beliefs into sustainable momentum. This is precisely the stage that Bloom Protocol intervenes in.

Bloom is designed specifically for the new generation of “product-oriented founders”—an era where AI brings product development costs close to zero and the integration of Web2 and Web3 becomes increasingly natural in the hands of Builders. Bloom provides a complete mechanism for teams to gather early beliefs, validate market demand, and ultimately convert these early supporters into capital.

The Bloom task system (Bloom Missions) and soulbound tokens (SBT) form a critical foundation. Through the Bloom AI Co-Pilot, teams can quickly design tasks to test PMF and attract supporters who truly understand the product's value. Supporters receive SBTs with “future utility,” which not only prove their early belief but can also be converted into assets later, enabling a flexible transition from “community engagement” to “capital formation.”

Bloom's role in ICM is to provide “verified products with early traction” for downstream ecosystems such as Meteora. When these projects enter the Community Launch phase, they can immediately access on-chain liquidity, allowing attention to be directly converted into capital. The entire structure has cross-ecosystem compatibility and can integrate with any network and issuance system that values product-driven teams.

Phase Two: Community Issuance - Turning Attention into Capital

After the early support layer ensures that the project possesses quality and genuine participation in the initial stages, the community issuance phase takes on another key task: transforming these validated beliefs into capital that everyone can participate in. It is at this stage that the revolution of the internet capital market is presented to the public for the first time in a truly visible form.

In the Solana ecosystem, this breakthrough comes from the new liquidity architecture pioneered by Meteora—centered around Dynamic Bonding Curves and open liquidity modules. Meteora significantly lowers the technical and financial barriers to token creation, enabling any project to launch its issuance in a fairer and more efficient manner, thereby laying an important foundation for the current wave of community-driven on-chain issuance.

Trends (trends.fun) showcases the core logic of attention capitalization. Popular trends or memes are no longer just fleeting signals on social media but assets that can be instantly minted into tokens. The explosion of Suolala is a typical case: a meme created by the Chinese community that spread into a cross-cultural internet character economy within days; holders collaborate with each other to produce fan content, extend across chains, and even create public welfare versions. Once attention is priced, the community can collectively own and spread the narrative, achieving a scale effect that is difficult in the traditional internet. This community-driven attention assetization lays the foundation for the next stage: not only can culture and memes be priced, but more serious products and companies can also be guided to the chain Capital Market according to the same logic.

More company participation

As the issuance model based on Meteora matures, more and more teams are beginning to attempt to bring truly revenue-generating startups into the on-chain Capital Market. Platforms such as ICM.RUN, Help.Fun, Soar, and Crafts are actively promoting project screening, optimizing the issuance process, and standardizing the capital pipeline, allowing “company-level” projects to enter ICM in a smoother manner.

Help.Fun applies the Meteora curve issuance mechanism to a permissioned, mission-driven Launchpad. While ensuring project quality, it focuses on public welfare, directing issuance proceeds towards charitable purposes, thus forming a “controlled, sustainable” issuance model. ICM.RUN further expands the ecosystem through the DAO incubation model, providing projects with guidance from the community, ecological cooperation opportunities, and early market exposure, allowing teams to establish a solid foundation before entering the public market.

As the internet Capital Market gradually matures, the next stage is no longer limited to “token issuance”, but rather moving the entire company structure onto the chain. MetaDAO is a representative of this transition, redefining the launch, governance, and financing methods of startup teams under the ICM framework.

Through a governance system based on futarchy (prediction market governance), MetaDAO shifts decision-making away from centralized committees and entrusts it to prediction markets to assess whether proposals can enhance the protocol's value. For startups and early teams, this mechanism provides a highly transparent pathway, allowing ownership distribution, treasury capital allocation, and funding support for new projects to be determined based on measurable performance rather than hierarchy and political considerations.

In practical operation, MetaDAO serves as both an on-chain accelerator and a governance shell, internally containing modules such as automated market making (AMM) and treasury management, making its operation a self-contained economic system. Any team can utilize these modules to quickly build their own “internet-native company” with programmable incentives as the driving force, without relying on cumbersome traditional supervisory systems.

Therefore, MetaDAO marks a key turning point for the internet Capital Market from “project issuance” to “programmable company formation,” making it a self-operating ecosystem with institutional potential.

These cases collectively illustrate that Meteora's liquidity framework opens the door for creators to transform validated beliefs into tradable capital, laying the foundation for the next stage of ICM—cross-ecosystem, sustainable market infrastructure.

As more ecosystems adopt similar foundational modules, the paradigm offered by Meteora has also become an important blueprint for the evolution of the internet Capital Market, enabling a complete closed loop from “belief formation” to “capital formation” in a continuous and interoperable process.

Phase Three: Market Infrastructure - From Liquidity to Sustainability

The community issuance proves that “capital can form at the speed of social media,” but for the market to exist in the long term, deeper microstructural issues must be addressed: order matching, fairness, delays, liquidity distribution, etc. These issues are NASDAQ-level challenges, and Solana is precisely viewing these as core components of its roadmap, rather than just improving TPS.

On top of the basic execution of Solana, Metaplex, Meteora, and MetaDAO are building tools that can truly be used by Builders and users.

Metaplex, as the most mature asset issuance framework on Solana, has currently created over 920 million digital assets and processed over $10 billion in cumulative transactions. The Genesis Protocol launched in 2025 opened the era of structured issuance, with its auction mechanism effectively reducing MEV and bot interference, making the issuance process fairer and more transparent. The successful issuance of DeFiTuna's $TUNA and the Portals project demonstrates the positive effects of structured ICM Launch: price discovery is more reasonable, and participation is more equitable.

Meteora addresses the most critical issue after Token issuance - liquidity decline. DLMM maintains continuous liquidity for Tokens throughout their growth cycle through an adaptive mechanism, allowing many community Tokens that would otherwise die out quickly to sustain market depth for a long time.

MetaDAO completes this structure by utilizing governance based on prediction markets, allowing all capital to enter a circular system, thereby forming a closed and self-reinforcing system of fundraising, liquidity, and governance.

The three together form a closed-loop ICM infrastructure from asset issuance, market liquidity to governance coordination, allowing on-chain markets to evolve towards a “institutional level” direction.

Phase Four: Real World Assets and Traditional Bridges - Connecting Trillions of Dollars Endgame

The final layer involves whether ICM can truly connect to the real-world economy.

In 2025, Wall Street began to make significant strides into on-chain: BlackRock announced the launch of an RWA fund based on on-chain tokens; CME completed its first Sol and XRP options trading; Western Union released the Solana-based stablecoin USDPT, bringing its network of millions of users' remittances on-chain.

The RWA platforms on the blockchain are also maturing rapidly: Backed's xStocks has tokenized over sixty types of US stocks and ETFs, enabling 24/7 trading; Collaterize and Synthesys provide institutional-grade asset tokenization and on-chain fund management; PreStocks brings Pre-IPO equity into ICM, giving private equity liquidity.

At the same time, financial institutions in East Asia and Japan are also beginning to build on-chain treasury infrastructure (cash layer), such as tokenized currency funds issued by Chinese fund companies, billions of dollars in assets managed by Securitize, and the on-chain treasury mechanism of DFDV JP, all of which allow on-chain projects to manage treasury storage and liquidity safely and in compliance.

Visa and Mastercard will also incorporate USDC settlements into their systems; Worldcoin offers over ten million verified human identities; licensed brokers like Futu are bringing tokenized assets into traditional channels. The infrastructure of the bridge layer has already taken shape, enabling ICM to directly connect with the traditional capital market.

Conclusion: A new Capital Market order is taking shape.

The internet capital market is rapidly becoming a parallel structure to traditional capital formation methods.

Bloom Protocol is responsible for making the upstream supporters' beliefs clean, real, and verifiable; the Meteora ecosystem instantaneously transforms this “verified attention” into open liquidity; Solana's infrastructure provides institutional-grade execution quality for these markets; the RWA bridge extends all of this into the real-world financial system.

For founders, this means no longer having to wait for VC approval or go through the lengthy IPO process;

For supporters, early participation is no longer just an emotional investment, but a contribution that can be recorded, respected, and valued.

For institutions, this is a transparent, programmable, and global market system.