Source: Multicoin Capital

Preface: The Dawn of Entertainment Trading, Yet to Be Truly Cracked

Amidst the constant iteration of the crypto narrative, "Entertainment + Trading" is quietly emerging as a new main battlefield. Kyle Samani, Managing Partner at Multicoin Capital, recently pointed out the core issue of this trend in a thread, where Pump and Zora are attempting to build an unprecedented trading modality: embedding trading within the entertainment experience and even turning liquidity itself into content.

This combination has long been foreseeable. In mainstream financial media, figures like CNBC's Jim Cramer represent the original form of "Content + Trading": blending stock tips with a show. In the Web3 world, the issue is more complex—once "safe" entertainment platforms (such as TikTok, X, IG) introduce trading, what users perceive is not just entertainment but risk. Especially in meme or content assets with extremely low liquidity, this risk perception is quickly amplified, and users' "psychological safety zone" instantly crumbles.

Samani's reminder is: rather than hiding risk, it's better to let users see it—because "hiding risk makes people feel scammed." He also acknowledges Pump's breakthrough in the live streaming direction—live streaming inherently has interactivity, enabling trading behavior to naturally integrate into the entertainment experience, reducing psychological barriers and opening up imaginative space for a new modality.

In other words, we are entering a new frontier where a new structure is taking shape: when "liking" turns into "betting," trading becomes a form of expression; and when the asset itself is the content, price fluctuations become the plot.

The ultimate criterion is not who has issued more coins or how closely the interface resembles TikTok, but: who can make users "want to come back to see if there's something new." Samani mentioned that he has opened Zora more than ten times but has never anticipated the next time; whereas Pump has at least created this emotional expectation for some users. The feeling of "anticipating the next time" is the key to all content platforms and the rarest resource in all "Entertainment + Trading" experiments.

This article, "New Modalities for Issuance and Trading," co-authored by Vishal Kankani, Shayon Sengupta, and Kyle Samani, systematically examines the latest changes surrounding issuance methods and trading paths. We will see a panoramic slice from Telegram bots, doomscroll feeds, live trading interfaces to Tinder-style UI. They are all answering the same question: how to make "trading" as natural as "scrolling short videos"?

This is an in-depth preview of "Software is Money." The winning move may be hidden in that button you overlooked.

Main Text

In the traditional financial system, it was nearly impossible for the average person to create a tradable new asset. However, cryptographic technology has made this task extremely simple. Today, anyone worldwide can create a brand-new asset on Solana at near-zero cost in a matter of seconds.

As a result, User-Generated Assets (UGAs) have seen explosive growth. The concept of UGA has been around in the crypto space for some time, starting with social tokens (such as BitClout, FriendTech, etc.), and more recently evolving into meme coins (like pump.fun) and content tokens (like Zora).

Since the birth of the internet, the common transaction model in secondary markets has not changed much. The earliest online brokerage services from 30 years ago bear a resemblance to today's Robinhood, Coinbase, and Phantom. Specifically, users enter an asset's code (or contract address) in the search bar, then view charts, news, and perform buy or sell operations on the asset's page.

This model not only exists in financial applications but is also prevalent throughout the entire e-commerce sector. eBay and Amazon operate in a similar fashion.

With the support of crypto infrastructure, developers can easily embed asset creation, buy/sell functions into any software. It is precisely because of this flexibility that in the past few years, some entrepreneurs have built new types of issuance products and trading methods that deviate significantly from the traditional Phantom model. This represents an evolution in transaction methods that has been somewhat underestimated. Therefore, through this article, we hope to share some new observations on this front.

Our team's Shayon also explored a variant of this idea in an article titled "Publisher Exchanges" a year ago.

In recent years, some trading models and issuance platforms have gained significant attention, with several other directions showing untapped but promising potential:

Issuance Platforms / Asset Creation Systems:

· Pump.fun

· Zora

Transaction Interaction Methods:

·Single-user Telegram Bot

·Multi-user Telegram Bot

·Doomscrolling Dynamic

·Professional Trading Terminal

·Real-time Token Streaming

·Tinder-like Swipe Interaction Interface

Issuance Platforms

The first cryptocurrency issuance platform was Coinlist, which pioneered the SAFT model through the Filecoin sale in 2017 and attempted to conduct compliant ICOs. Coinlist has since pivoted its direction but continues to support new project issuances, including the recent validator sale for DoubleZero in our portfolio and the community sale for Pipe Network.

In 2019, Binance launched its proprietary Launchpad product, which is still operational and vets projects for listing on the platform.

During the 2020–2022 L1 launch frenzy, dozens of teams built their own issuance platforms with the intention of capturing market share on new L1 chains like Solana, Polkadot, and Avalanche. However, as far as we are aware, most of these platforms later disappeared.

It can be said that these platforms did not truly "breakthrough." It wasn't until early 2024 that pump.fun succeeded in doing so.

After the "breakthrough" in the issuance mechanism, pump.fun began to expand both upstream and downstream: on one hand, building its own AMM, and on the other, exploring new types of trading interactions.

We believe that "Staking Curve + Graduation Mechanism" pioneered by pump.fun is unlikely to be the sole mechanism for launching meme coins with trust. We continue to search for teams with unique insights into market microstructure to construct better issuance mechanisms and trading methods.

Zora recently attempted to incentivize user behavior around content coins, but as of now, this direction has not found product-market fit (PMF).

Trading Interactions

Below, we will outline some of the existing trading interaction methods.

Single-user Telegram Trading Bot

Some of the currently popular single-user Telegram trading bots include Banana Gun, Unibot, Bonkbot, Trojan, and Maestro. These bots quickly gained popularity in the summer of 2023. For users accustomed to graphical interfaces like Phantom, these bots initially seem quite chaotic. Due to limitations of the Telegram API, these bots generally perform poorly in terms of asset visibility and account management. However, they excel in certain aspects:

1. Convenience: Many bot users are already active in Telegram chat groups, trying to catch trade signals. When they discover a signal in another group, they want to execute the trade immediately. Based on our experience, switching to a third-party wallet (such as Phantom) at this point would result in a delay of at least 5 to 10 seconds. Trading through bots, on the other hand, can usually be completed within 1–2 seconds.

2. Front-Running: Building on the "convenience" feature and combining it with users' desire to "front-run," many bots have built-in auto-buy functionality for new coins, as these users want to get in early.

It is clear that whether in single-user or multi-user configuration, these Telegram bots can leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) to support more complex trades, such as lending, looping, and vault operations. Despite the enthusiasm in this space, we believe the emergence of LLMs has not fundamentally changed the "way" of trading; it has only enhanced the capabilities and flexibility of these new methods.

It is worth noting that mainstream wallets like Phantom and BackPack are also expected to integrate LLM-like bots in the near future. This will slightly blur the boundaries between traditional wallets and Telegram bots, but we believe this will not have a substantial impact on specialized bots.

Some early Telegram bots have started to expand their functional boundaries. For example, Unibot has evolved into a full-fledged trading terminal.

Multi-User Telegram Trading Bots

The most representative multi-user Telegram bot is PVP. PVP's bot resides in your group chats with friends. You can send commands to the bot like /long BTC, and it will immediately execute that operation (in BTC-USD perpetual contract form) and then broadcast the command and BTC-USD price chart sync to the group chat. Friends in the chat can then easily follow the trade or take the opposite action.

The core value of PVP lies not in the transactions themselves, but in the "people" within the group chat. The focus of PVP group chats is not to discover trading signals, but rather camaraderie, the psychology of competition, and a playful atmosphere. Friends themselves are a source of emotional fluctuations.

Take off together, crash together. In this mode, the naturally generated emotional connection, brotherhood culture, and competitive atmosphere are extremely unique and cannot be replicated. Once users get involved, the retention rate is usually very high. Currently, PVP mainly trades perpetual contracts on the Hyperliquid platform. But we can easily imagine that in the future, other multiplayer Telegram bots will expand to support memecoins, assets with fundamental logic, stocks, and even sports betting.

Immersive Information Flow (Doomscroll-style Feed)

Here, we use the term "doomscroll" with a bit of affectionate irony. The dominant content form on the current internet is doomscrolling, such as Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, etc., which are ultimate information aggregators.

Farcaster, Lens, 0xppl, Bags, and more recently Zora, are attempting to create a new type of doomscroll feed similar to Twitter or Instagram, but with built-in native crypto features (such as tradability). So far, a common challenge these platforms face is the lack of content quality and appeal. The network effects built by Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok are almost unshakable.

Zora can be said to be the most promising project among these, as it combines asset issuance mechanics with a new form of transactional interaction. Zora is building a content feed similar to Instagram, where each piece of content is accompanied by a unique memecoin (total supply of 1 billion), with 1% automatically allocated to the content creator. Zora heavily emphasizes the concept of "creator monetization"; however, an unresolved issue to date is: why would users be willing to collect this content?

As far as we know, no traditional crypto wallets (such as Phantom, MetaMask, Backpack, Rainbow, etc.) have attempted to introduce a doomscroll feed. Coinbase Wallet has announced the integration of Farcaster in a future version, but we believe this does not fundamentally solve the content quality and scale issues that Farcaster faces.

Several teams, such as token.com and Involio, have already attempted to curate a content feed for crypto traders with the content they truly want to see, embedding transaction functionality within the content discovery process. These products bear a striking resemblance to TikTok in appearance, but seamlessly integrate crypto transactions at the experiential level, representing a highly promising design direction. Rather than building an entirely new content platform from scratch, these companies have chosen to "build on top of existing platforms"; however, due to reliance on third-party aggregation platform APIs, the actual implementation is often not smooth.

Vector has developed a doomscroll product where the "atomic unit" in the content feed is no longer traditional social media posts (text/image/video) but a transaction. In our view, this is the most intriguing path to building a native crypto doomscroll product as it truly embodies the idea of "expressing viewpoints with money" rather than mere talk about content.

The most significant challenge Vector faces is how to keep interesting transactions appearing continuously in the content feed to create engaging content. We speculate that the optimal doomscroll product should leverage AI to fetch data from multiple sources (not limited to on-chain transactions) to automatically populate the content feed.

When the doomscroll content feed operates effectively, it can have a profound impact. It inherently aligns with the "dopamine loop," delivering extremely high user stickiness. If combined with retail order flow, a doomscroll-style crypto content feed may be the most substantial consumer-facing opportunity in the current crypto space, yet it is also one of the most challenging directions to execute.

Transaction Terminal

No trader chooses a transaction terminal "randomly"—everyone is playing a specific game and looking for the most suitable tool to win. Users who downloaded Moonshot after seeing moo deng's TikTok did so with a clear purpose, while high-frequency traders based on macro liquidity chose Deribit for entirely different reasons.

Memecoin is a unique game where many traditional market structure logics do not apply to the makers and takers here (for example, the notion that "sophisticated traders care about the best execution price"—in this market, the most profitable players are often willing to accept a 10% slippage just to get in three seconds earlier). If we drastically simplify the victory factor on the front line battlefield of pump.fun, only two variables remain in the end: speed (finding assets and executing quickly) and the quality of social signals (how many people and at what level are paying attention to the asset).

At its core, a memecoin is the financialized expression of attention, with an evolving "transaction supply chain" competing around this attention. Issuers, KOLs, frontrunners, retail traders—whether good or bad, they are all links in this chain. The core mission of each transaction endpoint is to help traders better understand this attention chain than other products and to act more quickly within it. This is mainly reflected in two aspects: ultra-fast transaction settlement speed (usually achieved through Jito bundles and custom RPC) and extremely detailed social/address analysis (including popular address tags, supply concentration, on-chain state indexing performance, and a wealth of off-chain social discovery indicators).

The biggest lesson of the past two years is: traders have no loyalty to the trading interface.

The current problem is not "whether a better Axiom can be made," but rather: as long as a new team can make transactions settle faster and signals more accurate, traders will immediately switch over. The more important question is: as new types of assets and new types of traders join in, how will the memecoin game evolve? At that time, new interfaces will surely emerge to serve this change. It is hard to believe that the attention market structure of memecoins has reached a stable state. New "semi-professional trader" platforms will emerge opportunistically—the market structure will continue to change, and new opportunities and new entrants will emerge.

Live Token

One of the companies we have invested in, Unlonely, is exploring new gameplay at the intersection of live streaming and tokens. At the end of last year, the pump.fun team launched (later paused and then relaunched) a live streaming product that is gradually gaining attention.

Live streaming is an interesting interface for token transactions to explore because hosts can interact with viewers in real time. Hosts can incentivize viewers to buy or sell through certain actions or work together to achieve a common goal. The most common live streaming gameplay is: "If the token market cap reaches $Y, the host will perform action X." However, the biggest issue with this mechanism is the artificial price ceiling it sets.

An interesting example is Fishtank, which is essentially a real-time interactive reality show. In a six-week program, a group of participants is rotationally housed in a fully monitored house, with each room equipped with 24-hour cameras. Viewers can purchase tokens to modify the environment, send voice synthesizer messages, trigger challenges, and even deprive participants of basic comforts such as the use of beds. This interactive experience is deeply embedded in the core of the show, turning viewers from bystanders into participants who can instantly influence the direction of the show.

Its core idea is that content is programmable, and viewer input can break the boundary between content creators and consumers. We see it as an emerging form of media: live content and token transactions occur simultaneously, and transaction behavior, in turn, affects the content itself.

Live streaming-related behaviors are still in the early stages, and currently, no product has truly found product-market fit. Nevertheless, we believe this area holds unique innovation space, especially when combining old ideas such as "social tokens."

Tinder-like User Experience

The so-called "Tinder-like user experience" refers to the interaction design where transactions are completed by swiping left or right. Transaction types can include prediction markets, sports betting, or any asset trading. The core value of this UI is that a swipe-first interaction is a mature pattern that encourages quick user decision-making.

We believe this type of interaction is particularly suitable for short-term prediction markets. A typical example is: in American football, betting on whether the next play will be a "run" or a "pass." You can imagine that such a companion app would extend to events like the Oscars, evening news, and various live streaming content. For content broadcasters, this interactive betting experience not only enhances user stickiness but also monetizes through order flow, increasing revenue.

A few months ago, Kyle mentioned this idea on Twitter, sparking a lot of discussions. We still believe that a swipe-centric design paradigm can spawn a batch of new and high-potential businesses. Representative products include Hookt, Memelut, and Guess.best (the latter is not swipe-based but still one-on-one interaction).

One-Click Trading

Betting on Euphoria is as simple as tapping the screen. Users only need to tap their phone to bet on an asset reaching a specific price at a certain time. In traditional finance, such products are called "barrier options," usually complex tools designed by Wall Street for high-net-worth clients. Robinhood is also trying to disrupt this space, recently launching a similar feature called "in-chart trading."

Euphoria has abandoned complexity, presenting this powerful mechanism in a smooth and gamified interface—fast, engaging, and easy to use. Since 2021, the crypto community has been eagerly awaiting the explosion of structured products, and the "one-click trading" interaction may be the key enabler.

This "one-click betting" mechanism also has the potential to be applied in real-money gaming. Each click is a bet, and the crypto rails ensure instant, secure bonus settlements.

The Future Is Now, Who Will Lead the Next Wave?

As transaction capabilities gradually integrate into all kinds of software, the boundary between culture and finance will become increasingly blurred—trends, narratives, and native internet creativity will give rise to fleeting new assets. In such a world, attention brings liquidity, and liquidity, in turn, attracts more attention.

These emerging applications will become the primary gateway for users to discover, transact, and entertain. Applications that can provide excellent user experience in multiple interaction modes will control the dominant order flow, allowing them to not only generate substantial revenue but also have the opportunity to achieve exponential growth.

These applications will not just be a "wallet" — they will be used not only for asset storage and portfolio viewing but also as the central hub for users to discover new assets, engage in transactions, and socialize. Compared to "likes" or "retweets," transactions carry more signal value as they require users to take on actual financial risk. Ultimately, AI algorithms will also attempt to extract signals from these transactional behaviors to determine what content to show users — even if users have disabled transaction capabilities in their immersive feed of information.

The future of finance will be embedded in all software products, no longer limited to traditional portfolio viewing tools.

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