Today, I haven't seen any interesting projects on-chain, so I'm here to chat about $DUPE and speculate a bit for everyone's entertainment. Remember, the following is all speculation, so don't take it seriously.
108 days ago, the platform http://clout.me emerged, founded by Ben Pasternak @pasternak, backed by Alliance @alliancedao. That's right, Alliance is the one that invested in and incubated pumpfun and Moonshot, and can be said to be the driving force behind this round of asset issuance and trading platforms on Solana. As soon as Clout launched, it had a complete product available on the Apple App Store. Although the product experience was poor, the PASTERNAK token triggered FOMO in the market, reaching a market cap of over $80 million at its peak. However, due to product issues, it faced various FUD, and the token price continued to decline, eventually nearing zero. In fact, the project team made a significant profit.
Although they made a profit, Ben is quite resilient (not satisfied, wanting to make an even bigger profit) and did not give up on the idea of an asset issuance platform (the key is that he couldn't explain it to Alliance). It is speculated that he met Nikita Bier @nikitabier through Alliance. This guy has quite an influence in user growth and AI, understands Web 3, and has always wanted to combine Web 3 with real user scenarios. So the two hit it off and decided to create an asset issuance platform that differs from pumpfun: the founders must be real-name projects, the projects need to be innovative, and ideally, they should connect with Web 2. Thus, Ben came up with Believe: using @launchcoin + name to reply to any tweet to issue tokens, but requiring the founders to submit their ideas with real names and pass a review before they can trade on Believe's app channel.
The above is the general background. After the platform launched, they needed someone to issue tokens, and Nikita thought of DUPE, as he had previously worked on user growth for DUPE and became one of the project's founders. So what does DUPE do? The following information comes from a share by Shage @bitfool1 in the group:
http://Dupe.com is an online platform that helps users find similar products at lower prices (i.e., "dupe," meaning "replica" or "alternative"). It uses image recognition technology and product search functions, allowing users to input images or links of products (such as furniture, clothing, or home goods) and then returns visually similar but more affordable alternatives, usually from well-known retailers. The platform focuses on "high cost-performance shopping," especially gaining attention in the furniture and home decor sectors. In short, it's a price comparison platform for furniture and clothing.
Website traffic is rapidly increasing in 2024 (from 88,000 to 670,000), indicating growing user interest, but the specific user numbers cannot be quantified. In terms of transaction volume, the "tens of millions of dollars GMV" mentioned in the X post lacks credibility.
Although http://Dupe.com has gained significant attention in a short time, its long-term impact and market stability still need to be observed. Some comments point out that its technology is similar to Google Lens and faces challenges from large competitors like Google Shopping and Wayfair.
Funding Details
Funding Amount: $5.5 million (specific round not disclosed, possibly a seed round or early financing).
Investors: PitchBook mentions that Abstract Ventures, Detroit Venture Partners, Abstract (in multimedia and design software), Combine, and Designer Fund are among the five investment institutions, with seven others not detailed.
Time: The specific funding time is not clearly stated in public data, but given that the company was founded in 2021, the funding likely occurred between 2021 and 2023.
Use: The funding may be used for technology development (image recognition and search algorithms), marketing (especially viral marketing on social media like TikTok), and team expansion (the current company size is 10 people).
From Nikita and Ben's perspective, DUPE is very suitable to become the leading project on the Believe platform: the project is related to AI, has real Web 2 data, the product is innovative but has encountered development bottlenecks. If they can find a way to combine it with Web 3, it might find a way out, allowing investors to recover their investments and potentially increasing the product's competitiveness, finding a new path.
The key is that once such a benchmark succeeds, there are many AI projects like this in Web 2 that could be replicated, significantly increasing the success probability of the Believe platform.
So they went for it. To be safe, they also had someone issue SUPFRIEND to test the new product, only to find that issuing tokens directly through the founder's Twitter to grab chips was quite difficult. Therefore, they had DUPE's official Twitter issue $DUPE through Believe, bypassing most of the Twitter monitoring related to Web 3, successfully grabbing most of the chips.
However, since they didn't control enough chips, to gather more, the project team staged various performances in the early stages. First, Nikita said it had nothing to do with $DUPE, then Bobby said they didn't hold any $DUPE, driving the token price down to $800k. Of course, it could also be to mitigate legal risks in the U.S. In any case, the token price dropped, and they collected the chips.
After gathering enough chips, they started to make big moves, truly integrating $DUPE into the existing product system, becoming the first Web 3 AI project with practical utility that combines with Web 2! The economic system is shown in the image below:
With everything ready, it became easy and natural to pump the platform token and $DUPE. Since the chip control of $DUPE was very good, and they told a compelling narrative, plus they had a prominent figure supporting them, they managed to pump it from $6 million to $24 million in one night.
By the way, just to mention, the $PASTERNAK token has been renamed to $LAUNCHCOIN.
As for how the next plot unfolds, dear viewers, please tip first, and then we will continue the discussion.
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