Original Source: Multicoin Capital
Introduction: The Beginning of Entertainment Trading Has Yet to Be Truly Unlocked
In the continuously evolving narrative of cryptocurrency, "entertainment + trading" is quietly becoming the new battleground. Kyle Samani, managing partner at Multicoin Capital, recently pointed out the core issue of this trend in a discussion thread: Pump and Zora are attempting to build an unprecedented trading modality that embeds trading within the entertainment experience, even turning liquidity itself into content.
This combination has actually been in the making for some time. In mainstream financial media, figures like Jim Cramer from CNBC represent the original form of "content + trading": blending calls to action with showcases. In the Web3 world, the issue is more complex—once "safe" entertainment platforms (like TikTok, X, IG) introduce trading, users perceive not just entertainment but also risk. Especially with meme or content assets that have extremely low liquidity, this sense of risk can be quickly amplified, shattering users' "psychological safety zones."
Samani's reminder is: rather than hiding risks, it's better to let users see them clearly—because "hiding risks makes people feel deceived." He also acknowledges Pump's breakthroughs in live streaming—live streaming inherently possesses interactivity, allowing trading actions to be naturally embedded in the entertainment experience, lowering psychological barriers and opening up imaginative space for new modalities.
In other words, we are entering a new structural edge that is about to take shape: when "likes" become "bets," trading becomes a form of expression; and when the asset itself is content, price fluctuations become part of the narrative.
The ultimate criterion is not who issued more tokens or how closely the interface resembles TikTok, but rather: who can make users "want to come back to see if there’s something new." Samani mentioned that he opened Zora more than ten times but never anticipated the next time; whereas Pump has at least established this emotional expectation for some users. That feeling of "looking forward to the next time" is key for all content platforms and is the most scarce resource in all "entertainment + trading" experiments.
The following article, "New Modalities for Issuance and Trading," co-authored by Vishal Kankani, Shayon Sengupta, and Kyle Samani, systematically outlines 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 UIs. They all answer the same question: how to make "trading" as natural as "swiping short videos"?
This is a deep rehearsal of "software as finance." And the winning hand may be hidden in that button you overlooked.
Main Text
In traditional financial systems, it is nearly impossible for ordinary people to create a new tradable asset. However, cryptocurrency technology has made this extremely simple. Now, anyone in the world can create a brand new asset on Solana at almost zero cost in just a few seconds.
As a result, user-generated assets (UGA) have seen explosive growth. The concept of UGA has existed in the crypto space for some time, with its earliest forms being social tokens (like BitClout, FriendTech, etc.), and more recently evolving into meme coins (like pump.fun) and content tokens (like Zora).
Since the advent of the internet, the general trading model in secondary markets has not changed much. The earliest online brokerage services from 30 years ago are roughly similar to today’s Robinhood, Coinbase, and Phantom. Specifically, users enter the asset's code (or contract address) in the search box, then view charts, news, and execute buy or sell operations on the asset page.
This model exists not only in financial applications but is also widely applicable across the entire e-commerce sector. eBay and Amazon follow a similar process.
With the support of crypto infrastructure, developers can easily embed asset creation and buy/sell functionalities into any software. It is precisely because of this flexibility that in recent years, some entrepreneurs have built new types of issuance products and trading methods that significantly deviate from the traditional Phantom model. This represents an underestimated evolution in trading methods, and we hope to share some of these new observations through this article.
Our team member Shayon explored a variant of this idea in a previous article titled "Publisher Exchanges" a year ago.
In the past few years, some trading models and issuance platforms have gained significant attention, along with some yet to explode but promising directions:
Issuance Platforms / Asset Creation Systems:
- Pump.fun
- Zora
Trading Interaction Methods:
- Single-user Telegram bots
- Multi-user Telegram bots
- Doomscroll dynamic feeds
- Professional trading terminals
- Real-time live token trading
- Tinder-style swipe interaction interfaces
Issuance Platforms
The first crypto issuance platform was Coinlist, which pioneered the SAFT model through the sale of Filecoin in 2017 and attempted to conduct compliant ICOs. Coinlist has since continuously adjusted its direction but still supports new project issuances, including the recent validator sale initiated for DoubleZero in our portfolio and the community sale launched for Pipe Network.
In 2019, Binance launched its own Launchpad product, which is still operational and selects projects for listing on the platform.
During the L1 launch wave from 2020 to 2022, dozens of teams built their own issuance platforms, aiming to capture market share on new L1s like Solana, Polkadot, and Avalanche. However, to our knowledge, most of these platforms have since faded away.
It can be said that these platforms have not truly "broken the game." Until early 2024, pump.fun successfully achieved this.
After breaking through 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 interaction methods.
We believe that the "staking curve + graduation mechanism" pioneered by pump.fun is unlikely to be the only mechanism for establishing trust in memecoin launches. We are continuously looking for teams with unique insights into market microstructures to build better issuance mechanisms and trading methods.
Zora has recently attempted to stimulate user behavior around content tokens, but so far, this direction has yet to find product-market fit (PMF).
Trading Interaction Methods
Below, we will outline some of the existing trading interaction methods.
Single-user Telegram Trading Bots
Currently popular single-user Telegram trading bots include Banana Gun, Unibot, Bonkbot, Trojan, and Maestro. These bots rapidly gained popularity in the summer of 2023. For users accustomed to graphical interfaces like Phantom, these bots may initially seem quite chaotic. Due to limitations of the Telegram API, these bots generally perform poorly in asset views and account management. However, they excel in certain aspects:
1. Convenience: Most bot users are already active in Telegram chat groups, trying to capture trading signals. Once they spot a signal in other groups, they want to execute actions immediately. Based on our experience, switching to a third-party wallet (like Phantom) to trade at that moment would delay the process by at least 5 to 10 seconds. Trading through bots can typically be completed in 1–2 seconds.
2. Front-running Mechanism: Based on the "convenience" feature and combined with users' desire to "get in first," many bots have built-in automatic purchase functions for new tokens, as these users only want to grab the first-hand information.
It is evident that whether in single or multi-user configurations, these Telegram bots can integrate large language models (LLM) to support more complex trading, such as lending, looping, vault operations, etc. Although this space is filled with enthusiasm, we believe that the emergence of LLMs has not fundamentally changed the "interaction method" of trading; it has merely enhanced the capabilities and flexibility of these new methods.
Notably, 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 it will not have a substantial impact on specialized bots.
Some early Telegram bots have begun to expand their functional boundaries. For example, Unibot has now evolved into a complete trading terminal.
Multi-user Telegram Trading Bots
The most representative multi-user Telegram bot is PVP. The PVP bot resides in your group chat with friends. You can send commands like /long BTC to the bot, which will immediately execute the operation (in the form of a BTC-USD perpetual contract) and then broadcast the command and the BTC-USD price chart to the group chat. Friends in the group can then follow the trade or take the opposite action with one click.
The core value of PVP does not lie in the trading itself, but in the "people" in the group chat. The focus of PVP group chats is not on discovering trading signals, but on camaraderie, competitive psychology, and a joking atmosphere. Friends themselves are the source of emotional fluctuations.
Taking off together, crashing together. The emotional connections, brotherhood culture, and competitive atmosphere that naturally arise in this model are extremely unique and cannot be replicated. Once users get involved, retention rates are usually very high. Currently, PVP primarily trades perpetual contracts on the Hyperliquid platform. However, it is easy to imagine that in the future, other multi-user Telegram bots will expand to support memecoins, assets with fundamental logic, stocks, and even sports betting.
Immersive Information Flow (Doomscroll Dynamic Feeds)
We use the term "doomscroll" here with a hint of playful affection. The dominant content form on the current internet is doomscrolling, as seen on platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok, which are the ultimate information aggregators.
Farcaster, Lens, 0xppl, Bags, and the recent Zora are attempting to create new types of doomscroll content streams similar to Twitter or Instagram, but these platforms are built with native crypto features (such as tradability). So far, these platforms generally face challenges regarding content quality and attractiveness. The network effects built by Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok are nearly unshakeable.
Zora can be said to be the most eye-catching project among these, as it integrates asset issuance mechanisms with a brand new trading interaction form. Zora is building a content stream similar to Instagram, where each piece of content is accompanied by an independent memecoin (with a total supply of 1 billion), of which 1% is automatically allocated to content creators. Zora places a strong emphasis on the concept of "creator monetization"; however, one unresolved question remains: why would users want to collect this content?
To our knowledge, no traditional crypto wallets (such as Phantom, MetaMask, Backpack, Rainbow, etc.) have attempted to introduce doomscroll content streams. Coinbase Wallet announced that it would integrate Farcaster in future versions, but we believe this does not fundamentally address the content quality and scale issues that Farcaster faces.
Currently, some teams (like token.com and Involio) are trying to curate the content streams that crypto traders genuinely want to see, embedding trading functionalities while discovering content. These products visually resemble TikTok, but naturally integrate crypto trading at the experiential level, representing a promising design direction. Instead of building a brand new content platform from scratch, these companies choose to "build on existing platforms"; however, due to reliance on third-party aggregation platform APIs, practical operations often do not go smoothly.
Vector has developed a doomscroll product where the "atomic unit" of its content stream is no longer traditional social media posts (text/images/videos), but rather a transaction. In our view, this is the most interesting path to building a native crypto doomscroll product, as it truly embodies the idea of "expressing opinions with money" rather than merely discussing content.
The biggest challenge for Vector is how to ensure that interesting transactions continuously appear in the content stream, thereby creating engaging content. We speculate that the optimal doomscroll product should use AI to scrape data from multiple sources (not limited to on-chain transactions) to automatically populate the content stream.
When a doomscroll content stream operates well, it can produce astonishing effects. It naturally aligns with the "dopamine loop," resulting in strong user retention. If combined with retail order flow, doomscroll-style crypto content streams may represent the largest consumer-grade opportunity in the current crypto space, while also being one of the most challenging directions to implement.
Trading Terminal
No trader "accidentally" chooses a particular trading terminal—everyone is playing a specific game and looking for the most suitable tools to win. Users who downloaded Moonshot after seeing moo deng's TikTok have a clear purpose; whereas traders who frequently trade based on macro liquidity choose Deribit for entirely different reasons.
Memecoins represent a unique game where many traditional market structure logics do not apply to makers and takers here (for example, the notion that "mature traders care about optimal execution prices"—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 factors on the front lines of pump.fun, we are left with just two variables: speed (discovering assets and executing trades quickly) and the quality of social signals (how many people and what levels of people are paying attention to the asset).
Ultimately, memecoins are a financialized expression of attention, and a continuously evolving "trading supply chain" is competing around this attention. Issuers, KOLs, frontrunners, retail investors—regardless of their quality, they are all links in this chain. The core task of every trading terminal is to help traders better understand this attention chain than other products and to enable them to act more quickly within it. This is primarily reflected in two aspects: first, extreme trading execution speed (usually achieved through Jito bundles and custom RPCs); second, extremely detailed social/address analysis (including popular address tags, supply concentration, on-chain status index performance, and a wealth of off-chain social discovery metrics).
The biggest lesson from the past two years is that traders have no loyalty to trading interfaces.
The current question is not "whether a better Axiom can be made," but rather: as long as new teams can make trades execute faster and signals more accurate, traders will immediately switch over. A more pressing question is: how will the game of memecoins evolve when new types of assets and new types of traders come into play? New interfaces will inevitably emerge to serve this change. It is hard to believe that the market structure of memecoins has reached a stable state. New "semi-professional trader" platforms will naturally arise—market structures will continue to evolve, and new opportunities and new entrants will emerge accordingly.
Live Tokens
One of our investments, Unlonely, is exploring new ways to intersect live streaming and tokens. At the end of last year, the pump.fun team launched (then paused, and has now relaunched) a live streaming product, which is gradually gaining attention.
Live streaming is a promising interface for token trading products because hosts can interact with viewers in real time. Hosts can incentivize viewers to buy or sell through certain actions or collaborate 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 problem with this mechanism is that it artificially sets a price ceiling.
A very interesting example is Fishtank, which is essentially a real-time interactive reality show. Over a six-week program, a group of contestants is rotated into a fully monitored house, each room equipped with 24-hour cameras. Viewers can purchase tokens to modify the environment, send voice synthesis messages, trigger challenges, or even deprive contestants of basic comforts like beds. This interaction is deeply embedded in the core experience of the show, making viewers not just spectators but participants who can instantly influence the direction of the program.
The core idea is that content is programmable, and viewer input can break down the boundaries between content creators and consumers. We see this as an emerging media form: live content and token trading occur simultaneously, and trading actions, in turn, affect the content itself.
Behaviors related to live streaming are still in the early stages, and no product has truly found a market fit yet. Nevertheless, we believe this field contains unique innovation space, especially when combined with older ideas like "social tokens."
Tinder-like User Experience
The so-called "Tinder-like user experience" refers to an interaction design that completes transactions through left/right swipes. The types of transactions can include prediction markets, sports betting, or buying and selling any asset. The core value of this UI lies in the fact that swipe-first interaction is a mature model that encourages users to make quick decisions.
We believe this type of interaction is particularly suitable for short-cycle prediction markets. A typical example is betting on whether the next play in American football will be a "run" or a "pass." You can imagine that such accompanying applications would extend to various live content like the Oscars, evening news, etc. For content broadcasters, this interactive betting experience not only enhances user engagement but also monetizes through order flow, increasing revenue.
Kyle mentioned this idea on Twitter a few months ago, sparking considerable discussion. We still believe that swipe-centric design paradigms can give rise to a new batch of high-potential businesses. Representative products include Hookt, Memelut, and Guess.best (the latter, while not a swipe, also involves one-on-one interaction).
One-Click Trading
Betting on Euphoria is as simple as tapping the screen. Users can simply tap their phones to bet that a certain asset will reach a specific price at a certain time. In traditional finance, such products are called "barrier options," typically complex tools designed by Wall Street for high-net-worth clients. Robinhood is also trying to break this pattern, recently launching a similar feature called "in-chart trading."
Euphoria discards complexity and presents this powerful mechanism through a smooth and gamified interface—fast, engaging, and easy to use. Since 2021, the crypto community has been waiting for the explosion of structured products, and the "one-click trading" interaction method may just be the key unlocker.
This "one-click betting" mechanism is also expected to be applied in real-money mobile games. Each click represents a bet, while the crypto track ensures instant and secure prize settlements.
The future is already here; who will lead the next wave?
As trading capabilities gradually integrate into various software, the boundaries between culture and finance will become increasingly blurred—trends, narratives, and native internet creativity will give rise to fleeting new types of assets. In such a world, attention brings liquidity, and liquidity, in turn, attracts more attention.
These emerging applications will become the preferred entry point for users in discovering, trading, and entertaining. Applications that can provide an excellent user experience across multiple interaction modes will dominate the order flow, thus not only generating substantial revenue but also having the opportunity for exponential growth.
These applications will not merely be "wallets"—they will not only be used for storing assets and viewing portfolios but will also serve as the core places for users to discover new assets, participate in trading, and engage socially. Compared to "likes" or "shares," trading carries more signal value because it requires users to take on actual financial risks. Ultimately, AI algorithms will also attempt to extract signals from these trading behaviors to determine what content to show users—even if users have disabled trading features in their immersive information streams.
The future of finance will permeate all software products, no longer limited to traditional portfolio viewing tools.
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