Solana 's meme ecosystem has recently been heating up again. The market capitalization of the community-initiated and officially recognized Chinese meme "Solala" has recently surpassed $15 million, catapulting its launch platform, Trends.fun, into the spotlight. Meanwhile, Pump.fun, a leading meme launch platform in the Solana ecosystem, recently launched a new X account, "Spotlight," which aims to accelerate ICM development.

These market trends are not accidental; they represent a systematic strategic shift for Solana. ICM has been officially recognized by Solana as a core strategic initiative, aiming to elevate the internet from an information transmission layer to a value circulation layer. By fully on-chaining issuance, pricing, and settlement, ICM aims to reshape the underlying logic of the global capital market, enabling direct, unmediated, and highly efficient flow of funds and users across an open network. For Solana, this is not just a technical performance competition, but also a reshaping of its ecosystem. Below, CoinW Research will explore ICM's roadmap and recent ecosystem trends.

I. ICM Overview

1. The concept of ICM

ICM (Internet Capital Markets) refers to a new type of financial infrastructure based on blockchain and decentralized technologies. It aims to bring the entire issuance, pricing, and trading process on-chain, allowing anyone with an internet connection to directly participate in the capital market. Unlike the traditional model that relies on intermediaries such as brokerages and investment banks, ICM uses smart contracts to achieve trustless financing and investment, significantly lowering the barrier to entry for asset issuance and investment. Its philosophy can be seen as a continuation of the evolution of crypto financing. From ICOs, IEOs, IDOs, and Launchpad, each iteration has strengthened transparency and liquidity. ICM further integrates these mechanisms to build a unified on-chain capital market. The Chairman of the Solana Foundation stated that ICM's ultimate vision is to "build a global financial infrastructure through blockchain, enabling anyone with an internet connection to participate in asset investment and trading."

In May of this year, the concept of ICM quickly gained popularity with the launch of new platforms within the Solana ecosystem, such as Believe. Based on the core principle of "attention is capital," Believe leverages social media to trigger on-chain issuance, allowing users to create, price, and trade tokens in minutes. ICM not only continues the process of disintermediation in the crypto market but also represents a profound restructuring of financing structures and value discovery mechanisms. Its potential lies in advancing the evolution of on-chain markets from local innovation to system-wide financial infrastructure.

2.ICM Roadmap

In July 2025, the Solana team, in collaboration with Anza, Jito Labs, Drift, and other institutions, released the "Internet Capital Market Roadmap." According to the "Internet Capital Market Roadmap," the ICM technology roadmap is divided into three phases: short-term, medium-term, and long-term.

• Short-term: The focus is on launching BAM, the block assembly market developed by Jito Labs, and promoting the trading implementation of Anza. BAM is a next-generation, high-performance transaction execution system that runs in a trusted execution environment (TEE). It provides validators and developers with a verifiable, privacy-protected execution space, enabling applications to customize transaction ordering logic, achieving performance similar to that of ACE. It enables the on-chain central limit order book (CLOB) to have matching efficiency comparable to that of centralized exchanges, while maintaining transparency and certainty, significantly improving the fairness and trust of execution. BAM launched on the mainnet at the end of September. Meanwhile, Anza is continuously improving its transaction implementation mechanism. By optimizing the QUIC protocol and introducing a unified scheduling system, transactions can be more reliably completed on-chain within the same block cycle, building a low-latency, highly reliable execution layer foundation for Solana.
• Medium-term: The medium-term plan focuses on the DoubleZero fiber network, the Alpenglow consensus protocol, and the asynchronous program execution mechanism (APE). DoubleZero is a high-performance fiber network designed specifically for distributed systems. It can reduce transaction latency to sub-100 milliseconds, increase bandwidth by approximately tenfold, and enhance network stability and attack resistance through multicast acceleration and traffic filtering layers. Alpenglow is a new consensus protocol that reduces block confirmation time from approximately 12.8 seconds to 150 milliseconds, while simplifying consensus logic and laying the foundation for multiple concurrent block generation (MCL) and asynchronous execution. APE further shortens transaction landing time by removing the execution replay path. These three upgrades will jointly build Solana's low-latency, high-bandwidth execution base, providing a more efficient infrastructure for decentralized capital markets.
• Long-term (after 2027): The long-term goal is to implement a multi-concurrent block producer mechanism and a protocol-enforced Application Control Architecture (ACE). The MCL model allows multiple validators to produce blocks simultaneously, reducing geographic latency and censorship risks while improving global information synchronization efficiency. ACE will enable applications to customize matching logic and transaction ordering at the protocol level, building a truly open and programmable microstructure. By then, Solana could become the decentralized capital market infrastructure that carries the deepest global liquidity, providing the technical foundation for the full realization of internet capital markets.

Source: anza.xyz

2. Recent popular projects in the ICM ecosystem

1. MetaDAO

MetaDAO, currently the most valuable ICM project, is backed by Paradigm and is considered a new engine for decentralized fundraising. Its core innovation lies in its adoption of the Futarchy (prediction market governance) model, proposed by economist Robin Hanson. This model uses market prices, rather than token voting, to determine the acceptance of project proposals, thereby achieving more efficient and market-based governance. All USDC raised on the platform is held in an on-chain treasury. The system uses a prediction market mechanism to allow participants to bet on the potential impact of proposals. If a majority believes a proposal will increase the token price, the market price for "yes" (bullish) positions will be higher than that for "no" (bearish) positions. Only when the "yes" market price exceeds the "no" market price by at least 1.5% does it indicate a strong market consensus that the proposal will have a positive impact on the token's value, at which point the team is allowed to access the treasury funds. This design ensures that the use of funds is subject to market verification, effectively preventing subjective decision-making, misuse of funds, or short-term arbitrage.

MetaDAO has also designed a rigorous anti-rug and performance-based incentive mechanism to balance security and incentive effectiveness. 20% of raised funds and 50% of project tokens will be locked in a protocol-controlled liquidity pool to prevent premature cashing out by the team. Team incentives will be gradually unlocked after the token price reaches the established phased target. Notably, MetaDAO also introduced a "three-month average price verification mechanism," requiring the token price to remain above the target average price for the corresponding phase for three consecutive months to trigger the unlocking of corresponding incentives. This is accompanied by an 18-month lock-up period, reinforcing a long-term development focus and safeguarding the interests of investors and the community. Through its triple mechanism of futarchy governance, on-chain treasury custody, and performance-based incentives, MetaDAO protects investor security while encouraging the team to focus on long-term value growth and sustainable operations. Currently, the market capitalization of its platform token, META, is approximately $173 million.

2. Believe

Believe pioneered the "tweet-token" model, significantly lowering the barrier to entry for token issuance. Users simply reply to any tweet with "@launchcoin + token name" to automatically mint tokens. Upon token creation, a trading pool is automatically generated through a bonding curve, enabling initial price discovery. When the token's market capitalization reaches $100,000, the project is considered "graduated" and enters the deep liquidity pool of Meteora, Solana's decentralized exchange, offering enhanced trading capacity. The platform's revenue distribution is also innovative: 50% of each transaction fee is split 50% between the creator and the Believe platform, creating a continuous incentive. Project financing utilizes a phased unlocking mechanism to ensure the long-term and transparent use of funds. The platform's LaunchCoin token's market capitalization once exceeded $400 million, rapidly boosting the popularity of the ICM concept.

However, Believe still faces certain uncertainties. LaunchCoin's flywheel mechanism has yet to be announced, and the updates repeatedly announced by the founding team have yet to be implemented. This has led to a pullback in market enthusiasm and a wait-and-see attitude among the community regarding the subsequent narrative. Inadequate sniper protection and liquidity-sharing mechanisms have kept most tokens in the small-cap market, with limited capital depth, making it difficult to support larger price breakthroughs. Overall liquidity remains concentrated in the on-chain market, lacking a leading token driven by strong sentiment. The Believe platform has generated 53,720 tokens, but only approximately 104 of them are active. Beyond LaunchCoin itself, the upward potential of other tokens is limited. Currently, LaunchCoin's market capitalization is $67.02 million.

Source: believescreener

3. Trends.fun

On October 20th, the community-initiated and officially Solana-approved Chinese meme "Solala" launched its token on Trends.fun, quickly generating market excitement and attracting a new wave of PVP competition from other related tokens. Trends.fun is a recently emerging content monetization platform. Its core concept is to enable instant monetization of social content. Users can tag any post on X through the Trends.fun social tokenization bot to automatically generate the corresponding token, creating a direct correlation between social reach, community consensus, and token price. Unlike traditional ICM platforms, Trends.fun emphasizes a social data-driven value discovery mechanism. The higher the attention a content receives, the more active its token trading becomes, and price fluctuations more accurately reflect market sentiment and consensus, thereby building a new economic model where content is an asset.

Trends.fun's economic model is based on a bonding curve mechanism, dynamically adjusting prices based on social buzz, directly linking content influence with market value. The platform has a clear fee structure: creating a token requires a fee of approximately 0.016 SOL, which includes an on-chain creation fee charged by Solana and metadata storage fees collected by Metaplex. The platform itself does not charge any additional fees. Token purchases and sales, as well as DEX transactions, incur a 1% transaction fee. Regarding revenue distribution, "Creators" receive a 20% commission share on transactions involving their associated trending tokens, while "Trendors" receive a 5% commission share on each transaction related to their trending post X. The remainder is used for system maintenance and ecosystem development. All unclaimed rewards expire three months after generation, creating a time-sensitive incentive and deflationary effect.

4.ICM.RUN

ICM.RUN is a decentralized project incubation platform built on the ICM philosophy, aiming to establish an open entrepreneurship and financing system within the Solana ecosystem. ICM.RUN utilizes a DAO as its core governance structure, allowing anyone to initiate fundraising and incubation proposals on the platform. Investors can participate in project crowdfunding and gain governance rights. The overall process includes founder application submission, mentor voting and evaluation, DAO incubation, token injection into the treasury, and subsequent distribution. Accepted projects are required to allocate approximately 1% of their token supply to the DAO treasury for future proportional distribution to ICM token holders. All operations are conducted on-chain, ensuring transparency and traceability.

ICM.RUN's core mechanisms revolve around value capture and ecosystem collaboration. The platform utilizes a three-tiered structure to recycle token value. The first tier is the incubation layer, where a DAO selects projects through mentor voting and shares early token rewards. The second tier is the ecosystem layer, where the platform collaborates with multiple Solana launchpads to assist in the incubation and launch of high-quality projects. The third tier is the NFT incentive layer, which provides community members with benefits such as whitelisting, airdrops, and pre-sales. Overall, ICM.RUN is designed to replace the traditional venture capital model with decentralized incubation and market-based governance, lowering the barrier to early-stage funding and increasing transparency in fund utilization. The project team is currently planning to launch a Venture Arm, a DAO-affiliated platform, to expand on-chain incubation channels for traditional startup teams. The current market capitalization of its platform token, ICM, is approximately $17.9 million.

Source: icm.run

5.DoubleZero

DoubleZero is the underlying infrastructure within the Solana ecosystem focused on optimizing network performance and a key technical component in realizing the ICM vision. DoubleZero proposes the IBRL (Increase Bandwidth, Reduce Latency) architecture, which aims to significantly reduce consensus latency and improve system throughput by improving node communication paths and reducing network jitter and congestion. DoubleZero's goal is to achieve an average latency of less than 10 milliseconds and a multi-fold increase in throughput on the Solana mainnet, thereby providing performance support for capital market applications such as high-frequency trading and real-time settlement.

From a technical perspective, DoubleZero is a high-performance, dedicated fiber-optic network layer designed for distributed systems, providing fundamental performance support within the Solana network and ICM ecosystem. Beyond performance optimization, DoubleZero also serves as a powerful data filtering layer, protecting the network from denial-of-service (DoS) attacks and abnormal traffic, alleviating overload on validators and RPC nodes, and freeing node resources to execute tasks and expand the block space, thereby improving overall network processing efficiency and scalability. Through this architecture, DoubleZero provides the core underlying communication and protection capabilities for Solana's ICM.

3. Summary

ICM is Solana's most strategic long-term direction. Its goal is to upgrade the internet from an information transmission layer to a value circulation layer, bringing asset issuance, pricing, and settlement fully on-chain, and building an open, transparent, and low-friction global capital network. This system aims to lower the barrier to capital formation, improve market efficiency and verifiability, and thus advance the blockchain's evolution from a transactional vehicle to financial infrastructure. For Solana, ICM is not just an extension of performance competition; it redefines the ecosystem, integrating network performance, market mechanisms, and governance structures into a cross-layered capital operation framework.

However, the ICM is still in its early stages, and its overall system has yet to achieve a closed loop. While Solana's official roadmap has clearly defined its technical direction, including key modules like the BAM transaction execution layer and the DoubleZero network layer, these infrastructure components are still undergoing performance verification. On the application side, projects like MetaDAO, Believe, and Trends.fun have demonstrated various approaches, but ecosystem synergy and liquidity integration remain limited. Currently, the ICM represents more of a systemic consensus than a mature market structure. Its future implementation will depend on the realization of underlying performance, the sustainability of market mechanisms, and the development of the institutional environment. As these elements gradually mature, Solana may transform from a high-performance public chain into a financial infrastructure supporting global value circulation.