It's not about tokenomics. It's not about fair launches. It's not about governance. It's not about hype or metas. There is only one thing that matters for ICM to be successful.
The Time for Internet Capital Markets Is Now
History shows that every major technological shift is powered by a pair — infrastructure and products driving each other in a virtuous cycle. We've seen it time and again. The Internet and the personal computer (PC). Online payments and e-commerce. 3G and the smartphone.
The adoption of breakthrough products and the infrastructure that supports them go hand-in-hand.
At Pond, we believe a similar dynamic is inevitable for crypto and AI. Because the bottleneck has shifted.
Building is no longer the hard part: distribution, validation, and achieving traction are. The question is no longer "Can you build?" but "Can you prove the market wants this, and can you prove it fast?"
That's why crypto and AI make Internet Capital Markets inevitable.
AI collapses build time.
Crypto collapses validation time.
Put them together, and the market itself becomes the accelerator.
When building is easy, validation becomes everything. And markets are the most powerful validation engine society has. Especially in crypto, where markets move fast and users serve as co-founders that work to support, share, and accelerate startups due to aligned incentives.
What Crypto Needs
At its core, the onchain market is a programmable financial market. Markets are a form of infrastructure that allocate resources efficiently, to where they can generate the highest returns and yield the greatest societal utility.
But crypto's problem isn't infrastructure. It's inventory.
The rails work. The liquidity exists. The mechanisms function. But what's flowing through the pipes is hollow.
That's the thesis behind Internet Capital Markets: strong companies are the only thing that the onchain economy needs to thrive.
Exceptional Startups
A lack of these startups is why capital comes onchain, but seldom stays.
It's why everyone in the ecosystem talks in cycles and narratives.
Because the truth is undeniable: good businesses are few and far in-between in crypto.
That's why Pond's North Star is to find these startups, no matter where they are.
And then scale them, no matter what it takes.
Our mission is to find the best early-stage tech startups in the world. Traditional tech or crypto, AI or DeFi, we're betting on AI-native teams that build fast — and giving them the tools to validate and distribute just as fast.
If they prove themselves, we'll tokenize their businesses on Pond.
Every decision we make, every product we launch, and every dollar we spend is oriented around this North Star.
At scale, Pond will supercharge crypto's hyperliquid markets and lightning-fast distribution with the one thing it desperately needs: startups that generate real value.
Results > Words
What defines a killer startup? Simple.
Results.
Time and again in crypto, users are sold a grand vision.
But vision only matters if it's made real. And success — real success — can't be faked.
Before any startup is introduced to the Pond community, our team vets each startup for three intangible qualities that we think are required to find success onchain. Founder-market fit. Product-market fit. Token-market fit.
And then the non-negotiable: relentless execution. The willingness to ship, adapt, and grind without hesitation.
But that's just the price of entry.
The ideal startup for Pond is an early-stage, self-funded consumer startup that has already found initial traction in the form of revenue or users.
Self-funded teams move differently. They go all-in from day one and build with urgency because the alternative is failure. They don't ship in quarters. They ship in days.
And if they already have traction, that means their vision has momentum, and they've proven an initial ability to execute.
Even then, it's not enough. Because results — traction, users, revenue, growth, and retention — are the only thing that truly move markets over the long-term.
So we built a system that surfaces reality and provides proof by design. A system that exists to amplify startups that execute and filter out the ones that don't.
All before they launch. Results first. Token second.
That's why Pond is not a launchpad.
Pond is a decentralized accelerator (dAcc).
The community needs proof: proof of quality, proof of execution, proof of results.
Startups need traction: users, funding, revenue, growth, and above all, retention.
These are two sides of the same coin. Pond is the system that aligns them.
Here's how we do it.
1. Pond Futures
Every startup on Pond first onboards into Pond Futures.
It's a rigorous process where startups are required to give weekly updates (at minimum), showcase traction, and build in public in front of the community.
Our logic is simple: Transparency builds trust. Every Pond Futures startup needs to build that trust with the community from the ground up.
Can you move fast? Can you meet your timelines? Can your product retain users? Can you get your first $5K in MRR? Can you grow exponentially from there?
The startups that can answer these questions in results, not writing, are the ones that move forward.
The ones that don't? They won't get past the process.
And the entire time, the market is paying attention. Because the startups that graduate Pond Futures can be seeded on Pond Markets.
More on Pond Futures here.
2. Pond Bounties
Every startup that joins Pond gets access to Pond Bounties: a growth mechanism designed to convert direct rewards into real traction.
Bounties let startups acquire users and accelerate execution from day one. But the real breakthrough is not the tasks themselves — it's the data generated by every bounty completed across the entire ecosystem.
The system is built to compound with each additional bounty: which reward structures work best, which user profiles convert and retain, which labor types can be outsourced effectively, and which messaging drives action.
Every startup that launches a bounty adds to this growing network of learnings that creates a shared, evolving map of how to acquire users, reduce costs, and speed up operations.
This means every Pond startup can start with an advantage that only improves over time.
Users can be rewarded for using apps. Providing feedback. Voting 5 stars on the app store. Upvoting on Product Hunt. Looking for bugs. Referring a friend. Making content. Any task that drives value back to the business is fair game on bounties. The ideas are endless.
But it's the startup's job to attract, retain, and convert these users.
Pond Bounties is where validation meets distribution. And it accelerates everything.
The results are then delivered back to Pond Futures for the entire community to see.
More on Pond Bounties here.
3. Pond Markets
Pond Markets is the final step.
It's meant for the startups that find real traction, real users, and real revenue during their time in Pond Futures.
The community green-lights them to launch, armed with the wealth of information from each update, each metric, and each bounty.
This is the final test. A vote with wallets.
Not every startup will get to launch. Not every launch will succeed.
But through this process, every startup gets the chance to earn their success in the open. To prove, not promise, their value to the market.
Post-launch, Pond acts as a long-term partner for every startup as they chase the gold standard of $1M ARR or 100K users. Bespoke services, requested product features, tokenomics flexibility, and more.
We work one-to-one with every team that needs our support.
The Road Ahead
This is just the beginning. For ICM, for Pond, and for the onchain economy.
Internally, Pond has expanded its dealsourcing capabilities to attract hundreds of startups every month. A fraction of these will get to Pond Futures.
Pond Futures is now live and running, with its first two members providing weekly updates.
Pond Bounties launched just a few weeks ago with $10K+ USDC in rewards, 15+ tasks, and hundreds of task completions.
We have yet to launch our first startup on Pond Markets with this new system.
Over the next few months, we'll be working relentlessly to:
- Source more startups. Pond's North Star. Nothing works unless we bring world-class startups to the table.
- Increase Pond Futures transparency. We're setting a new standard for how startups share progress. Expect more data, clearer metrics, and greater accountability.
- Expand Pond Bounties. Cleaner user flow, more tasks, and a broader userbase — many of them from outside of crypto. We're onboarding non-crypto-native startups. We need the users to match.
- Fine-tune Markets. Stronger tokenomics, deeper utility, and seamless community-first launches.
Ultimately, crypto doesn't need more narratives. Now more than ever, crypto needs proof.
Proof that great products exist in the industry. Proof that startups can scale. Proof that value doesn't just flow in, but stays.
This is the vision of Internet Capital Markets, and Pond is where proven startups launch.
Want updates on the next launch? Like and repost this article, then make an account on Pond (5-second email connect). We'll dm you for our next launch.
If you're a relentless startup team and what we're doing resonates with you, apply to launch on Pond.
About Pond
Pond is a decentralized acceleration platform for B2C startups to scale and launch.
We are backed by Tier 1 VCs such as Coinbase Ventures and 30+ angels, including the co-author of 'Attention is All You Need' (the foundation paper of GPT).