This year has seen the emergence of a new Internet person empowered by AI coding tools to build software for the Internet’s long tail: the vibe coder. The vibe coder heralds an era of software development that is democratized, effortless and instant, and an Internet economy propelled by builders rather than influencers.

Vibe coders need a viral and organic way to market their products. Crypto could provide it. A new generation of token launchers, such as Believe and L( )ng, is trying to unlock the vibe launch using tokenized idea markets that allow users to launch and trade product ideas. If those tokenized ideas attract enough support, these platforms assign a portion of the trading fees to builders who are willing to execute on them.

Ideas markets are a clever way to harness democratized token creation and speculative trading towards dispersed innovation. For the vibe coder, they are a way to spark virality, attract community and gain access to Internet capital markets. Provided these new platforms can find ways to control abuses, cultivate committed communities and gain mainstream traction, they could help define the Internet’s next chapter and its new main character.

Meet the Vibe Coder

New technologies create new persons. Or, as Marshall McLuhan put it, “first we build the tools, then they build us.” Meet the vibe coder: the product of the vibe-coding revolution. Andrej Karpathy, a co-founder of OpenAI, coined the term “vibe coding” about four months ago. Since then, the term has set off a stampede towards this Internet persona.

Vibe coders are non-technical creators who build software products using AI coding tools (e.g. Cursor and Windsurf) that are flow-based and chatbot-oriented, and that enable fast and intuitive product development. Like past successful Internet personae, anyone can become a vibe-coder builder. With AI doing the coding, what matters is creativity, flow and intent, not technical knowledge.

Among the defining traits of vibe coders is that they put their products into production practically as they conceived of them. They also iterate quickly, collaborate often and welcome strange and unexpected turns during product development, which they guide more than they control. Their creations extend to niche and esoteric fields but remain responsive to the current moment.

Vibe coders must rely on the viral and memetic properties of the web to bring their creations to market. They have many ancestors but the most immediate is the cracked Gen Z indie hacker.

Vibe coders are still in their emergent phase so we are just getting to know them, but they may soon bestride the web with the ubiquity of influencers in the age of corporate social networks or bloggers at the dawn of websites, and they may become a default persona for young people unable to find entry-level white-collar jobs.

Vibe It and Launch It

Vibe coders want an early market signal about which ideas and products are timely, so they can immediately seize upon them. They avoid venture capital for funding and aim to bootstrap development while attracting early users.

A new generation of token launchpads is trying to deliver on those wants using ideas markets. An illustrative early mover is Believe, which has been compared to a Kickstarter for ideas and projects for the long tail of the Internet. Believe’s flow is simple. A founder or scout can submit a project through the app or tag an idea post on social media with @launchacoin, which automatically creates an idea token tied to that idea. That token then immediately begins trading in an ideas market that determines the idea’s fair value based on the scale and importance of the problem being solved, and the builder’s ability to execute.

The ideas market allows builders to gauge the timeliness of the product idea and to assess market demand while creating conditions for viral distribution. If enough trading fees are generated in the ideas market, the builders can claim part of them to start or continue building the product itself. This means that product ideas with early viral traction can begin producing real revenue before the product has matured or a full ecosystem has formed. It also means that vibe coders can bootstrap early users economically motivated to support rapid iteration.

Over time, builders can begin integrating the idea token within the real product and its economics, imbuing it with more economic fundamentals and aligning token-holders with its long-term success. Believe offers a suite of APIs that support that integration, including a burning mechanism that burns tokens based on the product’s ability to convert users.

Believe has competitors, such as L( )ng and an evolving Pump.fun, which recently turned on creator fee sharing. What they have in common is that they are relying on ideas markets for incidentally launching real products. Those products so far include Dupe (finds cheap dupes of high-end furniture and décor), CreatorBuddy (optimizes your presence on X), AVO (a marketplace for trading agents), Kaiko (an app studio) and Fitcoin (an AI virtual closet). AllianceDAO, a crypto accelerator, recently accepted its first startup that launched on Believe.

Vibe Kill

Crypto is no stranger to co-opting hot narratives before failing to deliver on them, and this latest experiment has its fair share of detractors.

A prominent criticism is that these vibe launch platforms are wrappers for memecoins. While it is true that idea tokens possess the basic characteristics of memecoins, they trade in markets aimed at processing information constructively and subsidizing product development as a byproduct. At least in theory, this is similar to the way that prediction markets reveal truth or policy markets promote better policymaking—what Vitalik Buterin calls info finance. That said, in order to prevent an extractive industry growing up around ideas markets, platforms must curb automated sniping and dumping while cultivating devoted communities, or even product cults, by design. In this regard, Believe repels sniping with taxes on early purchases and uses APIs to align token-holders with the product long-term. L( )ng goes considerably further by orchestrating Dutch auctions for idea tokens and embedding vesting schedules.

Another criticism is that the business model is non-compliant because it orchestrates ICOs. Yet, ideas markets might actually be a compliant path to fund products (not legal advice!) because product funding is generally the byproduct, or the exhaust, of the meme/idea market, not of any fundraising sales to the public. The absence of a legal relationship between builders and holders of the tokens, which can be initiated by third parties (i.e. scouts), makes it even more challenging to locate a traditional securities issuer or an investment contract. And a friendlier SEC has begun permitting certain creators to monetize their creations using tokens, at least when it involves NFTs. At minimum, the “vibe raise” will be a case of first impression for courts and regulators.

Finally, detractors contend that ideas markets like Believe’s will not attract mainstream builders and consumers who fear the wild west of crypto. Yet, Believe is steered by a Web2 founder and has attracted mostly Web2 builders. Growth hacker Nikita Bier is an investor and vocal booster. Mainstream success rests on curation, safeguards and sustainable economics. Here, Believe’s record is mixed. While it has taken great pains to prevent spam and rugs spam and rugs, its monetization take rate of 50% is more extractive than the AppStore’s (only 30%), and it is not above featuring flash-in-the-pan gambling games. The more recently launched L( )ng is searching for mainstream traction by integrating verified communities for curation and aggressively courting long-term builders outside of Web3

A Builder Economy

Vibe-coding is rapidly ushering in an Internet builder economy populated by an influx of builders and their nearly instant creations. At the same time, democratized token issuance and ideas markets are creating a blueprint for the tokenized vibe launch. Together, they can power the proliferation of a range of niche and eccentric products to serve the web’s long tail and likely make it even longer. That is a good thing for the web and for the crypto ecosystem.

The launch of Bitcoin in 2009 created a resilient and decentralized monetary asset. Early adherents rallied around it as a singular innovation — immutable, fixed-supply, and leaderless. Over time, this coalesced into a belief system: Bitcoin maximalism. The argument was simple. Bitcoin came first. It had the most Proof-of-Work security. The most conservative monetary policy. All other assets were distractions or regressions.

But that framing increasingly diverges from how Bitcoin is now being applied in practice.

Interoperability Becomes the New Norm

Today, the crypto ecosystem is no longer a collection of isolated silos or, at least, it needn’t be. Interoperability is the backbone of Web3. The same technologies that maximalists once dismissed, like wrapped bitcoin and cross-chain bridges, are now exposing the limitations of that worldview. While these technologies are far from perfect, they prove that users want more than ideological purity; they want utility and functionality. This evolution is particularly significant for Bitcoin, which has historically been limited by its transaction speeds and a lack of smart contract functionality.

The watershed moment came with the emergence and explosive growth of DeFi, offering yield farming, lending, and trading opportunities that Bitcoin — at least in its native form — couldn’t directly participate in (most early DeFi activity was concentrated on Ethereum).

To bridge this gap, solutions like wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC) were conceived and launched, tokenizing BTC for use on Ethereum and other chains. While this was a step forward, wrapped tokens came with associated risks, such as centralized custodians, potential security vulnerabilities and an overall departure from Bitcoin’s trustless ethos.

New systems, including trust-minimized tunneling and Bitcoin-anchored consensus proofs, are enabling BTC to be integrated into smart contract environments without compromising its core properties. These architectures avoid the need for wrapping. Instead, they treat Bitcoin as a foundational, external settlement layer that can interact directly with the rest of the blockchain ecosystem — through tunneling and specialized Bitcoin-aware virtual machines.

The result is simple: Bitcoin is no longer isolated. And it no longer needs to be.

Maximalism vs. Infrastructure

Bitcoin maximalism asserts that BTC alone is sufficient. But the infrastructure now being deployed across the ecosystem proves otherwise. BTC is being used in DeFi. BTC is supporting NFT standards. BTC is moving across chains. And it is doing so without compromising its consensus layer or monetary properties.

The future of crypto belongs to collaboration, not isolation. Blockchain infrastructure will be shaped by interoperability and modular design. Bitcoin need not compete for dominance in such an ecosystem; rather, it can complement and secure a broader multi-chain ecosystem. As developers build bridges between chains rather than walls, they prove that Bitcoin can coexist with other networks, enhancing its utility instead of competing for dominance. In this environment, the maximalist mentality of “one coin to rule them all” already feels out of touch.

Regular crypto users want flexibility and different options to stake, lend, or trade their assets across multiple platforms, which interoperability enables — unlike Bitcoin maximalism that restricts all out-of-the-box use cases. As multi-chain ecosystems mature, users are increasingly drawn to infrastructure that supports cross-chain utility, including secure integrations of BTC.

Finally, Bitcoin maximalism has always been rooted mostly in ideology — but the crypto industry is driven by innovation, and new technologies are proving that BTC can evolve without losing its importance or advantages. This way, maximalists risk being left behind if they dismiss these advancements as mere “distractions.”

The Core of A Multi-Chain Stack

Bitcoin continues to serve as the most secure and censorship-resistant settlement network in the world. That is not changing. What is changing is the environment around it. Decentralized systems are growing more interoperable. The expectation that networks will remain isolated is no longer viable.

BTC is becoming a core layer in a multi-chain stack, and more integrated into systems it once stood apart from.

Where once Bitcoin maximalism offered clarity during crypto’s early phases of growth, the ecosystem has evolved. Today, Bitcoin can serve as a cornerstone in a broader system emphasizing security, interconnectivity, and composability.

As this trend continues to gain momentum, Bitcoin maximalism may fade because the idea that one coin must dominate all others ignores the power of collaboration and innovation. Interoperability isn’t a threat to Bitcoin — it’s a catalyst for growth. The future of crypto isn’t about choosing a single winner but rather about building a decentralized world where every chain, including Bitcoin, plays a vital role.

The decentralized future will rely on systems that are secure, interoperable, and modular. Bitcoin’s role as a resilient base layer ensures that it will persist as an integral component of that future, not as the only chain, but a fundamental cornerstone among others.

The Ethereum blockchain’s unique selling point is its role as a decentralized computer, Wall Street broker Bernstein said in a research report Monday.

Inflows into ether ETH exchange-traded funds are increasing as institutions become aware of the network’s value proposition, the broker said.

The blockchain «deserves love» as it is useful technology, according to the report, acknowledging that ether’s larger peer bitcoin benefits from its perception as a store of value, or digital gold.

«Interesting blockchain use cases such as stablecoins and tokenization are native to Ethereum, analysts led by Gautam Chhugani wrote, adding that the network enjoys «maximum market share» in these areas.

Companies that use stablecoin technology are paying transaction fees to the Ethereum blockchain, the report noted.

As institutions become more aware of the value inherent in the network, ether ETF inflows have begun to pick up, the report noted.

Ether ETF inflows reached $815 million over the last 20 days, with year-to-date net inflows turning positive at $658 million, Bernstein said.

«The narrative around value accrual of public blockchain networks is at a critical inflection point, » the broker said, and this is «starting to reflect in investor interest in ETH ETF inflows.»

Read more: ETH Surges as Spot ETF Inflows Hit 15-Day Streak, Traders Watch $2,540 Level