ICM: The Core Narrative of Solana's Strategic Upgrade

Recently, the Meme ecosystem of Solana has heated up again. The Chinese Meme “索拉拉”, initiated by the community and recognized by Solana's official, has seen its market capitalization surpass $15 million in a short period, making its launch platform Trends.fun a new focal point. Meanwhile, the leading Meme launch platform in the Solana ecosystem, Pump.fun, has recently established a new X account “Spotlight”, which aims to accelerate the construction in the ICM aspect.

This series of market movements is not coincidental, but rather a systematic shift at the strategic level by Solana. ICM has been regarded by Solana officials as a strategic core for the future, aiming to elevate the internet from the information transmission layer to the value circulation layer. By fully putting issuance, pricing, and settlement on-chain, ICM attempts to reconstruct the underlying logic of global capital markets, enabling funds and users to circulate directly in an open network with high efficiency and without intermediaries. For Solana, this is not only a competition of technical performance but also a reconstruction of the ecosystem. Below, CoinW Research Institute will explore the roadmap of ICM and recent ecological trends based on this core.

1. Overview of ICM

1. The concept of ICM

ICM (Internet Capital Markets) refers to a new type of financial infrastructure based on blockchain and decentralized technology, aimed at putting the entire process of issuance, pricing, and trading on-chain, allowing any user with internet access to participate directly in the capital market. Unlike traditional models that rely on intermediaries such as brokers and investment banks, ICM achieves trustless financing and investment through smart contracts, significantly lowering the barriers to asset issuance and investment. Its concept can be seen as a continuation of the development of crypto financing, from ICOs, IEOs, IDOs, to Launchpads, with each iteration reinforcing transparency and liquidity, while ICM further integrates these mechanisms to build a unified on-chain capital market. The chairman of the Solana Foundation stated that the ultimate vision of ICM is “to create a global financial infrastructure through blockchain, enabling everyone with internet access to participate in asset investment trading.”

In May of this year, the ICM concept gained rapid popularity due to the launch of new platforms in the Solana ecosystem, such as Believe. Believe is centered around the core logic of “attention as capital” and triggers on-chain issuance through social dissemination, allowing users to complete token creation, pricing, and trading within minutes. ICM not only continues the process of disintermediation in the crypto market but also represents a deep reconstruction of financing structures and value discovery mechanisms. Its potential lies in evolving the on-chain market from localized innovation to a systematic 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 technology roadmap of ICM is divided into three phases: short-term, medium-term, and long-term.

• Short-term: The focus is on launching the block assembly market BAM developed by Jito Labs and advancing the trading implementation of Anza. BAM is a next-generation high-performance trading execution system that operates in a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE), providing verifiable and privacy-preserving execution space for validators and developers, allowing applications to customize transaction ordering logic to achieve results close to ACE. It enables on-chain Central Limit Order Book (CLOB) to have matching efficiency comparable to centralized exchanges while maintaining transparency and determinism, significantly enhancing the fairness and trustworthiness of execution. BAM went live on the mainnet at the end of September. Meanwhile, Anza is continuously improving the trading implementation mechanism by optimizing the QUIC protocol and introducing a unified scheduling system to ensure that transactions can be completed on-chain more stably within the same block generation period, building a low-latency and highly reliable execution layer foundation for Solana.
• Medium-term: The medium-term plan focuses on the DoubleZero fiber network, Alpenglow consensus protocol, and Asynchronous Program Execution mechanism (APE). DoubleZero is a high-performance fiber network designed specifically for distributed systems, capable of reducing transaction latency to less than 100 milliseconds, increasing bandwidth by about ten times, and enhancing network stability and attack resistance through multicast acceleration and traffic filtering layers. Alpenglow is a brand new consensus protocol that shortens block confirmation time from about 12.8 seconds to 150 milliseconds while simplifying consensus logic, laying the foundation for Multi-Concurrent Block Production (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 layer, providing a more efficient infrastructure for decentralized capital markets.
• Long-term (after 2027): The long-term goal is to achieve a multi-concurrent block producer mechanism and an application autonomous control architecture (ACE) enforced at the protocol layer. Among them, the MCL model allows multiple validators to produce blocks simultaneously, which can reduce geographical latency and censorship risk, while enhancing global information synchronization efficiency; ACE will empower application-specific matching logic and transaction ordering at the protocol layer, constructing a truly open and programmable microstructure. By then, Solana may become the decentralized capital market infrastructure with the deepest liquidity globally, providing the technological foundation for the comprehensive realization of internet capital markets.

Source：anza.xyz

2. Recent Hot Projects in the ICM Ecosystem

1.MetaDAO

MetaDAO is currently the project with the highest market capitalization in the ICM concept, invested by Paradigm, and is seen as a new engine for decentralized fundraising. Its core innovation lies in the introduction of the Futarchy (prediction market governance) model proposed by economist Robin Hanson, which decides the acceptance or rejection of project proposals based on market prices rather than voting with tokens, thereby achieving more efficient and market-oriented governance. All USDC raised by the platform is fully held in an on-chain treasury, and the system allows participants to bet on the potential impact of proposals through a prediction market mechanism. If the majority believes that the proposal will help increase the token price, the price of the “Yes” (bullish) position in the market will be higher than that of the “No” (bearish) position. When the price of the “Yes” market is at least 1.5% higher than the price of the “No” market, it indicates that the market has formed a strong consensus that the proposal has a positive impact on the token value, at which point the team is allowed to use the treasury funds. This design ensures that the use of funds must be verified by the market, thereby preventing subjective decision-making, fund misuse, or short-term arbitrage behavior.

At the same time, MetaDAO has designed strict anti-Rug and performance incentive mechanisms to balance security and incentive effects. Among them, 20% of the raised funds and 50% of the project tokens will be locked in a liquidity pool controlled by the protocol to prevent the team from cashing out early; the team incentive portion will be gradually unlocked only after the token price reaches the established stage target. It is worth noting that MetaDAO has also introduced a “3-month average price verification mechanism,” which means that the token price must remain above the corresponding stage target average price for three consecutive months to trigger the corresponding incentive unlock. There is also an 18-month lock-up period, reinforcing the long-term construction orientation and protecting the interests of investors and the community. Through the triple mechanisms of Futarchy governance, on-chain treasury custody, and performance incentives, MetaDAO not only protects investor safety but also encourages the team to focus on long-term value growth and sustainable operation. Currently, the market capitalization of its platform token META is approximately 173 million dollars.

2.Believe

Believe pioneered the model where tweets represent tokens, significantly lowering the threshold for token issuance. Users only need to reply “@launchcoin + token name” under any tweet to automatically mint tokens. Once the token is created, it automatically generates a trading pool through a binding curve for initial price discovery. When the token's market capitalization reaches $100,000, it is considered to have “graduated” and can enter the deep liquidity pool of the Solana decentralized trading platform Meteora, gaining stronger trading capacity. The platform's revenue distribution is also innovative, with transaction fees split evenly between the creator and the Believe platform, forming a continuous incentive. The project's financing employs a phased unlocking mechanism to ensure the long-term and transparent use of funds. The platform token LaunchCoin's market capitalization once exceeded $400 million, rapidly popularizing the ICM concept.

However, Believe still faces certain uncertainties. The flywheel mechanism of LaunchCoin has not been disclosed, and the updates repeatedly promised by the founding team have yet to be implemented, resulting in a market heat correction from its high position, with the community exhibiting a wait-and-see attitude towards subsequent narratives; the lack of sniper protection and liquidity support mechanisms has left most tokens at a small-cap stage, with limited funding depth, making it difficult to support larger price breaks. Overall liquidity remains concentrated in on-chain markets, lacking strong sentiment-driven leaders to drive momentum. The Believe platform has generated 53,720 types of tokens, but only about 104 of them are active. Apart from LaunchCoin itself, the upside potential for other tokens is limited. Currently, the market capitalization of LaunchCoin is $6.702 million.

Source: believescreener

3.Trends.fun

On October 20, the Chinese meme “索拉拉” token, initiated by the community and officially recognized by Solana, completed its token launch on Trends.fun, quickly igniting market interest. Other related tokens issued by Trends.fun also became the focus of a new round of PVP. Trends.fun is a recently emerging content financialization platform, with the core concept of enabling social content to realize “immediate issuance and immediate tokens.” Users can mark any post on X using the Trends.fun social tokenization bot to automatically generate the corresponding tokens, thus creating a direct mapping between social dissemination, community consensus, and token prices. Unlike traditional ICM platforms, Trends.fun emphasizes a value discovery mechanism driven by social data, meaning that the higher the content attention, the more active the token trading, and price fluctuations can more accurately reflect market sentiment and consensus, thereby building a new economic model where content equals assets.

The economic model of Trends.fun is based on a bonding curve mechanism, which dynamically adjusts prices driven by social popularity, achieving a direct linkage between content influence and market value. The platform's fee structure is clear; creating a token requires a payment of approximately 0.016 SOL, which includes the on-chain creation fee charged by Solana and the metadata storage fee charged by Metaplex, with no additional fees charged by the platform itself; buying and selling tokens and DEX transactions require a 1% transaction fee. In terms of revenue distribution, “Creators” can receive a 20% share of the transaction fees from the trading of their associated trend tokens, while “Trendors” can receive 5% of the transaction fee from each transaction related to their trending X posts. The remaining portion is used for system maintenance and ecological construction. All unclaimed rewards will automatically expire three months after generation, creating a certain incentive time limit and deflationary effect.

4.ICM.RUN

ICM.RUN is a decentralized project incubation platform built on the ICM concept, aiming to establish an open entrepreneurship and financing system within the Solana ecosystem. ICM.RUN has 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 founders submitting applications, mentors voting for evaluations, DAO accessing incubation, token injection into the treasury, and subsequent distribution. Accepted projects must allocate about 1% of the token supply to the DAO treasury for future proportional distribution to ICM token holders. All operations are completed on-chain, ensuring transparency and traceability.

The core mechanism of ICM.RUN revolves around value capture and ecological collaboration. The platform achieves token value backflow through a three-tier structure. The first tier is the incubation layer, where the DAO selects projects through mentor voting and shares early token profits; the second tier is the ecological layer, where the platform collaborates with multiple Launchpads on Solana to assist in the incubation and launch of high-quality projects; the third tier is the NFT incentive layer, which provides community members with rights such as whitelists, airdrops, and presales. Overall, the design of ICM.RUN aims to replace traditional venture capital models with decentralized incubation and market governance, reducing the early financing threshold for projects and increasing the transparency of fund use. Currently, the project team plans to launch a Venture Arm under the DAO to expand the on-chain incubation channels for traditional entrepreneurial teams. At present, the market capitalization of its platform token ICM is approximately $17.9 million.

Source：icm.run

5.DoubleZero

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

From a technical positioning perspective, DoubleZero is a high-performance dedicated fiber network layer designed for distributed systems, serving as a fundamental performance support role in the Solana network and ICM ecosystem. In addition to performance optimization, DoubleZero can also act as a powerful data filtering layer to protect the network from denial-of-service (DoS) attacks and abnormal traffic, alleviating the overload pressure on validators and RPC nodes, allowing node resources to focus on executing tasks and expanding block space, thereby enhancing the overall processing efficiency and scalability of the network. Through this structure, DoubleZero provides core underlying communication and protection capabilities for the ICM built for Solana.

3. Conclusion

ICM is the most strategically significant long-term direction for Solana, aiming to upgrade the internet from an information transmission layer to a value circulation layer, fully putting asset issuance, price formation, and settlement on-chain to build an open, transparent, low-friction global capital network. This system aims to lower the threshold for capital formation, enhance market efficiency and verifiability, thereby promoting the development of blockchain from a transaction carrier to financial infrastructure. For Solana, ICM is not only an extension of performance competition but also a redefinition of ecological structure, integrating network performance, market mechanisms, and governance structures into a cross-level capital operation framework.

However, ICM is still in its early stages, and its overall system has not yet formed a closed loop. Although Solana's official roadmap has clarified the technical direction, including important modules like the BAM transaction execution layer and the DoubleZero network layer, these infrastructures are still undergoing performance validation. On the application side, projects like MetaDAO, Believe, and Trends.fun have shown various attempts from different dimensions, but ecosystem synergy and liquidity integration remain limited. Currently, ICM resembles a systemic consensus rather than a mature market structure. Whether it can truly take off in the future will depend on the realization of underlying performance, the sustainability of market mechanisms, and the level of development of the institutional environment. As these factors gradually improve, Solana may transition from a high-performance public chain to a financial infrastructure supporting global value circulation.

Source: CoinW Research Institute