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.