Every startup needs marketing. With new token launches, attention is the most valuable asset. z500 is the first onchain index, on Ansem.io we have built a protocol that allows teams to easily airdrop token supply to $ANSEM holders on launch, and buy+burn $ANSEM to signal alignment to the network and move up spots on the z500 leaderboard. My replies are constantly filled with people and teams trying to get my attention to talk about certain coins or projects, this allows teams to market towards me in a way that benefits the $ANSEM community directly while also gamifying the experience so we can see and reward the best teams. Before I CTO'd $ANSEM it was trading at ~200k market cap, in less than two months it is trading at 200M+ market cap and consistently one of the most traded coins by volume across all blockchains. I will be actively sharing the top projects on the z500 leaderboard and want to find the teams building cool stuff on-chain, while allowing $ANSEM holders to get upside in all of these projects simply by holding one coin and being an active participant on-chain. What is z500? z500 will be an onchain index of all of the most successful token launches in crypto, bringing transparency to the trenches by allowing teams to signal their intent of long-term alignment with token holders, and avoiding the opaque practices of backroom deals with bundled token supply. I’m confident that we have the most effective marketing engine of degenerates on the internet, and will be able to use that to assist with bringing attention to good teams. We want exposure to all of the top performing tokens that launch without having to hyper rotate from our core holdings every week. $ANSEM holders will receive airdrops of all teams that join the z500. In addition to airdropping a portion of new token supply to all $ANSEM holders, teams have the option to advance on the leaderboard by buying+burning $ANSEM on launch. The top of the z500 leaderboard will display the teams who buy+burn the most $ANSEM and the teams who have the most successful launches with the highest market cap of airdropped supply. Hold one coin, and get exposure to every runner in the trenches. Crypto doesn’t need another vanilla token launchpad. Crypto needs a trusted curation layer. Pumpfun has solved token creation. The bonding curve mechanism paired with a simple UI/UX for creating coins with an image, description, and locked liquidity has had great success. However, Pumpfun has not solved token curation. Out of 36,000 launches on pump.fun yesterday, only 1,000 coins graduated, and zero of these coins are trading above 1M market cap. This problem is twofold. On one hand, devving, bundling, & selling coins shortly after launch is a very profitable business. Since it costs nothing to launch on the bonding curve, it is very cheap for devs to launch a lot of coins, buy up a ton of the supply in the same block across multiple wallets, and profit from very little trading volume afterwards. Retail has no way of detecting which coins have been bundled in this way, and are usually exit liquidity for these devs running automated launches and printing every day. To combat this, we have given devs the optionality of being transparent with how much supply the team holds and what the plans are for marketing and building on our enhanced token pages. The gold and diamond tiers on z500 require devs to buy+burn a preset amount of $ANSEM upfront, which devs are much less likely to do if they plan on rugging coins before they can even bond. By allowing teams to demonstrate their intent of being long term projects up front while also paying for marketing at the beginning of the project, we will be able to select for the few quality teams. Obviously there is no way of determining exactly how much teams buy off side wallets, but here we require them to directly put some financial stake at risk before deploying, which greatly increases their desire to make sure the project succeeds long term.
On the other hand, there are a lot of well-capitalized teams and retail users who don’t intend to rug but have no way of paying for effective marketing for their projects, this applies to all altcoins, whether they are memecoins or VC-backed. By giving visibility to quality projects, we will strengthen the overall value of the $ANSEM network, and create more future opportunities for partnerships. We have seen many proof of concepts with this over the past few weeks, the Bullpen & Bulltoshi NFT collections have consistently been two of the most traded NFT collections by volume by attaching themselves to the $ANSEM brand. Both memecoins and tech coins alike suffer from this problem of failing to gain visibility early on. z500 along with our enhanced token page aims to provide more transparency to retail traders from teams, while allowing them to get the attention of a group of token holders who are both very aggressive marketers on social media and also proven to hold coins over an extended period of time. The New Creator Economy I’ve been saying over the past few weeks that we are going to flip the creator-consumer relationship dynamics on their head. This is the first real start of productizing this thesis. With current creator-consumer relationships, brands pay creators $$$ or equity, in return creators promote a product, and consumers buy that product resulting in more revenue for the business paying the creator. In this dynamic, the consumer receives nothing in return but the product that they purchased or spent time using, and the creator gets their sponsorship revenue. We are going to change this. In this new meta of the tokenized creator economy, all consumers own stake in the creator’s network by holding the associated token, in this case $ANSEM, now instead of brands paying the creator $$$, brands are incentivized to direct value towards token holders, whether that is by buying and burning $ANSEM, or by giving special perks to token holders in their business or protocol. This scales extremely well because the creator and consumers both are aligned, while a much larger number of protocols can permissionlessly market towards the network. ansem.io is not only for new token launches, but also for existing protocols. We've made it very easy for teams to market towards token holders and get recognized. I always have trouble as an individual responding to every team who wants to partner with me, and I miss a lot of good teams just because of the sheer amount of volume. The cool thing about having a network of token holders is that anybody can build around the token without your permission and the token holders can respond to the best teams that are doing so in public. I didn’t speak with the BullpenNFTs, Bulltoshi NFTs, manlet, or mensa teams before they launched projects, but all of them have directed value towards $ANSEM in some way shape or form, whether through directing creator rewards to the $ANSEM wallet or buying $ANSEM with a portion of protocol fees, or deepening liquidity on the meteora liquidity pools. One of the reasons I am so bullish on tokenization is because this is only possible when the network is tokenized. In contrast, with web2 creators the only way to market to their consumers is by paying them sponsorship money individually. Token Marketing is Broken KOLs and dexscreener currently dominate the market for marketing new tokens. Dexscreener makes $$$ from listing fees on their site and boosts that teams pay them to get listed higher on their pages. They have a sustainable business because they have created a great product for on-chain charts and are the most used platform for getting information on new tokens. Even though this is true, there is a large gap in the market for better communication between teams launching tokens and token holders. z500 will fill that gap. As it stands, users go to dexscreener to search for trending tickers, where they are barraged with ads of random protocols, and when finding the coins page they go to check the charts, then afterwards go to a linked external telegram or X page to join the community, and then from there search to find out more details on the teams plans and announcements. What if you could do all of this in one place? With z500’s enhanced token pages, devs can update their communities on all relevant information going forward, in the same place that retail users can go to search for trending tickers. KOL marketing is also broken. The current dynamic is that KOLs will get either token supply or cash for talking about projects, more often than not tokens for the lower cap projects, and then will sell their allocated token supply after posting about the coin and generating attention. It encourages influencers to dump on their followers. Even worse if the KOLs are the ones actually launching the coins. If KOLs aren’t being paid by projects and do decide to just mention tokens on-chain they always take the risk of being dumped on by whoever bundled the token launch, as well as not knowing who the team is or what their intents are. z500 completely flips this dynamic. Teams send token supply to $ANSEM holders, buy+burn $ANSEM for marketing, and pay a fee to get boosted on the leaderboard. So in this setup the teams have already delivered value to $ANSEM holders, and by distributing tokens to a large number of wallets reduces sell pressure while also increasing the number of eyes teams are marketing towards. Afterwards token holders can determine which projects they want to support by buying more after evaluating them post-launch, without having to worry about chasing every new narrative on-chain.
Why not create your own launchpad? Launchpads are a fantastic business, but the majority of their revenue comes from the trading volume on tokens that never leave the bonding curve. I have no interest in making money off of coins that go to zero in hours, which is where majority of the bonding curve fees come from. Post-bond, creators make the majority of the fees on new launches, which is the area that I'd like to capitalize on. I would much rather figure out ways to highlight strong teams and give marketing to projects that are going to be around for a long time instead. Anything even slightly acknowledged by this X account immediately bonds if not sending to multi-million dollar market cap or higher, z500 is a way for me to use this attention flywheel to consistently create value for $ANSEM holders while also using this attention to support good teams. Crypto needs more public winners, permissionless blockchains only become attractive to builders when there are a lot more token success stories. To do this I need to source as much liquidity and demand as possible, and I need to incentivize a smaller number of quality token launches instead of encouraging hundreds of thousands of new coins a day. I can’t guarantee whether a coin will be successful or not, but I can ensure that whoever wants to market towards me does so by delivering value to $ANSEM holders, and I can assist in giving attention to other teams who deserve it. I’ve been a pretty vocal critic of Pumpfun over the past few months, in part because I see very clearly a great trade opportunity, but also because they are in such great position as a company that could very easily be much more aligned with their community with the right decisions. As a launchpad with majority market share on the most used retail blockchain, $2B in cash, $370M/rev annualized run rate, an unused community token allocation of 24% of token supply, and a cross-chain user-focused mobile app with an ongoing onboarding rewards program, they have a lot of bullets in the chamber to deploy and not much is necessary to change community sentiment. As a creator, I have the advantage of being able to use existing systems and protocols and build things on top of them. I’ve benefitted from creating a profile on pumpfun, with over $1.5M earned in creator rewards, gifted 65% of a coin trading over $200M market cap, as well as $10M+ gifted in other various coins from teams who wanted to market towards me. It’s most optimal to benefit from existing infrastructure as my primary goal is making $ANSEM as successful as possible. Every coin on the z500 leaderboard will receive cross-marketing from me and my social channels as well as pumpfun’s channels especially if the coins are the top performers on-chain. I’ll continue to vocally give my opinions on what I believe pump & other platforms should do as well that would be in the community’s best interest, but believe they are aware that they need to be more responsive with community and have been doing so. This also doesn’t just apply to pumpfun, I’ve also benefitted from many other existing apps & protocols, like fomo which has driven 30k+ holders to buy $ANSEM, meteora which has substantially deepened the liquidity pools onchain, and support from many others. There are a lot of quality builders on Solana and other chains that have reached out to me over the past few weeks. I will be hosting a dev session this week in discord at discord.gg/theblackbull and appreciate everyone that has built something to strengthen the ecosystem. I'll have a lot more structure going forward with how people can contribute. This is the first iteration of ansem.io and we will be constantly updating it to drive as much value as possible to $ANSEM as we see fit. This is the first product building on my ideas I've written about in the ansem thesis https://x.com/blknoiz06/status/2077815810458870267?s=20 but it will definitely not be the last. Always open to ideas and feedback as this is and will continue to be a very organic and grassroots project.
If you are holding $ANSEM on @BullpenFi, you will not need to do anything to receive your airdrops, they will be automatically deposited to your same solana address that you've used in our app. For those not holding on @BullpenFi, you will need to claim your airdrops on ansem.io/airdrop.