Internet Capital Markets

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Internet Capital Markets
Image: original illustration, memecoin.wiki
abbreviation	ICM
coined	contested, credited variously to Solana Foundation CMO Akshay, Multicoin's Kyle Samani and Mert Mumtaz
meaning	formally, tokenized and democratized capital formation on Solana; informally, any fast speculative token launch

Internet Capital Markets, abbreviated ICM, is the Solana ecosystem's thesis for tokenized, permissionless capital formation, a phrase whose exact coining is contested between competing accounts and whose meaning has drifted in trench slang into shorthand for any fast token launch.

Contents

1 Coining dispute
2 Lily Liu and the public framing
3 Mert Mumtaz's claim
4 Meaning drift
5 Corpus saturation
6 Current status
7 References

Internet Capital Markets, almost always abbreviated ICM, is the framing the Solana ecosystem uses to describe its ambition as a venue for tokenized, permissionless finance, from public equities to consumer apps to speculative launches. The phrase's coining is genuinely disputed rather than settled, a fact this article reports as the story rather than resolving it, and by 2026 trench usage had flattened the term from a formal thesis into everyday shorthand for any fast, speculative token launch, an "ICM."

Coining dispute

Multicoin Capital cofounder Kyle Samani published a piece titled "The Solana Thesis: Internet Capital Markets" on January 22, 2025, arguing Solana could become the base layer for "a global and permissionless financial system that allows people with information advantages to capture alpha across every asset class while crossing the tightest spreads and with the lowest fees." A footnote in that same piece credits Solana Foundation CMO Akshay with coining the phrase "Internet Capital Markets" in Solana Foundation marketing materials, without giving an exact date.

A later retrospective from Helius's own blog states the term was "first coined by Solana Foundation CMO Akshay in a 2025 marketing memo" and specifically cites that memo as shared on X on November 21, 2025, a date chronologically inconsistent with Samani's piece, which was already crediting Akshay with the coinage back in January of the same year. That inconsistency is reported here as a documented discrepancy between sources rather than resolved. Separately, Mert Mumtaz, Helius's own CEO, claims direct personal authorship of the phrase, discussed below.

Lily Liu and the public framing

Solana Foundation president Lily Liu became the term's most visible public face. She delivered a talk titled "Building Internet Capital Markets on Solana" at TOKEN2049 Dubai, held April 30 to May 1, 2025, the session cited across the ecosystem as the phrase's mainstream conference debut. She continued building the framing through 2026, including an October 2025 Shanghai speech arguing "everything can be tokenized," and a February 10, 2026 Consensus Hong Kong appearance where she said blockchains' true strength "lies in finance and markets, not utopian general purpose tech," argued crypto should "democratise talent and capital formation," and called Asia crypto's "core market" rather than a frontier.

Mert Mumtaz's claim

Mert Mumtaz claims direct authorship of the phrase as part of a personal slogan habit, in his own words from a November 2025 post: "the secret to any CT meme is just repetition, super underrated. OPOS, IBRL, ICM, trillions, zidelined, retardio etc all just are versions of this," and separately, "I am actively trying to shitpost myself into coming up with newer manlet slogans... some past bangers include opos, icm, ibrl." Mumtaz groups ICM with IBRL as part of the same self described slogan stack.

Meaning drift

Coverage of the Believe driven launch wave of 2025 to 2026 documents the term getting flattened by the memecoin community into "ICMs," shorthand for fast, speculative token launches generally, a semantic shift away from the Solana Foundation's original framing of democratized capital formation and asset tokenization. Threadguy adopted the framing as his own media identity in 2026, pivoting his show to cover equities "like memecoins" under the same banner, crystallized in a line like "everything trades like crypto now welcome to hell," evidence the term became a media brand as well as an ecosystem thesis.

Corpus saturation

By 2026 the phrase and its acronym appeared throughout ordinary trench posting as ambient ecosystem branding rather than a cited thesis. Solana Foundation product lead vibhu's May 7, 2026 post listed "AI, ICM, perps, privacy, predictions, options, collectibles, RWAs, memes, DeFi, stables, commodities, quantum, IBRL" as the ecosystem's simultaneous fronts, and the official @solana account's own bio described the network as "powering internet capital markets, payments, AI agents, and crypto apps."

Current status

As of August 2026, "internet capital markets" and the acronym ICM remain in active, near daily use across Solana ecosystem accounts, trench trading slang, and adjacent media branding, with no single agreed upon coining date. All coining claims should be treated as attributed rather than settled.