My thoughts on $LIGHT When I initially saw Heaven and their 27 mil ICO my initial reaction was “oh great another launchpad which has just siphoned 8 figs out of the trenches”. Which I’m guessing was the reaction for a majority of those who hadn’t dug too deeply into the mechanics or read some of the articles by @peacefuldecay. I was sick of the launchpad wars a long time ago and was part of the reason for my slowness of due diligence into Heaven, though as a trader it’s important to see what the current environment is rewarding. Skepticism is a strong trait to hold in these markets as you want to have conviction in ideas but not at the expense of ignorance and being uneducated. It’s always easy to brush off a new eco, especially when CT is bashing it and we’ve just had the likes of Launchcoin which has rekted any believers in “flywheel” mechanics. I was ICM’s biggest bull and very disappointed with Pasternaks delivery and over promises. Thankfully it seems like Peaceful is a polar opposite of Pasternak and extremely well versed in trading and also CT. Not trying to glaze but his articles are some of the best articulated pieces I’ve read in a while and I’m quite a critic when it comes to writing. Narrative Pump = memecoins Launchcoin = ICM Bonk = ecosystem suport Boop = KOLs and incentives, Moonshot = retail Jupiter = Dex users Meotora = businesses Heaven = philosophy? Heaven is a very philosophically driven launchpad, which is why there’s been so much recent success as crypto has always been a spirality driven industry and why you see CT native founders performing significantly better than those who can’t navigate this app efficiently. They’re not focused on cheaper fees, UX, KOLs, campaigns etc. They’ve got two objectives: 1. The god flywheel (will elaborate on this later) 2. Aura “How is a launchpads primary moat trying to get aura?” When I first read this it sounded quite insane but due to the quality of peace's writing, he’s made the idea quite convincing and simple enough to understand that a significant amount of traders also back it. The idea of having “aura” is quite similar to KOLs you follow. Why does someone like Cobie or smaller accounts like Uber have such an effect on ideologies or trades? It’s not due to attention but aura. Aura is a deviation of reputation which has a stronger intuition factor due to a certain emotion they spark when you read/listen to them. Usually due to how they made you feel in a certain moment or a culmination of events which was very difficult to predict or stand for the right point. Aura is a flow, not a force. Unless you spend a significant amount of time on CT or are an elite builder, it’s very difficult to obtain aura and appeal to a large audience without making significant enemies. Heaven’s been built on the idea of belief and faith. Which was the reason they had a token before a product as they believed in running a social experiment to see how many people saw their vision. They purposefully delayed the functionality of their launchpad to shake out non believers which allowed for better price appreciation (murad mode, allegedly). This has given traders the optionality to own the AMM at the ground floor. $LIGHT was not meant to be an additional liquidity event for Heaven but the reason for it’s existence. Since CT has been obsessed with the “attention trade” the past couple years, the edge through attention has eroded since it’s so easily recognizable. They believe aura is the last metric which hasn’t fully been encapsulated onchain as it’s more of a flow state and not an easily measurable metric. Why does someone with 5k followers have more motion than someone with 50k? Tech Heaven is taking a very different approach to the tech and believes imposing standardization is much more impactful than something like ERC standards. They’ve been quite obsessed on the belief that Pumpfun killed the trenches due to building pumpswap as they now introduced competition from trying to take all of the fees from raydium, metora and jupiter. Previously they lived in harmony but now it’s turned into a PvP environment and the reason why we’ve seen so many other launchpad competitors rising up as Pump became greedy, trying to take the entire pie for themselves. This is what’s caused Heaven to be so focused on building a dual AMM. They’ve taken a dual approach to the AMM as they see it being the ultimate form of precision which cannot be achieved with Meteora or Raydium wrapper alone. So they built both; the AMM and the wrapper. The AMM is designed to be an extension of the launchpad. Any token on Heaven’s dex needs to be deployed through the launchpad with no exceptions. It is a closed container. Meaning any token traded that you see heaven as the dex, it’ll have gone through their gates. This captures the fees and keeps the entire process in house from start to finish, stopping any liquidity or mindshare leakage. Heaven skips the bonding curve entirely and launches tokens directly onto its own AMM, avoiding the migration mechanics seen in Pump launches. Instead of starting at zero and ramping via a curve until hitting a Raydium migration threshold (which snipers often exploit), Heaven injects a small amount of virtual SOL into each pool, simulating instant liquidity without requiring deployers to fund it. This means projects can launch for free, with real buy/sell activity live from the first second. There’s no migration window, no cap on initial dev buys, and no price manipulation moment, just clean, immediate price discovery. To further limit bots, Heaven adds a short 6 second decaying tax at launch, deterring front runners without hurting organic volume. The objective is to find global parameters which take ideas to market instead of being fixated on letting developers customize everything (i guess this is quite similar to how social media platforms operate, you focus on the idea, not the delivery). Which is where their fixation of standardization stems from. The God Flywheel *PTSD has entered the chat* Unlike Launchcoin, Heaven has implemented a 100% buyback and burn mechanism for all protocol revenue. Every protocol fee from every purchase on Heaven is directly buying back and burning $LIGHT. This feels like the correct direction for any launchpad to take as your token should be the primary means of your success, if you don’t believe me then look at Hyperliquid. As we move into a more predatory environment, alignment will be one of the key distinctions which keeps people holding for more than a few days. Traders need to turn to believers for any ecosystem to survival in current conditions, without full alignment and token buybacks it’s hard to find a reason for traders to hold a token when the team isn’t willing to. At the time of writing this they’ve already bought and burned $1.7 mil which has been generated from the volume fees. This has only come from the last 5 days since the platform was fully functional too. Roadmap I ascribe to a very similar view to Peaceful and the Heaven team which aren’t going after genuine business moats like Pump’s livestreaming or Launchcoins onboarding, instead they believe we’re running out of time due to the ease of access no coding tools offers to building products and we’re converging into a reality where software becomes worthless. This is why my twitter bio is “One final bull run”. A moatless future is coming for almost every company that leverages code. Launchpads are just a niche vertical in crypto that is homogenizing quickly at the moment, but the collateral damage will impact almost every software company. The idea is that software, products, website, app, games or any complicated piece of code will be as simple as writing a post. Having access to abundant and accurate logic levels the playing field for builders, as there now becomes infinite choice for users. Competition only increases, creating less and less logical moats. Companies can’t rely on pure technicals for being an outperformer, that edge is becoming exponentially easier to close. User adoption and stickiness needs to come from somewhere else. Being able to collectively own a piece of whatever they’re interacting with is Heavens moat. The God Flywheel itself isn’t a strong moat for users to be onboarded, it’s simply the most compelling solution to their “moatless” environment. They’re banking on having more aura than another company will become the moat of the future, where collective ownership will be a primary level to obtain more aura. You could somewhat argue this is already true with some crypto native IP like $PENGU which has provenance and some form of aura since they’ve stood the test of time. Onboarding The team have publicized that they won’t be chasing any large BD deals, nor is this meant to be an evolution of ICM or a platform for utility and revenue. Although as a trader it’s a bit concerning to purely rely on “aura” attracting the best builders/deployers/ideas. Peace sees onboarding celebrity founders through loom videos like we saw with Launchcoin -ev for the eco and weakening overtime. They still plan to do BD and onboard new deployers but they want to make it business feel like art. Unfortunately they aren’t elaborating on how they plan to grow the eco and it plays into their mysterious vibe, granted this typically results the best outcome for crypto marketing as it allows for the highest level of speculation. Once traders see the cards dealt to them it’s much easier to tie fundamental valuations and kills momentum. Since they want to be an everything platform they’ve defined two different fee structures, one for builders (1% trading fee) and one for memes (0.1% trading fee). Ultimately, Heaven believes ICM, AI, utility and memes will all merge together anyways. As software creation becomes as simple as a single prompt, the line slowly blurs. Starseed is an interesting initiative which is their native eco fund. As of now the fund is not tracked and none of the buys are disclosed to the public and Starseed will remain publicly agnostic towards ideas. This is opposite to what we’ve seen from every other eco and again, another correct step taken as buys from eco funds typically result in sell signals for most traders as there’s no further catalyst for price appreciation. The R:R Of This Trade I’m certainly not going to pretend like I’m early and part of the reason I’m writing this thread is due to the recent influx in price, though their philosophical approach to building feels quite unique and something we haven’t seen yet. “Enough yapping, up or down Mr KOL?” Honestly I wish I could give you a high conviction answer. Unfortunately the markets are far too unstable and rotations are only growing in speed. Something which is important to point out is how weak the current memes on the platform are. As time has gone on, traders have progressively bid the infra/platform which the eco is partaking in as they know how shortlived apps, memes or novel products have become. Bidding betas used to be a viable onchain trading method, now we’ve fast tracked that method and simply bid the fastest horse on repeat while the rest of the eco significantly underperforms, akin to even BTC. While I do really ascribe to Heavens and Peace’s philosophy on how to correctly build and not force anything, unless that something eventually makes its way onto the platform, being a philosophically driven platform won't be a strong enough moat to last more than a couple weeks. As we saw with launchcoin it was able to hold above the 100 mil range for 70 days before traders finally capitualted on Pasternaks empty promises. 70 days is a very long time in crypto and it showed how much belief there was in the ICM sector as we hadn’t seen any form of strong utility for over 6 months (since AI szn). Traders want to bet on fundamentals, they’re sick of the meme rotations and trying to play it cupsy style, except no one has built with the right mindset to support longevity. I don’t currently own any $LIGHT and it would take something quite impressive for me to buy it and partake in the eco. Since there’s a lot of mystery around how they’re going to onboard new deployers/builders, the higher price goes without this explanation, the weight of the revelation only increases. Expectations rise alongside price, once you get to a certain point, god himself cannot satisfy trader expectations and it becomes increasingly hard to hold mindshare and belief. From what I can see, the meat of the move for this trade has happened, there’s still quite a large amount of traders sidelined and I’m not calling a top. Unless they pull something very special out of their hat then this momentum + uncertainty + lack of trust onchain + rotations will be a heavy boulder to push up hill. I genuinely really enjoyed Peace’s writing and it’s some of the best I’ve read in a long time. His thinking from a philosophical stand point is spot on. My issue is the uncertainty around onboarding and what’s going to keep a new influx of users coming in or retaining those currently playing. I was ICM’s biggest bull and want nothing more than utility projects to succeed. If Heaven finds a way to facilitate that then I’ll be a big supporter of their eco. Hopefully they prove me wrong and deliver some much needed freshness onchain. Launchcoins success came from their ability to bring revenue generating projects into the eco. Their failure stemmed from the inability to communicate on twitter and deliver on all the empty promises they made. Light’s success came from Peace’s well articulated writing and implementation of a 100% buyback flywheel. What they lack is a genuine onboarding model or reason for quality teams to join the eco.