What is Profiteer?

Profiteer is a “newscoin” launchpad. Newscoins function like memecoins but are permanently tied to specific topics. Currently, there are over 60 million possible newscoins, each representing a unique topic. Users discover coins by reading news stories that embed them in the text. Trading works similarly to traditional memecoins, allowing users to speculate on trending topics.

Hypothesis

Memecoins fail as predictive tools for real-world events because multiple tokens can reference the same topic, diluting their significance. Profiteer solves this by ensuring that each topic has a single, dedicated token. This allows users to bet directly on a topic’s long-term relevance rather than a speculative token with a weak thematic connection.

Issues

Product

Profiteer faces several key challenges:

• The news format feels stale and uninspiring, lacking the dynamic appeal of memecoins.
• Memecoins leverage market-driven content discovery, surfacing the best memes in real-time. Profiteer, however, relies on curated news, which moves slower and delivers suboptimal engagement.
• Users have no way to create or interact with content beyond buying and selling tokens.
• The platform is web-based, making it less accessible and sticky compared to a native mobile app.

Distribution

Memecoins thrive on virality. Creators are incentivized to promote their tokens, generating social capital and price pumps. Profiteer lacks this dynamic since its tokens track long-term relevance rather than short-term hype. To succeed, Profiteer needs alternative viral mechanics.

Timing

The ideal window for launching a meme coin app was 6-12 months ago. The market is now oversaturated and fatigued. Recent high-profile pump-and-dump schemes have driven top influencers into hiding and scared off smaller investors. The anticipated market downturn has arrived, and people are less willing to blindly ape into new tokens.

Takeaways

Despite these challenges, Profiteer has introduced some compelling mechanics worth exploring further.

Text-Embedded Token Discovery

Embedding tokens in text is an innovative discovery method. It allows for a greater variety of tokens, provides clear visibility, and enables interactive elements like hover and focus states for additional information. This mechanic has strong potential for future applications.

Tokenized Relationships

Profiteer establishes a network of interrelated tokens based on their frequency across posts and articles. Tokenizing relationships between concepts remains an untapped frontier. Some potential applications include:

• A social media platform where users receive kickbacks based on the price of tokens they mention in posts.
• A system where posting rewards users with a bundle of assets related to their content, which they can then trade.

Next Steps

After launching Profiteer, I’ll focus on exploring the post-memecoin landscape in crypto to identify novel, long-term opportunities that can create real value.