Believe Builder Spotlight!

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Believe
@believeappAug 16, 2025

The Spaces gathered the Belief ecosystem for its fourth Builder Spotlight. Ben Pasternak opened by outlining his day-to-day focus split between product, community, and an elevated share of legal work to properly structure Belief’s flywheel, which he said is 80%+ complete. He framed coins as ideas (and content) that communities build around, stressed the need to educate non-CT creators, and doubled down on a mobile‑first product strategy with accessible APIs for non-technical users. He also highlighted hiring beyond deep-crypto to improve UX and communication. Builders then showcased: Marvin’s Hegemony, an AI-driven trading terminal with real-time sentiment from 3,000 sources, notable backtest/live performance, 50% supply lock, fee-based revenue, a partnership with Belief Capital, and plans for a permissionless auto-trading bot plus flywheel. Luca (JDPhotoAI) presented decentralized/private LLM inference for enterprises (on-prem), partnerships and Asia expansion, tokenized compute incentives, and attention challenges. Lewis (Foundry) introduced View Spark, an AI ad builder for V3 that reduces credit burn and speeds viral content creation, backed by NVIDIA Inception credits and revenue split to treasury/burn. Ali Waters (Rec) outlined a no-KYC, Solana-native RWA model lending to realtors, USDC presales, Raydium LPs, ~20% per 3 months (50% annualized) flip deals, ~10% rental yields, plus Helio and RainFi integrations and an ETF roadmap. Finally, angel investor Dicky presented Startup’s meta-meme thesis: no team or utility—attention as the product—and a cult-like community that supports builders who hold STARTUP on treasury.

Believe Builder Spotlight (Week 4) – Full Session Notes

Session overview

  • Hosts: Nick (Believe) and Rain (Believe)
  • Special guest (opening Q&A): Ben Pasternak (Believe)
  • Builders spotlighted:
    • Marvin (Hegemony Fund)
    • Luca (Jitebo/JD Photo AI – decentralized LLM inference)
    • Lewis (Foundry – View Spark AI ad tool)
    • Ali Waters (Rec – real-estate loans/marketplace), with co-founder Jorge (referenced)
    • Dickey aka “Angelic Investor” (STARTUP – ICM meme token; community representative)
  • Audience: ~160 participants; global time zones accommodated

Ben Pasternak: operations, product direction, and the “flywheel”

Day-to-day and current time allocation

  • Early schedule driven by workload pressure; typically awake by 5:30–6:00am.
  • First pass: catch up on overnight ecosystem activity and international team requests.
  • Significant bandwidth on legal structuring (roughly 50% currently) to set up durable foundations for the “flywheel.”
  • ~33% on internal product/team work; remainder on community/trader interactions and creator onboarding.
  • Emphasis on discipline and rest (asleep by ~11–11:30pm), though he naturally wakes early.

Product/vision: “coin as content,” mainstreaming via mobile

  • Coins as a new format for ideas and funding:
    • Framework: a coin is an idea around which a community forms; successful ones can catalyze real platforms/products that are symptomatic of the coin’s meme/mission.
    • Prediction: “everything will be coined” over time. The key is explaining to non-CT (Crypto Twitter) users what a coin is for.
  • Onboarding non-technical creators:
    • Build versatile, accessible tools (e.g., APIs) so creators can do “cool things” without deep technical fluency.
  • Mobile-first priority:
    • Analogy: Instagram/X/TikTok are consumed predominantly on mobile; financial UX transformations (e.g., Robinhood) show the path to hundreds of millions of users.
    • Crypto products have been web/CT-first; Believe aims to go mobile-first to expand beyond CT and simplify UX.

The “flywheel”: status, intent, and legal structuring

  • Philosophy: believes in crypto-native flywheels where communities, traders, the platform, and creators co-benefit.
  • Status: >80% complete on legal/structural setup; in late stages. The objective is a compliant and durable mechanism “that can last forever.”
  • Context: other legitimate projects that launched flywheels did similar heavy legal work—Believe started later but is following the same thorough path.
  • Expectation: once live, the flywheel frees focus for product growth and onboarding—and aligns incentives across the ecosystem.

Team and hiring outlook

  • Intent to scale talent with a bias toward web2 product/UX thinkers to avoid “crypto tunnel vision.”
  • Rationale: newcomers must learn/teach crypto to themselves, forcing clarity that then translates into understandable products for mainstream users.
  • Near-term confidence: strong product improvements in the coming weeks; expects better creator launches as the product increasingly “speaks” to their needs.

Builder 1 – Hegemony Fund (Marvin): AI news-sentiment trading, automation, and fund vision

What Hegemony is

  • AI trading algorithm scraping ~3,000 sources in real time; sentiment analysis determines whether news is market-moving (long/short/neutral).
  • System autonomously opens long/short positions.
  • Origin: solo-built in ~5 months; started as a side project, gained demand to manage capital; now opened as a terminal with accessible trading signals (tiers incl. “pro”).

Performance (as shared by Marvin)

  • Backtest (70 days): ~8,200%.
  • Live (last 7 days): ~2,000% (using up to 75x leverage) with community-verified, zero-delay pro access extended to skeptics for real-time validation.
  • Monetization: subscription fees; he holds 50% of token supply, locked for 1 year.

Roadmap and near-term delivery

  • Flywheel integration: plans to add a flywheel tied to transaction fees and subscription revenues (via Believe’s API).
  • Partnership: Believe Capital is a top-10 holder; advising Marvin and allocating part of its own fund to be managed by Hegemony.
  • Model upgrades:
    • Add long-term memory/context to improve sentiment processing.
    • Risk profiles (high/medium/low) for signal consumption.
  • Key upcoming feature: a permissionless auto-trading bot (Telegram or native), allowing users to deposit funds, mirror signals 24/7, and withdraw—eliminating manual execution.
    • Additional token design elements: burn mechanisms and buybacks funded from fees; onboarding investors to seed volume through the bot at launch.

Community Q&A highlights

  • On permissionlessness: Marvin believes seamless, automated, and permissionless UX is the direction of travel; users don’t want to manually sit and execute signals.
  • On building in crypto: he’s committed long-term; crypto enables fully autonomous strategies (e.g., Telegram trading bots interacting with on-chain systems).
  • Vision: a hedge fund model inclusive of small capital (e.g., $50–$500,000), not just high-minimum LPs; leverage crowdsourcing/fees to present VC-scale traction later.

Builder 2 – Luca (Jitebo/JD Photo AI): decentralized/private LLM inference for enterprises

What the product does

  • Decentralized LLM inference platform and services; supports open-source models (e.g., LLaMA variants), “GPT-like” alternatives, and deep learning workloads.
  • Value proposition: private, on-prem/edge deployment for enterprises (banks, oil & gas, law firms) that cannot use public ChatGPT/hosted LLMs for compliance/security.
  • Business model pre-token: ~$5k MRR from B2B consulting/subscriptions; ~70% of revenue enterprise, remainder retail.

Why on-chain and how

  • Tokenized incentives to harness distributed compute:
    • Analogy to Render Network, but for AI inference: pay users to contribute spare GPU/CPU (e.g., MacBook M1/M4) for running models (20–32B parameters), rewarding them in tokens when enterprise clients consume inference.
  • Economics: after capex on private hardware, ongoing inference can be cheaper than per-token API metering from major providers.

Traction and partnerships

  • Tencent partnership; meetings in Shanghai; partnerships with InvestHK (planning Hong Kong office).
  • Believe ecosystem helped attract users with risk appetite; used Believe fees to fund global BD (Shanghai, Korea), which is costly but network-expanding.

Challenges and stance

  • Attention is difficult to maintain in token markets; Luca focuses on long-term sustainable B2B enterprise business while engaging web3 users.
  • Pitch clarity: “Local/private LLM deployments are cheaper at scale and (most importantly) compliant/secure.”
  • Capital plans: if VCs invest, allocate ~30% into the project’s token to align incentives.

Builder 3 – Foundry (Lewis): from personal AI workspace to View Spark (AI ad/virality tool)

Original Foundry vision

  • A personal/anti-workspace AI agent that deeply “knows you” by ingesting private data across files and connected accounts (LinkedIn, X, etc.) to enable personalized agent actions (e.g., writing tweets grounded in personal context).
  • B2B interest strong but slowed by enterprise cycles; in parallel, Lewis built internal marketing tools.

New product: View Spark (launched publicly ~2 days ago)

  • Purpose: solve the hardest part of shipping great products—distribution—by making it trivial to produce viral, high-performing ads/content with AI.
  • Built atop Google’s new AI video tooling (referred to as “V3” in-session); tackles high credit costs with:
    • Draft/visualization stage before video generation to preserve credits.
    • Persistent context across prompts/characters without forcing users to manage complex JSON payloads.
  • Early adoption: Product Hunt launch moved quickly to ~# 12; strong community feedback; Mercy (community member) validated UX and speed from early demo.

GTM and ecosystem strategy

  • Free credits for Believe builders (DM Lewis); feedback/testimonials are rewarded with more credits.
  • Funding: accepted into NVIDIA Inception program—leveraging cloud credits to subsidize user experimentation.
  • Tokenomics alignment: plans for View Spark revenue distribution—~50% to the treasury, ~50% to burns.
  • Target users: builders and teams across Believe who need ad creatives and “Kaoshi-style” viral templates (referenced in-session) without building a full marketing org.

Builder 4 – Rec (Ali Waters): real-estate yield via loans to vetted realtors; on-chain secondary liquidity

Model and differentiation

  • Rec doesn’t tokenize property ownership; instead, it intermediates between global on-chain investors and vetted, top-tier realtors who pass strict KYB.
  • Geography: currently active with operations tied to Emirates (loan origination jurisdiction) and Spain (example deals), expanding globally.
  • Mechanism:
    1. Realtor lists a property and declares a funding goal/use of proceeds.
    2. Investors deposit USDC into a presale (current target example: ~$44k; prior example: ~$120k).
    3. When goal is met, Rec launches an LP on Raydium for a utility token (rpsd) tied to that property pool, creating a secondary market.
    4. When the crowdfunding period ends (or the property transaction concludes), users can claim yields; alternatively, they can trade rpsd in secondary markets.

Yield profile and lock-ups

  • Flip/refurb-and-sell deals: headline APYs near ~50% (as an annualized framing); practically, investors lock funds ~3 months and receive ~20% nominal for the term (annualized ≈ 50%), funded by interest charged on loans to realtors and deal spreads.
  • Rental deals: target ~10% APY with monthly payouts.
  • Trade-off: higher yields vs. liquidity—lock-ups mirror real-world transaction timelines; not a 24-hour withdrawal product.

Partnerships and roadmap

  • Raydium: LPs for property pools.
  • Helio: to enable credit card payments (Web2 onramps) while keeping a pure Web3 flow available.
  • RainFi: accept LP tokens as collateral to unlock DeFi composability/credit.
  • Pipeline: more DeFi integrations (additional lenders/collateral venues), ETF-like index to diversify across multiple properties, eventual open marketplace for vetted realtors globally.
  • Believe alignment: initiating their flywheel, reinvesting profits, and growing the token alongside platform usage.

Builder 5 – STARTUP (Dickey, “Angelic Investor”): ICM meme thesis and ecosystem attention engine

Thesis and mission

  • STARTUP positions itself as the first ICM meme token where “investing in STARTUP outperforms investing in a startup.”
  • Satire-as-strategy: mirrors the traditional startup world while eliminating typical execution risks.
    • “No team, no utility, no payroll, no fraud, no deployments, no rollbacks, no CEO salaries, no private jets, no execution risk.”
    • The “product” is the market cap and its volatility—rises and drawdowns are integral to the game and culture.

Community engine and Believe benefits

  • 8,000+ self-described “angel investors”; highly mobilized to drive attention/volume and mindshare for Believe.
  • Practical evidence: dominated replies/engagement on Nick’s promo tweet; kept listeners tuned until the end of the space.
  • Offer to builders: hold STARTUP on your balance sheet/treasury and the community will actively support your product socially (example: Dupe holds 2M STARTUP; gets unconditional backing).

Discussion on VC vs. ICM

  • Dickey’s “revenge arc” framing: reduce reliance on traditional VC/PE.
  • Nick’s view: VC and ICM can be complementary; ICM democratizes access to opportunities historically reserved for VCs (e.g., letting the public participate alongside founders in breakout products).

Key takeaways and highlights

  • Believe’s flywheel is in late-stage legal setup (>80% complete). The team is prioritizing durability/compliance over speed; once live, expect focus to shift toward product growth and creator onboarding.
  • Strategic product stance: “coin is content” and mobile-first distribution. Believe aims to onboard creators with accessible APIs and consumer-grade UX.
  • Hegemony Fund’s immediate roadmap is clear and aggressive: automated trading bot, flywheel integration, fee-driven burns/buybacks, and enterprise partnership (Believe Capital allocation). Strong early performance claims; community validation loop in place.
  • Jitebo/JD Photo AI is executing on enterprise-grade, private LLM inference with tokenized compute incentives—positioned for organizations prioritizing data sovereignty and predictable cost structures.
  • Foundry’s pivot to a distribution enabler (View Spark) addresses builders’ biggest pain: attention. Tooling reduces cost/iteration friction for AI video ads and is backed by NVIDIA Inception credits.
  • Rec introduces a realistic bridge between real-world real estate and on-chain investors through loan-based funding to vetted realtors, with on-chain liquidity and target yields that reflect holding periods and deal economics.
  • STARTUP demonstrates the power of narrative and community coordination in ICM: a pure attention machine that can be harnessed by other builders through simple treasury alignment.

Notable announcements and action items

  • Believe
    • Flywheel nearing completion; watch for launch to reorient focus to product and creator growth.
    • Continued hiring with emphasis on web2 talent to sharpen mainstream UX.
  • Hegemony Fund (Marvin)
    • Bot for automated execution (Telegram/native) planned; fee-based burn/buyback mechanisms; integration with Believe API-driven flywheel; partnership with Believe Capital live.
  • Jitebo/JD Photo AI (Luca)
    • Expanding enterprise deployments; building tokenized distributed inference; opening Hong Kong office with InvestHK support; partnerships (incl. Tencent) active.
  • Foundry (Lewis)
    • View Spark public; offering free credits to Believe builders (DM Lewis); NVIDIA Inception credits supporting user growth; revenue split plan (treasury + burns).
  • Rec (Ali Waters)
    • Live presales and Raydium LP secondary markets; partnerships with Helio (cards) and RainFi (LP collateral); ETF product and open realtor marketplace in pipeline; starting their flywheel on Believe.
  • STARTUP (Dickey)
    • Builders can leverage the community by holding STARTUP on treasury; community will reciprocate with attention and advocacy.

Closing

  • The session showcased a spectrum from protocol/platform strategy (Believe) to performance-driven products (Hegemony), deep infra (Jitebo), GTM tooling (Foundry), real-world asset rails (Rec), and pure narrative/attention capital (STARTUP).
  • Common threads: explainability for mainstream users, mobile-first UX, legal/structural rigor for long-term sustainability, and attention/distribution as the defining competitive edge across ICM.