Heaven Launchpad ICO Closes Early After Raising $27M

While market leaders like pump.fun and letsBONK duke it out for dominance in Solana’s launchpad wars, a stealthy, pre-launch competitor is gaining traction in the shadows.

After publicly shipping nothing more than a manifesto denouncing the state of Solana’s launchpads in mid-July, the Heaven AMM has caught a speculative bid. The launchpad for the “Revenue Meta” successfully raised over $27M in 11 hours after the ICO supposedly reached an undisclosed cap.

Is Heaven’s vision really all that different from existing launchpads? Does a strong ICO performance indicate a strong product, or are Solana’s trench dwellers in too deep a state of speculative euphoria?

$27M Raised From Over 9,000 Wallets in Heaven ICO

Heaven, an AMM and token launchpad, has successfully raised over $27M, despite having no public-facing product beyond sleek screenshots and captivating videos denouncing the state of Solana’s launchpad scene.

Despite its somewhat stealthy GTM, it’s evident that there was palpable demand and interest in the Heaven ICO. According to the Heaven team, the site hosting the ICO had over 25,000 visitors, exceeding rate limits and causing discrepancies between the frontend display and the sale’s onchain performance.

The raise was originally intended to run for 48 hours. However, the Heaven team decided to close the ICO within just 11 hours, as stipulated by a clause in the terms of the sale. While unconfirmed, this is likely due to the ICO reaching an undisclosed cap. 

Heaven has since indicated that proportionate refunds will be distributed to contributors over the coming weekend to bring down the launch valuation of $LIGHT, the platform’s native token. This could include trimming down allocations for whale depositors to improve the token’s distribution.

While the vast majority of social media commentators expressed optimism and enthusiasm towards the new launchpad (and likely have vested interests), others have decried the sale, calling it another “extractive ICO”.

Based on investor demand and the mechanics of the sale, $LIGHT is currently slated to open at a circulating market cap of $27.3M. This values the Heaven AMM higher than several popular Solana DeFi apps, including Adrena, Bullet (formerly Zeta Markets), and DeFiTuna. 

Heaven’s valuation will drop following refunds to contributors, but the magnitude of that change remains to be seen.

What Makes Heaven Different?

Heaven is a self-proclaimed “fresh start” for Solana DeFi and the meme economy. Token launchpads have established themselves as the cash cows of the network, but for most of the sector’s lifespan, these astronomical revenues have gone directly into the pockets of operators. 

The recent success of letsBonk has blown the winds of change through the trenches and returned value to token holders through buybacks. However, it seems Heaven team would argue that dedicating a percentage of revenue to buybacks simply isn’t enough to align creators and speculative traders. Similar to GoFundMeme, Heaven AMM commits 100% of its revenue to buybacks of its native token, $LIGHT.

But Heaven’s generous buyback mechanic isn’t its most compelling feature. If it was, people might still be using GFM. Arguably, what makes Heaven stand out, and inspired degens to pour $27M into a vague ICO, is the implementation of Creator Flywheels.

Creator Flywheels enable token launchers, whether they be projects, builders, or artists, to easily and transparently allocate protocol revenue to supporting their token. Heaven creates a flywheel address for each creator, which automatically swaps any token it receives to the creator’s token and burns it, permanently removing the asset from circulation.

Heaven’s other features include universal token parameters, categorized fee structures based on whether coins are considered ‘project tokens’ or memecoins, and the omission of a bonding curve. Instead of trading on a bonding curve and ‘graduating’, tokens launched on Heaven are paired with a small amount of “virtual SOL” directly on the AMM.

 

SolanaFloor engaged Heaven for clarity on how exactly “virtual SOL” can be paired with tokens to provide liquidity. According to co-founder peacefuldecay, “virtual SOL” refers to a “mathematical placeholder for 35 $SOL that allows pools to open at ~$6k… because you can never go below the open market price, it's not like anyone is selling into that SOL, yet it algorithmically effects every buy and sell afterwards as if there was 35 SOL there.”

Are We Back to the Vague Presale Meta Already?

Heaven’s impressive $27M raise harkens back to a tumultuous period of Solana history. Following the success of $BONK’s historic run in late 2023, the beginning of 2024 was wrought with dubious and vague ICOs netting ludicrous amounts of $SOL as degens FOMO’d into random presales with no proof-of-concept.

During this time, projects like Dexter_Cap’s $GM raised over 159k $SOL, while memecoin presales for coins like $SLERF attracted over $10.8M. More recently, memecoins like $PAIN adopted a similar presale strategy, raising over $38M.

While it’s extremely unlikely that Heaven will fail to deliver a working product, the speed with which the ICO attracted deposits indicates that we are very much in a risk-on period.

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