The Vibe Coding Renaissance: Why Crypto Is the Only Monetisation Model That Fits | by Ben Fairbank | The Capital | Jun, 2025

In the early days of the internet, culture wasn’t dictated by platforms, it was shaped by people.

A single creator could build something like Flappy Bird, Agar.io, or Reddit’s r/place, and with the right spark, the entire internet would play along. These projects became historical moments and weren’t just playing along. Soon enough though, feeds became the dominant form of content distribution, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube Shorts, Twitch, and that chaotic burst of creativity got funneled into standardised formats, optimised for dopamine, not experimentation.

This resulted in a collapse in the surface area for creative risk.

But something is shifting again and pretty soon, it’s going to explode.

“Vibe coding” is a placeholder term for a growing phenomenon. Creators using AI tools and low-code platforms to build mini-apps, games, or utilities around a single idea, game, aesthetic, or meme.

Why this is so different is the crazy part, it’s not a movement defined by frameworks or engineering best practices, it’s defined by immediacy and it lives off spur-of-the-moment creativity.

Build fast → Launch weird → Go viral → Repeat.

I know first hand that what used to take a team of engineers can now be done in hours using GPT, Claude, or Replit’s Ghostwriter. With tools like thirdweb, Bubble, and soon Orange Web3’s upcoming token launcher, creators don’t need funding, they need a good prompt.

• Recent Vibe Jams yielded hundreds of submissions, most from solo devs building small-scale, playful crypto and web2 projects.
• Orange Web3’s $100K Orange Vibe Jam drew in over 60 game and app launches in less than 30 days, with more than 37,000 game plays and app visits through Orange ID during the last 14 days alone.
• Platforms like vibecodinglist.com now showcase a new class of “micro-apps,” many of which are fully functioning games or experimental utilities tied to a meme, trend, or niche need.

We aren’t talking about hypotheticals here, it’s already happening.

Historically, this kind of experimentation had one fatal flaw, there was no way to make money. You could try and sell billboard space in your app or game, but nah, that won’t work for the majority.

You couldn’t build a business around r/place. Flappy Bird made $50K a day, but mostly through ads, but as stated, hardly scalable for most. Subscriptions require long-term retention. VC is too slow and bureaucratic. And social media virality doesn’t convert into ownership.

Here’s the truth, crypto is the only monetisation engine that fits this movement.

It allows creators to:

• Launch tokens instantly.
• Bootstrap capital from their earliest users.
• Incentivise contribution of assets, features, visuals, music and more with ownership.
• Incentivise participation and testing, voting and feedback with tokens.
• Monetise attention, not just retention.

And most importantly, it lets weird, brilliant, and niche projects go from idea to market without needing a single meeting. Thank god this day has arrived.

Crypto has been searching for its consumer breakout moment. We’ve had infrastructure, speculation, DeFi, and NFTs, but outside of Bitcoin, very few tokens have shown sustainable product-market fit.

But crypto is very, very good at two things:

1. Bootstrapping capital around narratives.
2. Turning attention into ownership.

That’s exactly what vibe-coded projects need.

1. A solo creator builds a mini-game or app with AI.
2. They list it on a platform like VibeCodingList.com.
3. They launch a token, either as a meme, utility, or social incentive.
4. They offer bounties through hackathons, bounty boards or the Orange Web3 creator community for a share of tokens.
5. Users interact, get rewarded, spread it, buy the token, and feed the loop.

This has already happened with meme tokens. Now it’s about to happen with experiences.

If a single-player browser game can mint a cult following in 48 hours, crypto gives it a way to reward early users and monetise that momentum.

It’s not venture-scale, yet. But that’s the point.

One thing vibe coding shares with crypto? Most of it will be hot garbage.

And that’s okay.

The “slop” is part of the system. It’s the cost of creativity at scale. You don’t get the next Flappy Bird or ETH without a thousand half-broken memes and hot garbage fire experiments.

There’s a reason why this movement is different, the cost of building is now so low, and the rewards (if you hit) are so high, that the economics finally make sense.

Crypto doesn’t need a billion-dollar unicorn to prove its worth here. It just needs to help a thousand creators make their first $5K USD. You follow?

This wave is just beginning. We’re about to see a surge of:

• Short-lived, high-impact apps with tokens attached.
• Creator-to-creator collabs monetised by token incentives.
• Marketplace tools for remixing, forking, and evolving each other’s work.
• Experiences that go viral, raise capital, and morph into startups.

In time, social platforms will either integrate this model (TikTok Frames, Farcaster Frames) or new ecosystems will emerge that give it the real estate and rails it needs.

Platforms like Orange Web3 and vibecodinglist.com are already preparing for this, building the identity layer, listing directory, and token systems to support it.

The internet’s creative soul was never lost, it was just suppressed by algorithms and bots.

Now, with AI lowering the barrier to creation, and crypto providing a frictionless path to monetisation, we are about to witness the return of the chaotic, joyful, idea-driven internet and I for one, have been awaiting this day for as long as I have not been able to launch solo, any ideas that I have had. There are no more excuses or reasons to not jump in.

And this time, creators get paid.