From the beginning of this year to the present, in just 10 months, the total market value of Memecoin has reached $545 billion, and the "meme coin super cycle" has begun.
1. From the community, to the community
For a long time, internet culture has occupied an important position in the field of cryptocurrencies. From zoo cats and dogs to celebrities, people's recognition of these symbols has evolved from curious and interesting to identification, which takes time to accumulate.
The threshold of MEME is low, and the number of users accumulated during the bear market, as well as the cultural deposition of MEME, have reached a certain height. The players in the NFT community that were popular a few years ago are an important cornerstone for the development of MEME, and the community attribute is undoubtedly the top priority.
Whether it's the old-fashioned MEME coins like DOGE and SHIB, the newcomers like PEPE and WIF, or the NFT OG projects like Cryptopunks, as well as the leading NFT projects like Pudgy Penguin and Azuki that are constantly exploring in the field of IP operations, they have all laid a strong and united community for the development of MEME. And one of the reasons why these former NFT players can quickly integrate into MEME coins after playing them is that a good project, whether in terms of community atmosphere or cultural aesthetics, is relatively consistent. Whether it's "birds of a feather" or "kindred spirits", the fact that they can play together is what forms a community.
Successful MEME coins, although they are issued in a second, are not overnight successes.
Take Pepe as an example, Pepe can be traced back to the comic "Boys Club" by Matt Furie in 2005, with the classic line "feels good man", and later there was the sad frog "feels bad man". In 2008, Pepe became popular on the 4chan forum, and various stickers were made. Around 2014, Pepe basically covered all mainstream social media. However, later Pepe was given some political metaphors and caused a lot of controversy, which made Pepe's image very complex; in 2017-2019, Matt Furie and the Pepe community tried to restore the original intention and development of Pepe.
In April 2023, the MEME coin PEPE was launched, with early support from the NFT community such as Milady NFT holders and Chinese in Dubai. Although PEPE is much later in token history than DOGE, and there are some controversies, PEPE eventually became the third largest MEME coin after DOGE and SHIB.
At the same time, some investment institutions have also expressed recognition of the community power. On July 9 this year, a16z's official Twitter interacted with Truth Terminal and transferred $50,000 to Truth Terminal. GOAT comes from a large language model OPUS called Truth Terminal, whose training data comes from websites like reddit and 4chan. Basically, it is trained on extreme subculture content. Its design purpose is to debate the belief system generated by AI, and combine MEME elements. As of now, the GOAT token market value has exceeded $300 million, with a 24-hour increase of 133%.
2. KOL's desire for a viral effect
Not only will MEME community users hype it up, but celebrities also spontaneously hype it up. After the launch of $Trump, there are reports that Biden's campaign team plans to hire a MEME manager to try to win the support of young voters. Whether it's zoo symbols like dogs, cats, mice, monkeys, frogs, pandas, and penguins, or celebrities like Kanye West, CEO Brian Amstrong, Steve Aoki, and Snoop Dogg, they are all common images and visual symbols of MEME coins, especially the MEME content that combines Trump and Pepe's image, which has even been used as campaign material.
It is worth mentioning that the sales of the Trump family's cryptocurrency project WLFI have exceeded $10 million. WLFI started selling on October 15, with a total of 20 billion tokens, and 6.87 billion tokens were sold in 14 hours, worth about $103 million. Etherscan data shows that there are 6,832 independent wallet addresses holding WLFI, which is currently lower than the more than 100,000 registered users announced by the project team the day before the token was released.
Why is MEME more favored at the moment?
Because MEME has better liquidity than NFT and is a more viral cultural carrier. NFT images are limited, while the spread of MEME is unlimited. The issuance of MEME coins is basically in the millions, and a good MEME coin can achieve a spread of hundreds of thousands or even millions of people in just a few days or even a few hours, while an NFT project, no matter how hard it tries, can only reach a relatively limited audience of thousands or even tens of thousands of people. And due to the rising prices of NFTs, the transactions are not as convenient as DEX, and not everyone can own and spread them.
A big difference from NFT is that MEME coins will get attention regardless of whether the news is good or bad.
For example, the MEME coin project SLERF in the Solana ecosystem, after the founder accidentally destroyed the liquidity pool, actually attracted huge attention from the crypto community, and "Oh, Fuck" became a famous MEME for a period of time, leading the coin price to break through $1, an increase of more than 50%, and quickly listed on multiple mainstream exchanges.
In other words, MEME coin projects care more about "whether there are more people paying attention" rather than "whether this thing is good or bad".
3. The surge in MEME has "fed back" the user base and trading volume of the main chain: small leverage to drive big returns
In August this year, TRON stood out in the market volatility, benefiting from grasping the MEME craze (the launch of SunPump, etc.), and the MEME coin SUNDOG based on TRON previously continued to soar, from $0.002 to $0.20 in just a few days. (This wave of TRON and SunPump first broke out because of the violent pull of $Sundog that day, from the internal market to 70M, which attracted a lot of attention, and players also entered the market one after another, the on-chain became active, and even the TRON network revenue hit a new high, which is a typical "small horse pulling a big car".)
TRON's price rose 23.1% and its market value increased by 22.7%.
Here we have to mention a wealth effect.
The reason why MEME has developed into a mainstream track now is the easy-to-achieve wealth myth, and the FOMO (fear of missing out) panic of missed opportunities. On the one hand, it attracts people by rising, on the other hand, it promotes the myth of wealth creation, with stories of someone earning $30 million in two hours, and on the other hand, the community spreads FOMO fear, which is a common marketing tactic of MEME, and also very much in line with the laws of communication.
4. Reflection: MEME coin may be the fastest market entry strategy for blockchain products
The traditional project mindset is to first build the product and then match the users, but since the MEME coin community has already formed naturally, building a product that includes MEME coins to attract this community of users may be a market strategy worth considering.
For example, BONKbot is a Telegram trading bot on Solana, originating from the MEME coin BONK, which was airdropped to users at the end of 2022. Subsequently, an independent team launched a trading bot that uses part of the trading fees to buy and burn BONK tokens, thereby aligning economically with token holders. The daily trading volume of BONKbot has recently exceeded $200 million (in comparison, Base's daily trading volume is about $200 million).
Since MEME is a kind of hype culture, the narrative of the coin itself is not outstanding, if the MEME community can be combined with some practical products, will it also be a kind of empowerment for itself?
