Author: jk, Odaily Planet Daily
On the morning of November 14th, Beijing time, Litecoin, which has been out of the market's sight for a long time, suddenly released such an official tweet:
Source: X
"Given the current market environment, I now identify as a Meme coin."
As soon as the tweet was released, it immediately triggered a crypto market frenzy. The recent trend of Meme coins has been hot, the narrative of "resisting VC and exchange collusion projects" (aka previously projects with business support) is also very solid, and the veteran PoW Litecoin's meme-style tweet has further ignited market sentiment. Litecoin surged by about 10% in a short period of time, rising from around $72 to $82. At a time when Pnut, Pepe, and Bome, among others, are starting to follow Bitcoin's rise and gain momentum, the market's FOMO sentiment for Meme coins is also constantly accumulating, and Litecoin's explosion has undoubtedly proven this point.
Litecoin trend, source: Coingecko
Project teams that are following the trend, source: X
In addition to Litecoin, all the projects shown in the above image have claimed to have become Memecoins; the screenshot does not cover the full extent of this trend on the X platform, including Manta Network, AVA Foundation, Aleph Zero, and even the well-known exchange Gate.io have all joined this craze, just like the remakes (or popular TikTok challenges) of a hot video on Douyin, filling up the feeds on the X platform yesterday.
So how have these "new Meme coins" performed?
Overall, the coins that are just riding the hype have not seen significant gains - IoTeX has not seen a clear increase, with a 24-hour drop of 7.5%; Manta has a 24-hour drop of 11.9%. This part of the decline is less related to whether they have tweeted or not, and is mainly due to the pullback led by Bitcoin.
At the same time, the established Meme coins in the market have seen a trend of gains and pullbacks due to this Meme craze: PEPE and WIF both started to surge at some point yesterday, although they have seen pullbacks within 24 hours, but their 7-day gains are still around 90% and 50% respectively. As for PNUT, which is leading this trend, the price has reached $1.6 as of the time of writing.
Meme trends, source: Coingecko
Even more absurd is that this craze has obviously started to go beyond the crypto space: this morning, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, with 2.2 million followers on its official Twitter account, also posted an identical tweet:
Source: X
It should be noted that KLM Royal Dutch Airlines is (or was) a completely unrelated account to the crypto market, and was naturally first suspected of being hacked. Litecoin replied below: "Looks a bit bumpy, but ok!" And someone commented: "Is the Litecoin Twitter account manager working two jobs at the same time?"
Of course, KLM's stock price has not changed at all, and has even seen a slight decline. It seems that the crypto marketing is just shouting slogans, and no one is really buying (though buying is not for the stock market).
Even more extreme, a Meme coin token called INIAAM (I now identify as a memecoin) has already been released on Pump.fun, with a market cap of around $32K as of the time of writing.
INIAAM, source: Pump.fun
Going back to the original context, everyone is of course playing on the meme: "I now identify as xx" is actually more commonly used in the context of gender, where someone may now identify as another gender, and then get repeatedly grafted onto other meanings in the tug-of-war between supporters and non-supporters, such as the famous "I now identify as a Walmart shopping bag" and so on. And this part perfectly corresponds to the core of Meme culture, which is to deconstruct an existing system, be it gender or previously serious crypto projects, and then completely trample on the original meaning, allowing this sense of contrast to bring more traffic to the project.
This is a market strategy, and also the core essence of Meme. Of course, it is also necessary to mention the most important catalyst: crypto investors may have been tired of "high FDV low liquidity" tokens for a long time, and are unwilling to be the bag holders for VCs and project parties anymore, Meme is at least a more fair market - nothing more, just the fastest hand wins.
