From a historical perspective, memes have always been a part of the human experience, representing the migration of cultural artifacts across generations - ideas that endure, carry significance, and snowball in each era. Memes are the focal points of society, carrying value in the form of collective influence.
Today, memes are often associated with triviality or even absurdity, mainly because internet memes tend to be humorous in nature. However, the very reason humor resonates is that it contains a kernel of truth.
"Memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. As genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain." - Richard Dawkins
Memes are the fundamental units of cultural transmission. In ancient societies, religious stories and shared histories were often orally passed from person to person, with each narrator adding their own perspective or embellishment. This process helped solidify the beliefs and values of the community, embedding them deeply into the cultural fabric.
Similarly, in modern society, memes are the means by which cultural fragments or ideas are transmitted from one mind to another, evolving through each retelling or reinterpretation. Both modes of transmission rely on repetition, resonance, and the subtle shifts that occur as people interpret and share, allowing the essence of ideas to persist and adapt over time. In this way, memes are the modern narrative tools, distilling complex notions into simple, easily transmissible forms, conveying cultural information and spreading rapidly across the globe.
Community
Memes are the fundamental units of cultural transmission, and communities are the ecosystems in which memes accrue value. In other words, memes are the important ideas, and communities are the people who care about those ideas.
Communities typically exhibit the following key characteristics:
- Shared interests and goals
- Communication and interaction
- Structure and identity
- Knowledge and resource sharing
- Collective identity
Communities often originate from a small number of individuals dedicated to disrupting mainstream culture. The open-source software movement started with a handful of developers, like those driving the Linux project, who challenged the dominance of proprietary software and advocated for free access and modifiable code. The punk rock movement began in cities like New York and London, driven by a small group of passionate musicians, artists, and fans who rejected the refined sounds of mainstream rock and the consumerism of pop culture. The VaccinateCA organization was formed by a group of tech-optimists committed to spreading vaccine supply information to as many people as possible, in order to combat a logistically constrained government system.
These communities were initially highly localized, with only a small number of devoted believers sharing a common vision and collective belief in the malleability of the world. These communities ultimately had profound impacts on fields ranging from technology to finance, culture, art, entertainment, and healthcare.
The Linux operating system saves enterprises and governments over $60 billion annually in licensing fees, supports over 90% of internet infrastructure, and the Bits built on the Linux kernel power around 70% of the world's smartphones. Punk rock became the soundtrack for political and social uprisings in Eastern Europe (e.g., the Solidarity movement in Poland) and Latin America. Punk fans and bands popularized zines, self-published mini-magazines often focused on music, politics, and alternative lifestyles - becoming the grassroots precursors to modern blogs and independent digital news.
VaccinateCA provided reliable vaccine supply information for over 1,000 vaccination sites, compared to only 127 options provided by Google - significantly improving the efficiency of vaccine distribution.
This is bottom-up, community-driven grassroots value creation.
Meme
The use of gold can be traced back to ancient civilizations in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and parts of Eastern Europe. As early as 4000 BC, people valued gold for its unique beauty, rarity, and malleability, crafting it into jewelry, ritual objects, and symbols of status. Copper, silver, and bronze were also widely used for making tools and decorative items. But what made gold so special?
Unlike other metals, gold does not tarnish or corrode, giving it a lasting quality that symbolizes eternity and stability. Gold's longevity means it resists change, obsolescence, and competition, making it likely to continue existing in the future. Gold has become a persistent meme, as it is important, unique, and resonates with humanity.
Gold is one of the largest asset classes in the world, yet it has no practical utility - no productive use, no cash flow, and no business model. Its value exists solely because we collectively ascribe it value. It is a metal with limited intrinsic utility, but its perceived value stems from its beauty, rarity, and its symbolic meaning in human culture. It is not like oil, which is a useful commodity, or like Apple stock, which represents valuable ownership. Yet, as gold's collective influence grows, more people adopt it, making it a store of value and potentially a global reserve currency, perhaps even replacing another meme - the US dollar.
Some may say that BTC is the earliest "MEME coin" in the digital sense - an asset that initially seemed to have no value, but has now become a global store of value across economic systems.
BTC not only triggered a financial revolution, but also ignited a cultural movement. Through decentralized technology, it has enabled peer-to-peer value exchange, financial autonomy, and the rise of a global grassroots community bound by shared beliefs.
The birth of BTC coincided with the 2008 financial crisis, a moment of great significance as it tapped into widespread distrust of the traditional financial system and created a new narrative of decentralized value. People buy BTC not because of its potential cash flows, but because of its unique value proposition: it is a store of value, a belief in future appreciation, and most importantly, a symbol of a new financial ecosystem free from corporate or individual control. It is an asset without the need for trust, supporting an economy without the need for trust.
BTC holders feel they are part of a larger community - a community, not just financial investors. If you are skeptical, search for "Apple tattoo" or "Uber tattoo" and compare them to "BTC tattoo".
Assessing the Value of Communities
Outsiders often overlook the power and value of communities, just as they initially misunderstood BTC. In the traditional financial world, professionals often rely on analysis methods taught in schools like the Wharton School - discounted cash flow, comparative analysis, cash flow and EBITDA. Companies have therefore shaped their own metrics and reporting around these frameworks. This limited perspective is why many initially misunderstood the value of GameStop, and why crypto assets like BTC and MEME coins are still misunderstood by traditional finance.
Today, the communities built by these "companies" have immense value. "Companies" here can refer to anything - startups, public companies, crypto protocols, KOLs, creative works, even a subreddit. Over time, the valuation of companies depends not only on their profits, but also on the value created and accumulated by their communities - both internal and external (e.g. Reddit + GameStop).
Over 86% of internet users trust Reddit and its communities more than ads when it comes to understanding new products and brands; 45% of adults under 45 trust news on social media platforms more than traditional news networks; 63% of Gen Z and Millennials trust influencers more than brands. Gen Z members spend an average of 8.5 hours online per day, 55% use smartphones more than 5 hours per day, and Americans send an average of 94 text messages per day.
The BookTok community on TikTok has single-handedly driven bestsellers, with some books seeing 1,000% sales growth after gaining community recognition. The r/WallStreetBets community on Reddit was able to push GameStop's stock price from under $20 to over $300 in just a few days. After the collaboration, Bud Light's sales declined by 26%, Anheuser-Busch InBev's stock price fell by 20%, resulting in a $26 billion market cap loss - all caused by its conservative community.
Communities cannot be accurately predicted by traditional financial evaluation frameworks, as their meaning and impact are dynamic, constantly growing, shrinking and transforming. They cannot be simply captured in the tables and lists of investment prospectuses or financial models.
Financial firms often overlook the enduring power of communities, viewing them as anomalies, underestimating their impact, and dismissing them as futile efforts.
We believe that as the speed of interconnectivity and online interaction continues to grow, communities will continue to expand and exert greater influence. The ubiquity of digital platforms makes it easier for individuals to find and connect with like-minded groups than ever before, breaking down the geographic and social barriers that once constrained community formation.
MEME Coins: Vessels of Community Ownership
MEME coins are the perfect tools for measuring the value of communities. They are the tokenized expressions of culture.
Similar to social networks, the value of MEME coins comes from the communities they aggregate. However, they represent a fundamental shift in how value is distributed and controlled. Unlike platforms like Instagram or Facebook, where user activity (content creation, interaction, and data) generates value that is primarily captured by the platform and its shareholders, MEME coins upend this model, making users both the creators and the owners of the value on the network.
Bonk, distributed through an airdrop to users, quickly became the preferred MEME coin of the Solana ecosystem. The initial recipients were those who continued to contribute to existing communities, protocols, and core infrastructure even after the FTX collapse. Bonk became a tokenized symbol of resilience in the face of adversity, and the enthusiasm of the initial recipients rapidly spread to a wider user base, driving up the value of Bonk and creating wealth within the ecosystem. This wealth remained within the community, supporting the development of projects like Bonkbot, bringing immense value to Solana, the product users, and the Bonk token itself.
This is grassroots value creation - bottom-up, community-driven, without external investors, only the human capital within the community creating value for the community.
As the world's assets become further digitized, more MEME can be monetized, manufactured, and self-generated - extending the "MEME" concept as a toolkit to anything with social significance, and transforming it into a community-monetized instrument through immutable smart contracts.
The Future
The future will be a continuation of the past, with technology constantly evolving, cities continuing to expand, and culture adapting to the tools and media of the times. However, machines cannot usurp the right to produce MEME. Culture - its creation, dissemination, and sustainability - cannot be outsourced to large-scale floating-point matrix computations. While machines may be able to generate products that appear to be MEME - hollow, algorithmically optimized snapshots of familiar ideas, mass-produced for momentary attention - they will lack the deeper resonance and transformative power of true MEME.
Throughout history, culture has always been the collective effort, and MEME are the smallest units of cultural transmission, encoding the ideas and values of their time. MEME are not just fragmented media, but vessels of shared meaning. The vitality of MEME comes from being accepted, not created. Their birth is not isolated creation, but a chemical reaction of shared understanding, humor, and emotion.
There is a small Puerto Rican restaurant called Rinconcito on Loisaida Avenue in Manhattan. They have no reservation service, no reward programs, no points systems or electronic membership cards. They don't ask for your email address to send you targeted ads, and they're almost impossible to find. You won't see them compromising on TikTok to cater to some horrific trends, and they won't be bottling and selling their signature sauce to the masses. They trade in culture, honest people who cook delicious food with care, and fair prices - the same way they've done for decades. In every community, this resonates deeply, and people recognize: this is how life should be. And that's their secret recipe - culture, for sale.
