Written by: TechFlow

The MEME market's trend changes quickly, and today, most MEME players' attention is drawn to $Ghibli—with a market cap of $28 million in less than a day.

Social media is filled with AI-generated images in Ghibli style, with even Sam Altman and Elon Musk joining the trend, and crypto projects quickly creating their own Ghibli-style derivatives.

Let's quickly introduce the background of the fast-rising token $Ghibli.

Ghibli? Studio Ghibli? AI Ghibli?

Ghibli style refers to the unique visual style of animations created by the famous Japanese animation studio Studio Ghibli, founded by renowned Japanese animation director Hayao Miyazaki and his partners. The studio has numerous well-known works, such as "Spirited Away", "My Neighbor Totoro", and "Howl's Moving Castle".

The formation of Ghibli style can be traced back to Miyazaki's early creative experiences. The Ghibli style is characterized by watercolor texture, high-saturation colors, and unique character designs. When people think of Ghibli, they often visualize a refreshing scene combining blue sky and green grass.

Master Miyazaki's last work, "The Wind Rises"

Ghibli Style + AI

The distinctive Ghibli style has become a classic drawing style in traditional animation and gaming. Since AIGC became popular in 2022, AI image generation technology has rapidly developed, with top AI image models like Midjourney and Stablediffusion adopting the Ghibli style, leading to many Ghibli-style AI derivatives in recent years.

The copyright issue of AI-generated images has always been controversial. However, years ago, Mr. Miyazaki had already expressed his skepticism about AI-generated art, directly stating that "this is an insult to life".

How did $Ghibli become popular?

The fire of the $Ghibli token can be traced back to the GPT-4o image generation function update.

Yesterday, GPT-4o's image generation function received a major update, allowing direct "image-to-image" functionality within the GPT-4o dialogue box. Specifically, by providing GPT with an image and a simple natural language instruction, it can generate a new image based on the original, such as: "Transform the image into a Ghibli cartoon style".

Although this style transformation technology was already mature two years ago, GPT-4o's update lowered the barrier for AI image generation, allowing AI users to easily use the "image-to-image" function without professional AI image software.

The lowered usage threshold and the fun of Ghibli-style derivatives led to Ghibli-style images spreading virally on social media yesterday.

Around 6 PM yesterday, a token named $Ghibli appeared on Pump.Fun, with its icon being a Ghibli-style generated avatar of Pump.Fun founder @a1lon9.

Clearly, the $Ghibli concept narrative was simple and direct, riding on the wave of AI image generation's rapid spread. However, $Ghibli didn't initially attract much attention, and X user @Kris7146 pointed out that $Ghibli's token allocation was tightly bundled.

However, with many on-chain leaders buying in succession, $Ghibli's price continued to rise. After the $JellyJelly event last night, $Ghibli's market cap hovered around $3 million.

Early this morning, Sam Altman updated his X account profile picture to a Ghibli-style image. After the community discovered this, $Ghibli's price skyrocketed from a $3 million market cap. But that wasn't all—at 6:33 AM, Musk posted a meme combining Ghibli style with Lion King, a self-portrait, and Doge, captioned "Today's theme".

With the big names' endorsement, $Ghibli's price became unstoppable, rising to a $28 million market cap before falling back, currently around $20 million.

The explosion of $Ghibli is essentially the spread of market sentiment, concentrating on-chain attention and liquidity. It doesn't have particularly innovative narrative elements. However, for MEME tokens, the hardcore nature of the narrative is just one of many influencing factors. When the market "gets the feeling", the rise naturally follows.

As an ordinary participant, when perceiving market rhythm with real money, don't get carried away and mind the boundaries.

(PS: Beyond Ghibli style, GPT-4o's image generation function offers various other styles to play with)