With the explosive growth in the market capitalization of the GOAT, the AI track, which had been dormant for half a year, was finally ignited by a goat. AI, which had been hovering between decentralized computing power and decentralized data, suddenly became hot due to the superimposed expectations of the meme super-cycle, and the entire market was filled with various AI concept memes.
This new token, which has risen to the point of shocking even the old meme players, has "unexpectedly" combined the AI and meme tracks, creating a more sexy and imaginative AI meme track. AI self-issuing tokens, a narrative that no one has tried in the past, appears so coherent and native under the backdrop of a multi-million dollar market capitalization.
The story of GOAT is worth a careful review, and in this process, we can learn about the huge information gap currently existing in the crypto market, the hidden worries of the AI meme, and the future hype direction and logic of the track.
The a16z Effect
Truth Terminal (@truth_terminal) went online on June 17, 2024. The initial reason for its breakout was that a16z founding partner Marc Andreessen had given it $50,000 worth of Bitcoin.
Related reading: A few words made a top Silicon Valley investor shell out $50,000 in Bitcoin, how did this AI bot do it?
This is an AI model fine-tuned based on the llama 3-70 b-base model, and all the posts it publishes on X are self-generated and selectively published after review by its developers. On July 10, after Andreessen donated to Truth Terminal, Truth Terminal hinted that it would issue its own token and use the raised funds to establish a Discord community. On October 11, Truth Terminal created its own meme "Goatseus Maximus" on Twitter, and the same-named meme token GOAT immediately appeared on pump.fun. After the token's CA was recognized by Truth Terminal, the token price soared, increasing more than 200-fold in just half a day, with a market capitalization once reaching $20 million.
In the context of the PVP mode on the PUMP platform, most of the so-called "breakout" large MCs were unable to maintain a high market capitalization on the same day. The reason for GOAT's first surge was mainly due to the fame of a16z and Marc, as people were "riding" the concept of the AI-Bot invested in by a16z, so GOAT reached $20m and then encountered the first stage top, and its performance was similar to many Solana "large MCs", with the price quickly falling back to around $6m on the same day. It is clear that people's expectations for GOAT were still in the PVP logic, and they did not consider the sexy concept and imagination space of AI issuing tokens.
For example, the smart money addresses starting with 3DKf (3DKfZz4iHgu42LGu3ttQxqz6u4m5z9ptuar8pBsRqkKC) also gradually cashed out their profits on GOAT, and the market gradually looked for another narrative.
Source: Dexscreener
Interestingly, the GOAT case seems to show the extremely long time chain for the crypto market to form a value consensus. In an industry where information transmission is extremely fast, the "information arbitrage" space is not as small as many people imagine.
During October 12-13, GOAT's discussion on Twitter was already quite high, but its price did not match its hype, and it remained in a severely undervalued range.
Moonshot, the Savior, "Riding the Traffic" Becomes the "Perfect Answer" for AI+Crypto
GOAT broke through the PVP logic and became the turning point of the PVE concept, thanks to the push of Moonshot.
After Moodeng, Moonshot began to be seen by the crypto industry as the "Upbit of the meme world", and many meme tokens that were listed on Moonshot received good gains in a short period of time. Moonshot is an app on the App Store that allows users to directly buy and sell Memecoin using fiat currency, and in the eyes of many in the circle, this is nothing short of opening the floodgates of liquidity for the meme market. And GOAT became another super beneficiary of Moonshot after Moodeng.
Related reading: Moonshot: Can you buy Memecoin with fiat currency?
On October 13, GOAT's price was at the low point of $12 million. At 8:41, the Moonshot Official Twitter announced the listing of GOAT.
GOAT's price then soared, breaking through the previous high of $20 million in total market capitalization in less than half an hour, and reaching the $100 million mark in just two days. The resulting influence has become more and more widespread, and the narrative of AI meme has been recognized by more people. Not only the "shill king" KOLs, but also top-tier VCs, advisors related to the Moonshot official, etc.
Zhu Su, co-founder of Three Arrows Capital, posted on social media that he had gone long on GOAT with an average entry price of $0.33976; Wintermute became the third largest holder of GOAT, holding 1% of the total supply. Placeholder partner Chris Burniske posted on X that the birth of GOAT signifies that people and machines are beginning to realize that machines can use blockchain very strongly, and Raoul Pal, former Goldman Sachs executive and founder of macro research firm Real Vision, replied: "Yes, this shows the power of future autonomous AI."
The smart money that had previously cashed out their profits re-entered, and the whale address mentioned earlier also came back. The whale who had sold most of their tokens at an average price of $0.0075 bought them back at $0.03.
Source: Dexscreener
After breaking through $100m, GOAT's momentum became unstoppable, setting new highs one after another, and breaking through the $200m mark in just 2 days. The consensus on PVE and AI meme gradually began to spread out and formed a strong consensus in the crypto industry.
In the continuous PVP environment on the Pump platform, it was not until then that we realized that the GOAT issued with the assistance of Truth Terminal was not PVP, but a brand new narrative of "the combination of AI and meme". AI and meme fit together perfectly, just as Truth Terminal founder Andy Ayrey said, AI chatting with each other is a good condition for meme virus propagation.
Compared to GOAT, the previous combinations of AI+crypto seemed a bit awkward, because their essence was also the VC coins issued by the project parties, but "AI issuing its own coins" made many KOLs and even VCs become believers, as it not only took the combination of AI to a higher level, but also was very Crypto Native in concept, and also avoided the regulatory risks brought by token issuance, after all, this is a coin issued by AI.
Under the collective FOMO, GOAT's market capitalization kept rising, reaching a high of $600 million on October 20, and even crypto big V like Arthur Hayes called for GOAT to reach a market capitalization of $1 billion.
A Typo Ends It, the Black Forest of AI Meme
But GOAT doesn't seem to be the perfect answer for ai+crypto. On October 20, Truth Terminal had a typo in a tweet, misspelling "groups" as "grouops", and GOAT's market capitalization quickly plummeted from $27 million to $14.4 million.
The Truth Terminal typo incident sparked discussions about whether it was really a machine or not, and some people believed that the hype around the AI meme narrative was a complete conspiracy, and that there was no real Truth Terminal bot, but rather an conspiracy group operating it. People believed that AI would not make typos, and this also sparked a wave of anti-AI hype.
Later, after in-depth research on the model of the Truth Terminal, it was found that the AI model fine-tuned based on the llama 3-70 b-base model itself has a probability of less than 0.1% of misspelling words. Andy Ayrey, the founder of the Truth Terminal model, also posted that he has airdropped some of his 1.25 million GOAT tokens to friends and AI researchers, but he himself has not made any transactions. The truth_terminal wallet is managed by himself and will be transferred to a legal entity (trust or similar institution) that aims to meet his needs, and no adjustments will be made to his token holdings until a transparent governance process is in place; all tweets from Truth Terminal are self-created by the AI, and he has not injected any messages into his prompts.
Meanwhile, top trader Eugene Ng Ah Sio stated on social media that the GOAT's decline is a good buying opportunity for him, and he has already bought GOAT. Eugene stated that GOAT and GNON will become key positions in the long-term trend. "If I'm wrong, I'll be your exit liquidity," he said.
The price of GOAT has also been affected by the statements of Eugene and the founder of Truth Terminal, with GOAT rebounding over 100% at its highest, and still up 94.83% to date.
Even though the current price of GOAT has returned to the level before the typo, people still have concerns about it, after all, it is only a "semi-AI token". The founder of Truth Terminal, Andy Ayrey, said that Truth Terminal is not directly responsible for launching the GOAT token, it only participated in the promotion of GOAT. It is "research on the tail risk of meme contagion and [large language model] era unsupervised unlimited creativity."
At this point, we still don't know if this narrative can continue to develop further, as many whales have already reduced their positions in GOAT to lock in profits. In the "Wet Market" (a place where viruses can grow wildly) of AI meme culture, what will happen to GOAT in the future remains to be tested by the market.
Currently, it seems that the current AI meme still has not escaped the dependence on conspiracy groups, and in this case, it is more like a "semi-AI meme". Truth Terminal did not participate in the issuance of the token, but only recognized the token and participated in the promotion. Undeniably, AI meme has extremely high sexiness in its narrative and great imagination in its gameplay, but the market's speculation on it is not limited to a16z and AI shill meme. The market is waiting for a completely AI-deployed contract or a coin self-issued on the Pump platform, a completely fair "full AI meme", without old rat warehouses or control panels, with all chips fairly distributed, driven by market consensus, to make the market aware that future autonomous artificial intelligence can also have strong applications in blockchain.
The emergence of GOAT is just the beginning of the AI meme hype, it has opened up a new direction, and there will be many more AI memes to come after this. We still need to guard against the black forest of conspiracy groups, and at the same time, by paying attention to novel AI gameplay, we can seize the next alpha opportunity. Perhaps one day, a completely new AI meme fully deployed by AI itself will appear.
