Author: Aaron Elijah Mars, Crypto Investor; Translated by: Jinse Finance xiaozou
I've been in this industry for four years and have invested in over 30 startups. I've collaborated with the biggest Web2 and Web3 IPs. However, I've never issued my own tokens or Non-Fungible Tokens. It's time to change that.
One of the hottest topics this year is the debate around meme coins and utility tokens. Meme coin analyst Murad said it well: "Utility tokens are just meme coins that took a few more steps." That's a cool narrative. But is it true?
Are meme coins more fair than VC coins?
I've FOMO'd into a lot of meme coins, and most of the time the teams are really bad. Why is that? What's so hard about issuing tokens? Well, I'll share my insights on the industry and the meme coin market.
Honestly, I haven't issued tokens yet - my team (around 10 of us) and I run a CTO (Community Takeover). I like the CTO concept, reviving a dead token. You just need to find an existing narrative. I think there's a lot of potential to be tapped, with very good dormant tokens.
We've accumulated a lot of tokens for the CTO (maybe too many), and we're starting to create content, develop strategies to revive the community, and try to assemble a team.
It grew very quickly, achieving 100x growth in a day. To be honest, we made a lot of mistakes.
First, we didn't capture any profits, not a single penny. We had an idealistic vision to build a "cult", aiming for tens of millions of supporters in the long run. If marketing is a money game, then meme coins are the hardcore mode.
KOLs are not your friends, they're not reliable at all. They'll be singing the praises of a token as the "new paradigm" one minute, and dump it 30 minutes later. *Pump and dump, pump and dump, always ending in a dump.*
You'll soon find that it's very similar to traditional advertising, with CAC and customer ROI data to deal with. It's a PVP game, you have to battle your ad network and users.
In this game, if you don't profit, you get farmed. It's a really bad industry framework, but that's the reality. *Either you, or them.*
As for the community, it's incredibly difficult to build something reliable in this market. People's attention spans are so short, if you don't make a move in a day, they might lose 90% and dump.
Non-Fungible Tokens have a lot of flaws, but they do facilitate community building. For meme coins under the tens of millions, this is incredibly difficult.
Now, I see meme coins as a sandbox for building utility tokens (and building overall skills). You can become really good at content creation (FWOG or using MERV) or community building (Retardio). But ultimately, if you succeed, you have to build a product.
This is also a great way to build a top-tier team, as it's a high-risk/high-reward environment with a lot of pressure. I'm amazed by the pressure, especially during price rallies. And how depressing it is, especially during price dumps.
I'm surprised the meme coin and utility token communities have been able to sustain building in such chaos. Honestly, you have to experience it to understand it.
We've also seen how terrible Twitter is for crypto projects, but I'm not sure if Farcaster has solved some of the issues. Ultimately, the best meme coins are those where people have aggregated their social capital around existing audiences.
This makes me very excited about social DEXes/publishing platforms, making people accountable and diluting the bundled influence.
I also think there are a lot of opportunities for innovation in this space:
Excited about Flaunch / Baseline and interested in how to do LP profitably and return volatility to users.
Case studies/documentation are practically non-existent. You might have read some articles, but you can't find a (good) piece like mine on the internet about meme coins and how to properly launch and manage communities. We're in the early stages.
There's room for new VC models, market makers, and specialized meme coin management products. Because it's very similar to startups, your pre-seed buyers take the biggest risk (but they're not locked).
Pumps are really just a casino. If you're a serious, legitimate team, you don't need Pumps. And you're losing a ton of revenue.
I don't know if I'm an asshole trying to impose unnecessary formalization/complexification. However, I truly believe this space can be more fun and responsible.
The debate between utility tokens and meme coins is irrational. I'd rather buy a token from a16z than some $5,000 market cap token bundled with a dozen wallets. Unless we can reduce this risk, we can't truly enjoy the fun, because it's a zero-sum game.
I like the vision of meme coins, community building has never been more important, and I do believe it will succeed. But we need better tools to do it, and the VC model isn't that bad. I want early users to buy my tokens, but I don't want them to dump it at 10% of the price in 1 day.
I also think VC funds are too ridiculous, will never make money, and won't build a lasting community. So we might need a hybrid model.
Ultimately, I think it's just about community building, with meme coins as an attention mechanism. Like Pudgy Penguin or Milady.
The best memes win the hearts of the internet.
But I also wonder, when you can automatically create memes, how much does community building really matter. Is crypto just a framework to turn humans into economically incentivized AI agents?
