Author: JJ Alicea Compiled by: Block unicorn
From a historical perspective, Meme has always been a part of the human experience, representing the migration of cultural artifacts across generations - ideas that are enduring, significant, and snowballing across eras. Meme is the focus of society, carrying value in the form of collective influence.
Today, Meme is often associated with triviality or even absurdity, mainly because online Meme is typically humorous. However, the reason humor resonates is that it contains a kernel of truth.
"Meme propagates itself from brain to brain, in the Meme pool, by a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so Meme propagate themselves in the Meme pool by leaping from brain to brain." - Richard Dawkins
Meme is the basic unit 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 community's beliefs and values, deeply embedding them in the cultural fabric. Similarly, in modern society, Meme is the means of transmitting cultural fragments or ideas 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, Meme is the modern narrative tool, distilling complex notions into simple, easily transmissible forms, conveying cultural information and rapidly disseminating it globally.
Community
Meme is the basic unit of cultural transmission, and community is the ecosystem in which Meme accumulates value. In other words, Meme are the important ideas, and community is the people those ideas are focused on.
Communities typically exhibit the following key characteristics:
1. Shared interests and goals
2. Communication and interaction
3. Structure and identity
4. Knowledge and resource sharing
5. Collective identity
Communities often start with a small number of individuals dedicated to disrupting mainstream culture. The open-source software movement originated 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 polished sound of mainstream rock and the consumerism of pop culture. The VaccinateCA organization is composed of tech optimists committed to spreading vaccine supply information to as many people as possible, to combat a government system constrained by logistics.
These communities were initially highly localized, with only a few devoted adherents sharing a common vision and collective belief in the world's malleability. These communities ultimately had profound impacts on fields like technology, finance, culture, art, entertainment, and healthcare.
The Linux operating system saves enterprises and governments over $60 billion annually in licensing fees, supporting over 90% of the internet infrastructure, with the Linux kernel powering around 70% of the world's smartphones through Android. 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 - 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 from Google - significantly improving vaccine distribution efficiency.
This is bottom-up, community-driven value creation.
Meme
The first 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 status symbols. Copper, silver, and bronze were also widely used for making tools and decorative items during this time. So, what made gold so special?
Unlike other metals, gold does not tarnish or lose its luster, giving it a lasting quality that symbolizes eternity and stability. The longevity of gold means it resists change, obsolescence, and competition, increasing its chances of continued survival into the future. Gold has become a Meme with enduring influence because it is important, unique, and resonates with humanity.
Gold is one of the world's largest asset classes, yet it has no practical utility - no production 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 a useful commodity like oil, nor is it a representation of valuable ownership like Apple stock. 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.
One could argue that Bitcoin (BTC) is the earliest "Meme coin" in the digital sense - an asset that initially seemed worthless but has now become a global store of value across economies.
Bitcoin not only sparked a financial revolution, but it also ignited a cultural movement. Through decentralized technology, it enabled peer-to-peer value exchange, financial self-sovereignty, and the rise of a global grassroots community bound by shared beliefs.
Bitcoin's birth coincided with the 2008 financial crisis, a pivotal moment that tapped into widespread distrust of the traditional financial system and created a new narrative of decentralized value. People buy Bitcoin not for its potential cash flows, but for 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 a trustless asset that can support a trustless economy.
Bitcoin holders feel they are part of a larger community - a tribe, not just financial investors. If you're skeptical, search for "Apple tattoo" or "Uber tattoo" and compare them to "Bitcoin tattoo".
Assessing the Value of Communities
Outsiders often overlook the power and value of communities, just as they initially misunderstood Bitcoin. In the traditional financial world, professionals typically rely on analysis methods taught in schools like the Wharton Business School - discounted cash flows, comparative analysis, cash flows, and EBITDA. Companies have thus 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 Bitcoin and Meme coins are still misunderstood by traditional finance.
Today, the communities created by these "companies" have immense value. "Companies" here can refer to anything - startups, public companies, crypto protocols, influencers, creative endeavors, or even a subreddit. Over time, the valuation of a company depends not only on its profits, but also on the value its community creates and accumulates - whether internal or external (e.g., Reddit + GameStop).
Over 86% of internet users trust Reddit and its community more than advertising when it comes to understanding new products and brands; people 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 for more than 5 hours a day, and Americans send an average of 94 text messages per day.
TikTok's book community has directly driven bestsellers, with some books seeing over 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 a collaboration, Bud Light's sales declined by 26% and Anheuser-Busch InBev's stock price fell by 20%, resulting in a $26 billion market value loss - all driven by its conservative community.
Communities cannot be accurately predicted by traditional financial evaluation frameworks, as their significance and impact are dynamic, constantly growing, shrinking, and transforming. They cannot simply be captured in tables and lists in investment prospectuses or financial models.
Financial firms often overlook the enduring power of communities, viewing them as anomalies, underestimating their influence, and dismissing them as futile efforts.
We believe that as the speed of interconnectivity and ongoing online interactions accelerate, communities will continue to grow 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 stems 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 the value generated by user activity (content creation, interaction, and data) is primarily captured by the platform and its shareholders, MEME coins upend this model, making users both the creators and the owners of the network's value.
Bonk, distributed through airdrops to users, quickly became the preferred MEME coin of the Solana ecosystem. The initial recipients were those who continued to contribute to the 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 stayed 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, minted, and self-generated - expanding the concept of "MEME" to anything with social significance and transforming it into a community-monetization tool through immutable smart contracts.
The Future
The future will resemble the past, with technology continuing to evolve, cities expanding, and culture adapting to the tools and media of the age. However, machines cannot usurp the right to produce MEME. Culture - its creation, dissemination, and endurance - cannot be outsourced to large floating-point matrix computations. While machines may 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; they are 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.
On Loisaida Avenue in Manhattan, there is a small Puerto Rican restaurant called Rinconcito. They have no reservations, no rewards programs, no points systems or digital membership cards. They don't ask for your email address to send targeted ads, and they're almost impossible to find online. You won't see them compromising to cater to some outrageous trends on TikTok, nor will they bottle and sell their signature sauce to the masses.
They trade in culture, honest people cooking good food at fair prices - the same way for decades. In every community, this resonates deeply, as people recognize: this is how life should be. And that is their secret recipe - culture, for sale.
