Author: Joyce, Frost, BlockBeats
Note: This article was written on July 1, when Pump.fun launched its live streaming function and the "live streaming with meme" phenomenon was just beginning to gain popularity. Recently, Pump.fun has further promoted its live streaming function. In the early morning of November 22, a young unemployed North American streamed on Pump.fun, saying he would not stop streaming until the market value of his own token (LIVE) reached $100 million. This live stream was also selected by Pump's official and placed on the homepage. After filling the order book with $100,000, the LIVE token price kept rising, and later KOLs like gmony joined the online real-time interaction, eventually pushing the LIVE token market value to over $20 million.
Left: The guy who issued the LIVE token live streaming his head shaving; Right: LIVE token price
After the "live streaming guy" became a hit, Pump.fun's website has again sparked a wave of live streaming, with various anchors displaying their talents to boost the price of their own tokens, making Pump.fun gradually take on the appearance of a "crypto Kuaishou".
Pump.fun is the most special product in this cycle. In the more than 4 months since its launch, over 1.17 million tokens have been issued on Pump.fun, with a cumulative revenue of over $50 million. How to understand this figure? In comparison, Uniswap Labs, a top traffic product in the previous bull market, is estimated to have an annual revenue of about $25-30 million.
It can be said that Pump.fun is not a typical Web3 project, without a complex token economic model or DAO governance mechanism, but relying on precise market positioning, Pump.fun has created a business market that is stable and profitable. Under the dominance of the attention economy, many people will interpret the continued prosperity of the on-chain meme coin track as the advantage of short videos over long videos, so in the "era of mass token issuance", can latecomers still get a share? What new tricks will the gameplay of on-chain meme coins have when attention economy is combined with extreme PVP?
The person who burned himself to promote his meme coin is still live streaming
Do you remember the developer who burned himself to promote his meme coin a month ago? Last Thursday, June 27, he was still live streaming on Twitter.
The developer's name is Mikol. On May 17, he launched a meme coin called TruthOrDare (DARE) on Pump.fun, when Pump.fun did not yet have a live streaming function, and could only post pictures in the comments. Mikol personally demonstrated the "highlights" of the first season, live streaming on Twitch and pouring isopropyl alcohol on himself, while his friends shot fireworks at him. In the cheers of the fans and the rise of DARE, his body was set on fire, and he was sent to the hospital with third-degree burns all over his body.
The DARE token gained 12 times in value on the day Mikol was burned, and then quickly returned to zero the next day. Mikol's story was reported by the crypto community media Decrypt, attracting a lot of attention. While in the ICU, Mikol specially recorded a video to the community, saying he would not give up operating, "You will see a better me."
Not only Mikol is the one who issues a meme coin and then expects it to rise in price through extreme behavior to attract attention. The Solana meme craze has brought in a large number of new crypto users, and also spawned many meme coins that are watched by the second. In addition to Mikol's "Burn Coin", there were also meme coins named "LIVEWITHMOM" that live streamed exposing private body parts to "seek investment".
Although the life cycle of these meme coins is extremely short, and few have a market value of over $1 million, the form of linking live streaming with token issuance has allowed many low-income people to find the secret to wealth.
A week after this incident, Pump.fun opened the live streaming function, and the community's first reaction was to advise the token issuers "please don't self-immolate for the sake of making money".
At the time when Mikol's story attracted attention in the community, there were many who felt that such behavior was too pathological and contrary to the original intention of crypto, and some even advised Mikol to find a good job after recovering. But after his condition stabilized, Mikol, who was still in the hospital, opened a Twitch live stream and synchronized it on Pump.fun. As he wished, the comeback live stream pushed DARE to a 15-fold increase.
That comeback surge only lasted a day, and the DARE token price has continued to decline, seemingly difficult to regain upward momentum. But from then until now, Mikol often starts live streams with bandaged wounds, performing acts like eating raw eggs, swallowing cinnamon powder, and synchronizing his recovery routine. New members have also joined his "TruthOrDare family", showcasing their "special skills" like eating mustard and dry-eating chili peppers.
Unless in extremely rare cases, Mikol and his DARE token will probably never regain the attention they had before. There are more Mikols on the internet, hoping to gain community attention through enough abstraction and enough shocking performances, so that their meme coins can soar.
Those with inherent high traffic have already entered the token issuance field, from Jenner to Mother, Father, etc., the celebrity coin wave has made the token issuance teams and early followers all earn handsomely. Although people like Vitalik have expressed opposition to this phenomenon, it is difficult to stop the "entertainment to death" trend in the crypto community.
Perhaps it can be considered that the new entrants in this round of the crypto community are from the "lower-tier market". The meme coin market is still huge, but unlike the DOGE, PEPE and other meme coins that had some connection with the crypto community in the past, the current meme coin craze is pointing to a new direction, outside the crypto community and into the lower-tier market.
The crypto market is experiencing a transformation from PGC to UGA
There are many realistic reasons behind the emergence of the meme coin craze. Admittedly, the crypto narrative in this bull market is no longer as attractive as before, and compared to the opaque token distribution and grand narratives that fail to land, newcomers are more willing to use meme as the first step to enter the circle.
Behind this is the increasing number of users who have seen through the ultimate PVP logic, no matter how the narrative changes, it is just to create a Ponzi-like pool for the next person to take over. The market is not lacking in people who issue tokens, but lacking in people who can tell the token issuance story well. Since the community consensus has become "the essence of value coins is also a kind of air coin", just go straight to issuing their own tokens. The birth of Pump.fun is just in time.
The emergence of Pump.fun allows users to issue their own meme coins at an extremely low cost (0.02 SOL) with just one click, and meme coins go through the take-off and collapse in a few hours, with over 10,000 tokens issued on Pump.fun every day, accounting for more than 80% of the total Solana ecosystem tokens. Recently, Pump.fun's daily revenue has been between $450,000 and $1 million, and its total revenue has exceeded $50 million since its launch a few months ago.
As pointed out in an analysis report released by Youbi Capital in May, the popularity of low-liquidity assets is an internal response to the current lack of on-chain liquidity in this cycle, and also implies a potential metaphor for the rapid increase in the number of tokens issued due to the transformation from PGA (Professional Generated Asset) to UGA (User Generated Asset), leading to an increasingly dispersed consensus.
However, new opportunities still exist.
Three days ago, DEX Screener launched a token issuance platform called Moonshot. On the first day of launch, it released over 7,000 tokens, and during the same period, Solana also received community approval for launching the ability to trade tokens on Twitter, called blinks. Combining these two hot topics, the meme coin SC has surged over 100 times in two days, indicating that the market is eager to grab a share of the token issuance platform's cake, and users are also looking forward to new stories after Pump.fun.
After all, encryption technology has unprecedented and greatly reduced the speed and threshold of asset issuance and trading, and its potential application market is still very large. As long as the community still has the demand for "attention monetization", the crypto market still has a narrative to tell.
What if live streaming happened in Web3?
In the traditional Internet, the "attention economy" industry has developed for about 20 years, experiencing a transformation from the forum and bar era to the era of text and image microblogging, and then to the era of short video live streaming. And this trajectory is also being played out in the crypto field.
On May 29, pump.fun announced that it had opened a live streaming function on the platform. For a website that is focused on making money from on-chain memes, users indeed have no demand to watch live streams. But live streaming, as the form of communication with the largest information carrying capacity, the strongest sense of scene and infectiousness, combined with the function of asset issuance, is a worthwhile application scenario from the perspective of the attention economy.
Simplify commercialization to the extreme
The path to commercialization of Web3 is completely different from that of the traditional Internet, but in the attention economy, the typical cases of Web2 can give some inspiration to the crypto industry.
Take Kuaishou as an example. In 2013, Kuaishou, which was less than two years old, decided to transform from a GIF creation tool to an Internet community, where users produced content on Kuaishou, recorded and shared their lives and creativity through short videos, and interacted with fans. Unlike emerging platforms such as Douyin, Kuaishou's user positioning is the "average person in society", with users mainly being young people in second- and third-tier cities.
In 2014, YY anchors with a batch of loyal fans in the lower-tier market joined Kuaishou, and at that time Kuaishou's monthly active users were 1 million. By the end of 2016, Kuaishou's monthly active users had exceeded 64 million, and in the two years of rapid growth of Kuaishou, YY system anchors occupied the top four positions in the list of Kuaishou's top anchors during the same period.
Kuaishou maintained the characteristics of the community in the lower-tier market, did not sign up internet celebrity stars, did not support traffic, and the fair algorithm mechanism encouraged the flourishing development of UGC content, and compared to products of the same period, Kuaishou eventually stood out with its unique "decentralized community" model.
In 2017, Kuaishou also took the lead in occupying the dividends of live streaming, becoming the world's largest single live streaming platform. According to Kuaishou's prospectus, from 2017 to 2019, the company's revenue was 8.3 billion, 20.3 billion, and 39.1 billion yuan respectively, of which live streaming revenue was 7.9 billion, 18.6 billion, 31.4 billion, and 17.3 billion yuan, accounting for 95.18%, 91.63%, 80.31%, and 68.38% respectively. It can be seen that at that time, live streaming was Kuaishou's core business and the foundation of Kuaishou.
After the rapid development, Kuaishou had to adjust the content ecology, after all, traditional Web2 companies all need to undergo a commercial transformation, and in this process, only those content producers with high audience consumption level, meeting traditional social values, and surviving the fierce competition can be left in the end.
In retrospect, rather than saying that Kuaishou did well in the lower-tier market, it is better to say that Kuaishou targeted the new user market of the attention economy track. And the issuance platforms facing crypto newcomers do not need to consider "commercial transformation".
Among traditional Internet giants, whether they are content platforms or shopping platforms, they all hope to show users "there are good things worth watching/buying here", because only content recognized and loved by more users has commercial value and can bring profits to the platform. But Pump.fun does not need commercialization, its profit model is extremely simple and pure, it only needs to show "there are enough coins and traders here", as long as there are people trading, Pump.fun can make money.
At present, although Pump.fun has opened up the comment area and live streaming function, users log on to Pump.fun only to complete the buying or selling process, and the discussion of on-chain meme coins mainly occurs on Twitter, and meme coin developers with live streaming ideas will also choose platforms such as Twitch and Kick for live streaming promotion.
On the Pump.fun interface, users can only choose based on the two indicators of comment volume and token market value. If there is a live streaming column, will "live streaming hot spots" emerge on Pump.fun?
Human nature game and regulatory dilemma
Currently, some meme display platforms have emerged, such as Game.com, which has just broken through 7,000 Twitter followers, providing a paid list token service, and users can pay 0.8 SOL to publish their issued meme coins on this platform to gain more attention.
And the Pump.fun team seems to have no intention of exploring more on the existing services, after all, a small team that has earned more than $40 million in revenue in half a year and has a stable daily revenue of $600,000 really has no motivation to break the product and innovate the narrative, positioning it as a "tool" is already enough.
With more and more newcomers entering the crypto field, perhaps live streaming can become a label for Moonshot and other issuance platforms as a differentiated strategy.
But the several "x to earn" projects that have been destroyed in the past of Web3 have already shown that no matter how ingenious the design, it cannot challenge human nature. On June 13, a user on Pump.fun launched a meme coin with a sheep wearing a hat as the theme and conducted a live stream during the same period. But shortly after the live stream started, while the comment area was still discussing the sheep's movements, the snipers who had bought in at the time of the token launch quickly sold off most of the tokens at the high price, causing the token price to plummet.
After the token crash, the meme coin issuer explained in the comment area, "My token balance has always remained unchanged, which can be verified through Solscan. If I was just trying to make quick money, why would I live stream my sheep but not sell my tokens?"
Not selling may be because the tokens have not yet been listed on Raydium, and in the end, this token did not reach a market value of $60,000. And the issuer never live streamed his sheep again.
In addition, regulatory issues are also something that this type of platform needs to pay attention to. If the live streaming form is combined with asset issuance, there will inevitably be various attempts to gain attention through extreme and vulgar behaviors. When Pump.fun announced the launch of the live streaming function, the community was most concerned about how the platform would review extreme content, and when issuers release some pornographic or even more extreme inappropriate behavior, whether Pump.fun should intervene to prevent possible criminal behavior.
Epilogue
Going back to those meme coin issuers at the beginning of the article, you can feel the content ecology of traditional Internet short video platforms in the early years. After years of development, these platforms have explored highly attractive business models.
As a form of content that provides an "immersive experience", live streaming has broken through the imagination in a way that makes people realize how simple the speed of traffic aggregation can be, and channels such as tipping and live commerce have also given content producers the ability to compete with platform capital to a certain extent.
In the crypto field, the control of the platform is instantly dispersed. And attention is still the core driving force pushing the entire market forward. If live streaming happens in Web3, what kind of story will unfold? Can the extreme utilization of traffic find a new form of expression in a decentralized environment?
Looking back on these years, in the constant breakdown and reconstruction of consensus, the crypto industry has seen countless projects go from "innovation" to collapse. The emergence of Pump.fun is just a beginning.
