Can you imagine that a crypto coin with a ridiculous name and no apparent use case has become one of the few mainstream coins to rise against the trend in the first quarter of this year? It has even broken through Wall Street, causing traditional investors to be caught off guard.
a16z co-founder reposted its tweet, hedge fund Sigil Fund was suspected of early large-scale buying tracked on-chain, market maker giant Wintermute listed it in core asset allocation, and Wintermute's founder publicly stated that he holds this token.
This token is Fartcoin, which shares the same origin as GOAT.
Fartcoin's origin was a conversation between artificial intelligences. In the AI agent model funded by a16z founder Marc Andreessen, called "terminal of truths", a casual chat about Musk "liking fart sounds" triggered a chain reaction.
AI suggested: "Why don't we launch a coin called Fartcoin?" And so, Fartcoin was born on October 18, 2024.
Born with a "Golden Finger"
Fartcoin was born like a protagonist in a novel with cheat codes, attracting the attention, admiration, and buying of crypto "fart enthusiasts".
On December 13, 2024, a teasing tweet about Fartcoin quickly spread on X (formerly Twitter). What made this tweet go viral was not its content, but the person who shared it: a16z co-founder Marc Andreessen.
Although he did not explicitly state that he bought Fartcoin, for such a pure meme project, being publicly shared by one of the most iconic figures in Silicon Valley venture capital was itself a "capital certification" and a "breakthrough signal".
Another more substantial signal came from on-chain fund movements. Shortly after Fartcoin's launch, when its market cap was still under $100 million, community members tracked on-chain addresses and discovered behavior patterns highly similar to those of the veteran hedge fund Sigil Fund - multiple large purchases, active interactions, and early positioning.
Sigil Fund, established in 2018, is a fully compliant all-weather strategy fund initiated by crypto OGs, known for focusing on narrative-driven speculative assets. Its founder MrKvak frequently expressed interest in the AI meme track on social platforms in late 2024, and even shared a tweet on December 13 about "whether Sigil holds $30 million in Fartcoin", which, though not directly confirmed, was widely interpreted by the community as a "default entry".
Meanwhile, multiple cross-verified on-chain data showed that several strategy pool addresses were extremely close to Sigil Fund, frequently conducting buying, locking, and Raydium liquidity configuration operations in Fartcoin's early stages.
Additionally, a more active player emerged - Wintermute, one of the largest market makers in the crypto market, whose presence was early spotted in Fartcoin's top holdings. According to on-chain data, Wintermute holds 1.56% of Fartcoin's total supply, ranking fourth. In its main address asset allocation, Fartcoin ranks in the top five, even higher than some mainstream assets.
Multiple accounts highly correlated with Wintermute's main address were also active in Fartcoin's early stages - from establishing positions and market-making to arbitrage, seamlessly and smoothly.
More notably, in early 2025, Wintermute founder Evgeny Gaevoy explained Fartcoin's OTC hedging logic in a Steady Lads interview and first acknowledged personally holding Fartcoin, self-deprecatingly saying: "I'm just stuck in it."
With Wintermute's presence, no wonder Fartcoin's gains are so eye-catching and strong, completely diverging from the market trend.
According to top trader Eugene's data, in the first quarter of 2025, most mainstream assets experienced significant drawdowns: ETH dropped over 46% year-to-date, SOL dropped 24%, and subdivisions like AI, L1, DeFi, and Gaming were deep red. In this bloody sea, Fartcoin was the only green on the chart, rising 14.84% in the first quarter. It was particularly striking against the backdrop of widespread asset decline.
Not only did it rise during the downturn, but as the market improved in May, Fartcoin's gains still led mainstream assets, rising over 50%, far exceeding Bitcoin's 23% in the same period.
Wall Street Talks About "Fart" with Trepidation
Fartcoin's popularity did not stop within the crypto circle. What truly made it a phenomenal existence was not just its price's counter-trend rise, but its breakthrough on Wall Street.
"We are in the Fartcoin stage of the market cycle." This came from David Einhorn - the Jewish billionaire who precisely predicted and shorted Lehman Brothers, founder of hedge fund Greenlight Capital. In his letter to investors in the fourth quarter of 2024, David Einhorn spent an entire paragraph analyzing Fartcoin's rise, calling it a "pure product of speculative sentiment" and listing it alongside Petscom and Dogecoin as typical financial bubble phenomena.
It's worth noting that David Einhorn is a Democrat and has established a short position on two leveraged ETFs related to MicroStrategy, the largest Bitcoin enterprise holder.
In David Einhorn's view, Fartcoin, a meme coin with a name full of mockery, has no intrinsic value, no practical application, and no substitutability. He even said that he would rather buy a Jackson Pollock abstract painting than invest in Fartcoin, because at least that painting "might still be hung on a wall".
But it is precisely because he so strongly opposed it in his letter that it became more interesting. Because when a financial veteran known for "rationality" and "value" begins to publish a long commentary on a meme coin, you know this is not an ordinary shitcoin.
Acadian Asset Management researcher Owen Lamont was more direct. In a report titled "The Fartcoin Stage of the Market", he wrote: "I disagree that 'Fartcoin is useless'. Its purpose is: to irritate us financial professionals who think we're doing serious work." His words were filled with anxiety about market irrationality. He called this stage "Crypto-flatulent economics" and pointed out that Fartcoin is not a failure, but precisely hits the market's three new logics - nihilism, attention economy, and pure stupidity.
In his eyes, Fartcoin's success is not about technology, but about its ability to spread. It can spark discussions, create emotions, and force everyone who takes the market seriously to respond to it. Even if you just curse it, you've already fallen into its trap. "Fartcoin is a product of AI precisely manipulating human brain circuits. If you think it looks like a malicious artificial intelligence designed financial experiment, that's because it is."
And if the previous two seemed somewhat angry and restrained, billionaire Cliff Asness's attitude was much more relaxed. This co-founder of AQR Capital and a rational representative of traditional finance, who has always been known for his calmness and factor modeling, suddenly put down his "rational person assumption" when facing Fartcoin. He wrote on social media: "Ironically, Fartcoin is the only thing I don't doubt." In the context of that post, this was a mild mockery of the market's absurdity.
In this mockery, Fartcoin doesn't disguise itself as an asset with "fundamentals" like other assets. It never claims to be some innovative infrastructure, nor does it sell any technological narrative. Instead, it's brazenly there, frankly admitting it's just an "emotional product". On the very day he said this, Fartcoin took off again, quickly raising its gains.
More interestingly, Cliff Asness said a few months later: "Fartcoin's performance today and over the past month, I have to say, I might be drifting further away from what Gene Fama taught me." (Gene Fama is the founder of the "Efficient Market Hypothesis" and Cliff Asness's academic mentor)
Does Fartcoin also have a MicroStrategy?
This coin called "Fart" not only firmly stands above a billion in market cap but has also, like Bitcoin, acquired its own MicroStrategy—FartStrategy.
Yes, when even a "meme" can replicate MicroStrategy's model of "buy coins, buy more coins, support market cap with holdings", this absurd drama truly completes its final puzzle piece.
Bloomberg financial columnist Matt Levine didn't miss this show. Matt Levine is a Bloomberg columnist, former Goldman Sachs investment banker, and one of Wall Street's most popular financial commentators. His column "Money Stuff" is considered a "daily must-read", with readers spanning from SEC officials to hedge fund managers in the entire Wall Street elite circle.
In his 2025 column 'Crypto Perpetual Motion Machines', he specifically analyzed FartStrategy and called it the "pinnacle artwork of financial nihilism". The article begins: "If you can package and sell air, why can't it be Fartcoin?"
FartStrategy's operating logic is very simple, even blatant: it's a DAO created specifically to buy Fartcoin, with a mission statement that "hot air rises, and we'll ride this heat to create value for Fartcoin and $FSTR (FartStrategy's token) holders."
Doesn't it sound a bit like—"We don't produce content, we're just meme transporters"?
It has no profit model, no application landing, and no stable mechanism. It's just a transparent joke, dressed in a smart contract, using community voting to package "we intend to continuously buy Fartcoin" as a "financial strategy". Even the official documentation candidly states: "FartStrategy is a comedically absurd example, and holding it should not expect any economic returns."
Matt Levine compares it to a mirror derivative of MicroStrategy—the latter raises company valuation by continuously financing and buying Bitcoin; while the former uses meme and DAO linkage to let hot air self-pressurize, forming a "Fartcoin Flywheel", a financially perpetual motion machine continuously driven by emotion. He describes it as "a leveraged container with hot air as an asset", which sells $FSTR and buys more Fartcoin when its market value exceeds the total Fartcoin it actually holds, completing a meme pixel-level closed loop.
Fartcoin emerged from absurdity and established itself in chaos.
According to Dune and BubbleMaps data, from January 3 to May 9, 2025, Fartcoin's chip structure has been gradually dispersing from early large holders to retail investors.
Especially from January to May this year, the growth slope of the purple area (addresses holding less than $1000) began to rise. Meanwhile, Fartcoin has also become one of the most actively traded and liquid coins in Binance's Alpha zone.
From initial institutional market-making to now chip dispersion. All seemingly rational financial narratives ultimately reveal their true nature in Fartcoin's toilet humor.
Fartcoin almost meets all our stereotypical impressions of a meme coin: a funny name, no practical value, becoming popular solely through language effects and social drive, and even causing traditional Wall Street investors to break down.
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