Among the technology and internet assets, the most widely circulated investment legends in the market are undoubtedly NVIDIA, Luckin Coffee, and Pinduoduo. The prices of these leading targets with huge market capitalization have doubled, which is enough to make those big players with large funds retreat.

However, from the perspective of an ordinary person, this year's strongest asset is still the explosively strong Crypto. In 2023, which was recognized as a bear market, the two meme coins, PEPE and ORDI, shocked the industry with gains of 37.5 million times and nearly 20,000 times, respectively.

The Meme Coin project is the "wealth code" with the greatest opportunity for ordinary investors in the cryptocurrency field, because there is never a shortage of new things here. Unlike other business-oriented cryptocurrency projects such as DeFi and web3Game, Meme seems to have no business model, but its business model and PMF (Product Market Fit, a product that matches user needs) are very clear, that is: to provide the public with highly imaginative speculative media for cryptocurrency investors.

The so-called "providing for retail investors" refers to the concept of Meme being simple and fresh, with a concept that is either strange or conflicting, making it easier to capture the attention of the public in a sea of information. The so-called "great imagination space" means that they have no actual business as the gravitational force of the currency price, and only the word "consensus" can value them sky-high.

Even the most serious practitioners in the encryption industry cannot deny that "speculation for profit" is the most important, even the primary driving force in the world of encryption. The endless stream of meme projects is a response to this type of demand and represents a product-market fit.

meme Cultural Inheritor PEPE

"Dog-themed" meme coins' success has made the market realize that memes have a unique role in the cryptocurrency field, and that sharing a certain subculture within a community can generate tremendous power. After experiencing a bear market, meme coins like Shib and Doge not only survived, but also performed even better than some so-called value investment projects.

If you are a traditional investor, whether it is value investment or short-term trading, you will definitely study all aspects of asset issuance to ensure safety when choosing investment targets. However, meme coins will not give you this time, they rely on emotions and marketing.

PEPE, as a "meme" that has been popular on the internet for many years, is inspired by the classic meme "Pepe the Frog" from Matt Furie's "Boy's Club" cartoon. It became popular on cultural forums such as Myspace, Gaia Online, and 4chan in 2008, and in 2015, it became one of the most popular viral images on social platform Tumblr.

Crypto is not short of hype about this sad frog, from tokens to NFTs, it has it all. And in 2023, PEPE will reach its peak value, making the value of this meme soar.

PEPE official X account published its first tweet on April 5th, and PEPE trading began on April 15th. The initial price of PEPE was approximately 0.000000001 USD, with a total supply of 420.69 trillion.

PEPE declared itself as "the most attention-grabbing meme coin in existence. Dogecoin is outdated, it's time for PEPE to dominate." The two numbers "420" and "69" in its supply of 4.2069 trillion also have subcultural attributes as meme numbers. It can be said that the popularity of PEPE is inseparable from the cultural foundation laid by the "Sad Frog" emoticon and the wealth of imagination brought to this market by numerous meme coin projects in the past.

PEPE's early price trend was driven by the founding team and fans sharing frog-themed memes on social media. It wasn't until May 6th when Binance launched PEPE on its innovation zone, followed by the launch of PEPE 1-20x U perpetual contract on Binance, that PEPE's price reached new highs at that time.

At that time, the market was in a state of excitement. Bitcoin had risen by 100% from its lowest point after a sharp decline. Cryptocurrency players were envious of the skyrocketing AI and chip stocks in the US stock market and needed a target to vent their pent-up emotions. Combined with the Binance effect, PEPE's performance in the first half of this year was unparalleled.

Since its establishment at the end of April, in just one month, PEPE's market value has reached an astonishing $1.5 billion, with a 24-hour trading volume exceeding $1.7 billion at its peak. This trading volume is no less than that of some of the largest centralized exchange platforms' bitcoin spot trading volume during the same period. In the bear market, PEPE may be the first to match the trading volume of bitcoin.

PEPE price trend chart; Source: CoinGecko

Wearing the meme coat, the inscription dragon head ORDI

Unlike PEPE, who placed himself on the meme culture track from the beginning, ORDI, the inscription of the Bitcoin ecosystem, chose a more obscure path to climb to the throne of wealth effect.

ORDI's story starts in December 2022. Bitcoin ecosystem developer Casey launched the Ordinals protocol, and the cryptocurrency market began conducting asset experiments related to Bitcoin.

On March 8th, 2023, an anonymous developer named @domodata launched the BRC-20 Inscription Protocol based on the Ordinals protocol and deployed the experimental token $ORDI. On March 9th, ORDI was fully minted at a cost of approximately $2-3 per token, with each token containing 1000 ORDI. This means that the unit price of ORDI at that time was $0.003.

And now ORDI is priced at $54. In 9 months, it has increased from 0.003 to 54, nearly 20,000 times.

ORDI 7 price trend chart; Source: CoinGecko

One year has passed, and looking back now, perhaps ORDI is the most successful experiment in the Bitcoin industry, but the price wheel of ORDI did not take off at the beginning.

Bitcoin has long been used only for storage and transfer functions. When people start building ecosystems and experiencing applications in it, they will find that compared to the mature DeFi, NFT and other fields of Ethereum, the Bitcoin ecosystem is still not very friendly to ordinary crypto users. At that time, the price of Bitcoin did not give people confidence, and except for the firm players in the Bitcoin ecosystem, ordinary investors did not believe that projects like ORDI could really take off.

On March 23rd, UniSat launched the BRC-20 trading market and the price of ORDI rose to 0.3 USD. However, due to double-spending issues, UniSat closed the trading market. One month later, UniSat reopened the BRC-20 trading market, but only for select users, and the price of ORDI rose to 1 USD.

People are gradually realizing the future expectations of BRC-20, a new asset issuance method. In the cryptocurrency industry, people are always willing to invest their energy in researching new things and have attracted a lot of funds through the consensus of fair launch.

With the successive entry of mainstream trading platforms, the first wave of ORDI's outbreak gradually planted seeds. On April 27th, OKX initiated a vote on whether to support BRC-20, and users received the expected launch of BRC-20 on OKX.

Related reading: "OKX: Why did it become the biggest winner of BRC-20?"

On May 8th, Gate launched ORDI, and the price once reached a record high of over $20, with BTC transaction fees on the chain accounting for 43.7% of the total miner revenue. However, due to market downturn and selling pressure, the price of ORDI continued to decline to around $7.5. On May 20th, ORDI was listed on OKX and Huobi, but with BTC dropping to $25,000, the market remained sluggish and ORDI fell to $5, followed by a continuous decline in price for more than four months.

During this period, there hasn't been any significant progress or breakthrough in the Bitcoin ecosystem, and most people in the market have become skeptical about Bitcoin Inscription, which was just a little hot a few months ago. In September, there were problems with users withdrawing ORDI from OKX, which caused dissatisfaction in the market. It wasn't until October 18th when UniSat released BRC-20-swap that the ORDI price began to rebound again.

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