Original Title: "What Are We Talking About When We Talk About MEME"

Original Author: Zeke, YBB Capital Researcher

I am a practitioner in the encryption industry. Please translate the following Chinese text into English without considering the context or industry-specific terms and names. Do not omit any English words or phrases, including capitalized ones such as ZKS, STARK, and SCROLL. If there are English characters in an tag, do not translate them and return the tag as is. If the content consists only of punctuation marks, return them as is. Do not translate HTML tags such as

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Foreword

Recently, with the approval of BTC spot ETF, the market enthusiasm has gradually reached its peak. MEME Coins led by Inscription and Solana communities have once again swept in, and various myths of thousand-fold and ten-thousand-fold wealth are crazily spreading on social media, attracting more and more retail investors who missed out on the market.

So what makes recent MEME Coins different from the past? And how can one choose a MEME Coin with potential in a market full of scams?

What is MEME Coin?

"MEME" is a concept originally proposed by British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his book "The Selfish Gene" published in 1976. Dawkins used the term "MEME" to describe information units that are transmitted through culture between individuals, similar to genes. His goal was to explain the process of cultural transmission, similar to the way genes are passed down in biology. If the basic unit of biological evolution and reproduction relies on the inheritance of genes, then the basic unit of cultural idea transmission is the MEME. Its form is diverse and can be a sentence, a story, an allusion, or an image, as long as it can carry a certain cultural idea, it can be called a MEME.

Although the word "MEME" was originally a serious academic concept, it has been reconstructed to some extent to become a general term for various internet spoof cultures in the era of the internet. It is used to refer to this type of internet spoof culture, which is also known as "Geng" in Chinese internet culture.

The so-called MEME Coin is actually a type of cryptocurrency based on MEME culture, as the name suggests. The earliest MEME Coin is usually considered to be Dogecoin. Dogecoin was created in 2013 by Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer by copying the Litecoin code and adding a Shiba Inu meme as a joke token, as a mockery of BTC (they thought BTC was just hot air). But the later development is more ironic. Dogecoin not only did not become a worthless token, but also received crazy attention from Reddit (a well-known forum abroad), and the richest man Musk's statement "Dogecoin may be my favorite cryptocurrency, it's cool." made it "To Da Moon". The market value of Dogecoin began to skyrocket, and thus a "hot air coin" born out of nonsense jokes became a legendary cryptocurrency with a market value of tens of billions in the top ten of the cryptocurrency market.

火爆 2023 年的那些 MEME

translates to

Hot MEMEs of 2023

In the 21st year of Dogecoin's journey to the moon, various imitated tokens with animal images emerged like mushrooms, hoping to become the next Dogecoin. At that time, the community had an interesting nickname for these tokens - "zoo coins". However, only a few outstanding ones survived, such as Shib and Floki, which were relatively popular MEME Coins. The remaining 99% of "zoo coins" basically disappeared in the later bear market. It seems like finding a MEME Coin that can become the next Dogecoin is like finding a needle in a haystack. So, how should we choose a MEME Coin that seems to have no fundamentals to analyze? And how should we change our mindset in a new bull market opened by inscriptions? Let's first look back at the MEME Coins that still left a deep impression during the bear market in the past 23 years (selected from some memorable tokens) and see what they have in common and what innovations they have.

PEPE

Pepe the Frog (PEPE) is a character created by American cartoonist Matt Furie for his comic "Boy's Club" in 2005. Although this frog-headed, human-bodied humorous MEME image is a perennial tree in Western social networks, there has been no PEPE Coin that matches it in the MEME race (in fact, the PEPE token that is currently well-known is not the earliest, but other PEPE tokens have not been marketed). On April 4, 2023, a Twitter account named pepecoineth posted a picture of a hat-wearing PEPE meme, but no new tweets were posted in the following ten days.

On April 14th, when the next tweet was posted, the creation of PEPE Coin, Telegram group, and official website (the domain pepe.vip was bought as early as March) was announced directly. Two days after the token was released (allowing two days for insiders to buy), some big V on Twitter suddenly began to promote PEPE Coin, and in the following two days, the price and number of fans of PEPE token began to skyrocket. After attracting the first wave of traffic, the official PEPE Twitter account began to cooperate with the rise in token prices, frequently posting some emoticons mocking other MEME Coins to continue to build momentum. On April 18th, Shaurya Malwa, the leader of Coindesk's Asian data team, published a short article titled "'Pepe the Frog' Meme Coins Rocket as Crypto Twitter Moves Over Dogecoin Obsession", which once again gave PEPE a lot of exposure. On April 19th, some first and second-tier exchanges began to release Frog-related tweets and polls, many of which even directly listed PEPE.

Later on, PEPE's journey to the moon became unstoppable. Compared to the two previous Shiba Inu predecessors who took several years to achieve success, PEPE, under "careful planning," became popular in just four days and achieved an astonishing increase of up to 375,000% in just a few months thereafter.

Silly Dragon (as compiled from "Reviewing Silly Dragon's Journey: How a Dragon Became Solana's Spiritual Totem?")

Silly Dragon is a MEME Coin that took off with the recovery of Solana. Today, this silly dragon has become a symbol of the community. Speaking of the origin of this silly dragon, it can be traced back to the Solana Breakpoint summit on October 30, 2023, where Solana co-founder Anatoly appeared in a Western-style green dragon costume. Anatoly first joked that he was a silly dragon, and then made a profound explanation of his outfit: "I stand here, dressed as a dragon, and it is crucial for us to discuss what we are building and why we are building it. We need to know what our goals are and what we want to achieve."

For Solana, which has experienced a rebirth from the ashes in the bear market, this silly dragon seems to have many special "meanings". 20 days after the summit ended, a Twitter account named DrakoSolana posted its first tweet, which was a silly dragon avatar adapted from a MEME image. DrakoSolana gained a lot of attention in this trend, but unfortunately, although it was the first silly dragon on Twitter, it was overtaken by an account named Silly Dragon because the token was not launched in time.

Silly Dragon's initial following and Twitter release time were not advantageous, but they were fortunate enough to be the first to release their own token, SILLY. After the token was released, Silly Dragon's popularity began to quickly surpass that of others. With the support of huge traffic, Silly Dragon took advantage of the momentum and held the Silly Dragon Art Contest.

During this event, Silly Dragon caught Anatoly's attention. Although the token price did not soar at that time, on December 16th, Anatoly tweeted: "Urgently need Silly Dragon's MEME emoticons. Samsung and Apple have 1 billion device sales, while Solana phones only have 20,000." This tweet instantly ignited the community's enthusiasm, and the price of SILLY began to skyrocket, becoming a new myth of thousand-fold returns.

Harry Potter Obama Sonic 10 Inu

This may be the longest and one-of-a-kind named token you have ever seen, Harry Potter Obama Sonic 10 Inu (due to its ridiculously long name, referred to as HPOS1I in the following text, but its own token name is Bitcoin). The token highlights its spoofing nature in its name, and of course, the absurdity does not stop there. HPOS1I became popular on the internet when it was deployed on May 10, 2023, with an extremely funny webpage. The project team filled the webpage with videos, pictures, or spoofing stories of Harry Potter, former US President Obama, Sonic the Hedgehog (a well-known character in a parkour game), cryptocurrency, Illuminati, and other elements related to classic and popular topics on Western social networks. It can be said that they directly fired a map cannon at various classic and popular topics on Western social networks.

And the development of HPOS1I is also very unique. The ownership of the project has been abandoned and there are no developers. Instead, it is led by its community. This is also one of the unique selling points of the project, a development model based purely on the community's spoofing MEME culture. While various MEME images spread wildly on social networks, the price of HPOS1I has also been climbing step by step, reaching a peak of 0.1783 US dollars in August 2022, achieving a hundred-fold miracle achievement in the bear market.

Pogai

The most ridiculous emoji in history, the coolest panda person, and also the most nostalgic time of our youth, is the slogan from Pogai. Its image is the most familiar panda person in the Chinese Internet community. It is a token that has no fees, no copyrights, and no development roadmap. It is purely a community-driven project. The community can decide the future direction, and all tokens are dispersed. The founder only keeps one hundred million Pogai tokens and works with the community to be a ridiculous panda family.

The project party continuously made a splash in the Chinese Twitter circle at that time through a cool and humorous propaganda method, coupled with the familiar panda emoticon, leaving a deep impression. The project was issued on May 2, 2023, with an issue price of 0.000008 US dollars and a highest price of 0.0005 US dollars. Although it did not have the exaggerated rise of other MEME Coins, the token still left a deep impression.

SATS

In December 2022, Casey Rodarmor, a Bitcoin developer, released an open-source software called ORD that runs on top of the Bitcoin Core software. ORD allows users to mint Bitcoin inscriptions in two steps: inputting any information, such as text or images ("inscription"), onto the Bitcoin blockchain and linking the uploaded inscription to a specific Satoshi. Satoshi is the smallest unit of Bitcoin, where 1 BTC = 100,000,000 satoshi. The final product is a Satoshi with an inscription, also known as a Bitcoin inscription.

According to the input information being text or image, Bitcoin inscriptions can be divided into two categories. Text-based inscriptions are mainly used to create tokens, such as the BRC-20 standard. Image-based inscriptions are mainly used to create NFTs, such as various cartoon characters.

SATS is a type of MEME inscription issued based on the BRC20 standard. (Personally, I like to refer to inscriptions as divisible text NFTs, but there is now a more accurate term for inscriptions, namely semi-fungible tokens.) Its full name is Satoshi, which is the smallest unit of Bitcoin, usually abbreviated as sat or satoshi. 1 BTC is equivalent to 100 million satoshis, and the total supply is 21 trillion, which is equivalent to 21 million BTC.

The casting process of SATS took nearly half a year. The inscription was deployed on the blockchain in March and completed casting in September. Unlike the spoof culture and rebellious culture of traditional MEME Coins, SATS is very special because it refers to Satoshi or Nakamoto (the basic unit of Bitcoin and the founder of Bitcoin), and the total amount corresponds to the total amount of BTC, which has a deep meaning of paying tribute to BTC and commemorating Nakamoto. The fact that such a huge total amount can be cast also reflects the strong consensus of the inscription. The popularity of SATS has continued to rise. On December 12, 2023, the day it was listed on Binance, its market value doubled and it soared to $1.15 billion, even surpassing the first inscription ORDI, ultimately achieving a maximum increase of 25,000 times.

MEME Coin Diversification

From the previous discussion on MEME Coin, it is not difficult to see that MEME Coin has shifted from being a dog-themed animal park imitation in the past to a more diversified development direction. Currently, it can be classified into the following four categories:

1. Classic MEME: Tokenization of some classic MEME images represented by PEPE and Pogai. There are still many classic MEME images that have not been tokenized or have not been successfully tokenized, such as Trollface, Grumpy Cat, Success Kid, Kermit the Frog.

2. Native Crypto MEME: MEMEs from the native crypto "joke" community represented by BONK and Silly Dragon. Both are from the Solana community, and there are currently some imitative MEME Coins, such as Polygon's "Polygon Dragon".

We also mentioned in the previous section that the PEPE we are familiar with is not the first PEPE Coin. So why didn't the earlier PEPE (there was an earlier PEPE inscription on BRC20) succeed? The fundamental reason is the lack of publicity ability. Excellent publicity ability not only accelerates the success of MEME Coin, but also determines the lower limit of MEME Coin.

For example, in our daily lives, the more well-known brands invest more in advertising. For any product, its advertising audience can be divided into high-frequency consumers, low-frequency consumers, and non-consumers. The mechanism of advertising for these three types of people is different, and the logic of advertising effectiveness comes from four aspects - informing, persuading, reminding, and reinforcing. The promotion logic of MEME Coin should also be like this, consolidating community members and speculative buyers and bringing in more potential buyers. Therefore, in addition to choosing the right carrier, it is also important to "advertise widely" in the right way.

PEPE's ability to achieve success in a very short period of time is due to its effective use of human nature in its promotional methods. Looking back at the previous section on PEPE, it is not difficult to see that these big V's had already quietly purchased PEPE tokens, and the bundling of interests drove these big V's to start promoting vigorously. In addition, the pre-planned domain name and token planning (there are relevant personnel in the team who are docking with exchanges) caused the price and holding addresses to skyrocket in a short period of time. Coupled with PEPE's ready-made magical expression pack, which is used to promote positive news every day, the two complement each other, leading to an explosive viral spread. The intensity of the fire depends on the amount of kindling, and PEPE's fire is definitely burning with a wildfire. Therefore, PEPE's outstanding performance is not simply due to good luck. It is not easy for the project team to cooperate and plan to form an ultimate herd effect without being dull. (Readers interested in this point can compare the relevant tweets of $pepe.BRC-20 and PEPE in the early days.)

一个不想做 MEME 的 MEME——Shib

Translation:

A MEME that doesn't want to be a MEME - Shib

Going back a few years, I remember confidently stating that Shib would surely fail. In the Web3 industry, it seemed like a pipe dream for a copycat to challenge the OGs. However, Shib gave me a harsh wake-up call and looking back at its comeback, I still believe it was a miracle brought about by multiple factors. Apart from luck (such as the economic stimulus and Elon Musk's related tweets), I personally think Shib's uniqueness lies in its excellent community culture and bold narrative direction.

All dog-themed MEME Coins actually have a fatal problem. Due to the fact that these tokens are all simple derivatives of Dogecoin, the homogenization degree is very serious. The MEME expressions created by the project parties and communities also have very weak spread on social networks, as mentioned earlier, their real audience is very small. Shib faces the same problem, whether it is the recognition in Western internet culture or the celebrity effect, Shiba Inu has an absolute advantage. A derivative version of a Shiba Inu cartoon cannot be the "Dogecoin killer".

So Shib's narrative direction can only be ecology, a MEME Coin with Swap, cross-chain bridge, Layer2, and metaverse expectations. Doesn't it suddenly raise the bar? Although Shib's development direction has been questioned, I personally believe that this is its only direction to become a killer of Dogecoin, and the correct way to continue its vitality.

Conclusion

The market of MEME Coin is always tempting, but it also comes with high risks. According to CoinMarketCap data, there are 1467 tokens in the MEME race. If only the top 300 projects by market capitalization are considered, there are only 9, with a success rate of less than one percent. With the evolution of MEME Coin and the addition of inscription-based MEMEs, the complexity of the selection is increasing. If you really want to buy some MEME Coin today, you need to do your homework on some special cultures of Crypto and Western MEME culture. A potential MEME project should also have cultural identity, promotion, narrative, and community involvement.

This article is from a submission and does not represent the views of BlockBeats.

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