Original Author: Ice Frog, Crypto Researcher

Foreword:

With Trump's historic victory sweeping the American political scene, the tide turned overnight, and Bitcoin reached a new all-time high. However, within the crypto world, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are fundamentally two different worlds.

Under the guise of Building, the so-called "Value Coin," claimed to be the cornerstone of the crypto world, is facing an unprecedented application dilemma and FUD. The MEME craze has struck again, inevitably prompting us to rethink:

In this visible bull market, should we once again believe in Value Coins, or is MEME the real future?

From Humble Beginnings

The Value Discovery of Small Belief, Boosted by Liquidity Waves

Before discussing MEME, it is necessary to briefly outline the history of MEME in the crypto world. From a timeline perspective, it can be roughly divided as follows:

From the above developmental history, several important trends can be summarized briefly:

1. Liquidity Expansion is Fundamental: MEME was born in a bull market, and price surges often accompany the expansion of the USD liquidity.

2. The Celebrity Effect is the Best Boost: Explosions of image-based MEME coins like Shib or Doge are often propelled by the celebrity effect, such as Musk.

3. MEME Echoes Spiritual Appeals: From zoo pictures, internet memes, to AI MEMEs, they all imply the zeitgeist of the most disseminated era at that time, and the implicit emotional appeals it contains are increasingly rich.

4. Rapid Shortening of Existence Cycles: With the rise of meme fair launch platforms like Pump.fun, coin launches have entered the minute level, and life cycles have entered the hour level.

The era of Doge's rise is the era of the post-90s, basically entering the smartphone era, and the exchange of images and emojis began to become popular;

Entering the year 2020, into the era of the post-00s, internet memes have become mainstream, but compared to the post-90s, melancholy and lying flat seem more common. However, they are also more anti-authority and anti-elite. They like the absurd and ridiculous, such as PEPE;

As we enter 2024, AI, as the most cutting-edge and disruptive technology today, Gen Z remains at the forefront of this wave. While older generations are still questioning the future of AI, Gen Z has already started using AI to make money. They seem to have swiftly embraced this era's most forward-thinking technological leader and accepted the occurring changes.

With the rise of meme fair launch platforms like Pump.fun, 5k-10k MEME tokens are born every day. October's statistics show that only 1.4% of users earned over $1000, with over 80% facing losses.

At this point in time, there is much discussion about the origins of the MEME market. Whether from a cultural, emotional, or propagational perspective, corresponding points and theoretical explanations can be found. However, from any angle, one definitive conclusion is:

Memes are not to be evaluated for their value from a utility or practicality standpoint. This is a narrow understanding of value itself. In the irreversible trend of currency over-issuance, the era has chosen memes. Blockchain is simply the best-suited soil for this.

Memes are rooted in the spiritual aspirations of a younger generation and new value standards. They disregard grand narrative-based value standards and prefer to experience happiness in insignificant certainties, using specific humor to combat abstract authority. A meme that resonates can be seen as a victory in life for the younger generation. This victory has sparked tremendous value in the blockchain world. Concepts such as rationality and idealism are outdated terms. Entrenched in a culture of entertainment to the death and consumerism, they have no concept of crypto shame or crypto casino. Essentially, for them, memes are part of everyday life, another form of a game.

However, although memes were created by a younger generation, their transformation into investment commodities is more credited to an older generation's capital. For the 60s, 70s, and 80s generations, their most familiar stance is: not understanding but not preventing rug pulls either.

The Collapse of Value Coins in the Face of Reality's Refutation

A Crash Is Not Terrifying; A Refutation Might Be Devastating

For most elders who have experienced multiple cycles in the crypto world, crashes are quite common and not frightening. Even strong assets like BTC have seen crashes. The loss of belief in value coins/VC coins, however, is because they are not witnessing the volatile ups and downs or the classic pump and dump scenarios. Instead, for a larger group of retail investors, when they acquired chips, they were already at the peak of the coin's price. They helplessly watched it gradually descend to the ocean floor, dropping deeper into the Mariana Trench.

The current situation is that the token of a value coin has become the product, while the actual product has been neglected. Regarding value coins with low circulation and high market value, there are as many market analysis discussions as MEME, and there are many reasons for this situation: the overvaluation caused by bull-market conversion; chip distribution under crypto compliance; unbalanced and unhealthy ecosystem power, etc.

Essentially, the development of value coins is the result of multiple reasons, failing in narrative due to a lack of application, ruined in wealth effect due to distribution, and harmed in ecology due to the influence of pseudo elites. For most altcoins, playing with concepts and minor innovations at the protocol level once became fashionable, with a constant emergence of new terms such as chain abstraction, Layer 2, Layer 3, intention-centricity, but transaction volume proves everything. In the absence of practical use cases, user demand is neither essential nor irreplaceable. Therefore, a project's data can only rely on project incentives such as airdrops, points, etc. If the incentive mechanism itself is unfair and involves insider trading behavior, it will eventually evolve into what Murad calls the token becoming the ultimate product, while the product itself is neglected.

As shown in the figure below, a value coin under the mainstream narrative logic, each participant has different demands surrounding the wealth effect. Unfortunately, each demand is not based on the project's true value, or to put it more cruelly: the so-called narrative is just a fig leaf for rug-pulling, because all narratives are too easily debunked in a short time, and most of what is confirmed is either a Ponzi scheme or a fallacy.

Hundreds of public chains, hundreds of L2s, hundreds of cross-chain bridges, thousands of Defis, and countless various narrative concepts, in the maze of concepts, what seems to be a seamless logical building cannot withstand a simple strike of reality. If external liquidity does not overflow widely, against the backdrop of homogenized narrative competition, this situation becomes even worse.

Many project teams' ignorance of the so-called pseudo-elite mentality has become the final straw that crushes value coins. Many project teams play both sides; disdain electronic beggars on the one hand, while secretly building a whale pool on the other, shouting for disruption, revolution, innovation in words, but holding sickles, big sickles, and even bigger sickles in their hands.

You gaze into the abyss, and the abyss gazes back at you. By attracting capital and users with grand narrative value, implementing wealth distribution by unfair means, once the former is debunked, the latter will surely fall into the abyss. However, the bottom of the value coin may be much longer than everyone imagines.

The Future of MEME and Value Coins

History Will Repeat Itself, But Not Simply Replay

Victory is always written by the victor, and the validation of value only achieves maximum consensus at the moment of value realization. The central idea in the crypto world is still Tokenization, before a Token has proven itself, there is no distinction between a Value Coin and a MEME Coin—fundamentally, they are no different, only reflected in the difference in implementation paths.

The advantage of Value Coins is that they have a complete and followable methodology to implement, from cold start to positive price feedback loop, and relatively speaking, successful outcomes are more deterministic, but the ceiling is also quite limited. Ultimately, they address the user's utility needs.

The advantage of MEME Coins is that, although they do not have a fully replicable implementation path (compared to Value Coins), there is a relatively high degree of randomness, but the ceiling is high, and now the operation of MEME Coins is more capitalized, and their maturity is no worse than Value Coins. Ultimately, they address the community's need for identity and belonging.

The original sin of a project is when users do not make money, not whether it has value. In the long run, we need to realize that the blockchain world is inherently diverse in value, whether it's FUD against Value Coins or the pursuit of MEMEs. Neither necessarily means that one form should survive over the other; this opposition only represents a struggle for dominance in different narratives, not a reflection of reality. For the majority of the market, the simplest and most basic rule is: in a fair environment, a project that can make people money is a valuable project. This is almost the only criterion.

So, regarding the future of Value Coins and MEME Coins, we only need to answer two questions: who can achieve relative fairness, and who has a better risk-reward ratio.

Fairness depends on the perfection of the system; the risk-reward ratio depends on narrative development and liquidity. Both together determine the cyclical rotation of the future and the future of crypto.

Upon Trump's rise to power, we can likely ascertain an improvement in the institutional environment, but whether this improvement is conducive to reversing the current dire state of the Value Coin industry is still unknown;

In terms of the risk-reward ratio, the sustainability of the narrative development of Value Coins depends on whether new entrants increase massively, but if this assumption cannot be deeply integrated with real needs, falsification will come quickly, and the worst part is that this process is difficult to accelerate. Blockchain will not become mainstream overnight, but in terms of liquidity, Value Coins seem to have an advantage because more prevalent investment institutions still tend to inject funds into the Value Coin track, but in a scenario where the narrative logic does not fundamentally improve, the day the sheep are not enough to shear is turning from a joke to reality.

If we look at the future from this perspective, institutional improvement, slow narrative progress, and liquidity overflow are still the basic situation of value coins. Therefore, its most likely state is not to die and go to zero. Similar to China's real estate, it will face a long period of elimination and adjustment under a state of high valuation collapse. The significant upheaval during this process will give birth to truly valuable coins.

As for MEME, an era of diversified development is approaching. More powerful capital operations and exchange traffic support have accelerated the momentum of MEME. However, for retail investors, this does not necessarily mean making money will be easier. But as long as the wealth effect continues to exist, the majority of the market will still be willing to believe: "This time, I will definitely succeed in PVP."

Earning money in a fair environment is essential for sustainability. Each cycle has a different narrative. The number of dead value coins and MEME coins is countless. The commonality of the truly remaining valuable coins and MEME coins is not the competition for so-called mainstream value but who wins the recognition and support of a broader community of users.

If we were to make a final summary, it would definitely be: There is no eternal universal value in the world. There is no distinction between value coins and MEME coins. Historically, it has always been the projects that can consistently gain community recognition and user trust that can endure and remain evergreen. That is the true value.

Money never sleeps, new stories are still on the way, and this time, I hope you can win!

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