Musk stirs up meme craze again. What’s behind the take-off of meme?

Author: Day, Vernacular Blockchain

Recently, with the help of Musk’s Twitter, meme assets such as Troll and Zuzalu have soared in popularity. So, what exactly is a meme? Why are meme assets so popular? What do you think of meme assets?

01  What is a meme asset?

The word "meme" comes from Dawkins's book "The Selfish Gene" and refers to the basic unit in human culture. It can be various forms of information, ideas, or behaviors that are passed from person to person through imitation and communication. A"meme" is intended to convey a specific phenomenon, theme, or meaning and to resonate within society. After the development of the Internet, "meme" is now not limited to traditional text or pictures, but also includes digital forms such as Token and NFT.

These "memes" spread quickly, widely and interestingly through social media and the Internet, and have become an important part of Internet culture and popular culture. They can express people's emotions, opinions, humor and irony, while also reflecting current social trends and cultural phenomena.

The core concept and appeal of meme assets come from meme culture. Meme assets attract investor attention by using meme images, concepts or ideas that are humorous and entertaining. They are a social infrastructure that spreads rapidly within the industry through community co-promotion and viral spread. The uniqueness of meme assets is that they are community-driven. Compared with institutional currencies, they are fairly distributed. Community members jointly participate in and promote the development of meme assets. The success of meme assets is closely related to the activity of the community.

02 Why are meme assets so popular?

The development of the blockchain industry is no longer the reckless stage it was a few years ago. ,A few years ago, if you were doing multiple projects, investors would think this was a sign of lack of focus and unreliability, but now it’s just the opposite. Launching a new project is actually a good thing, because there are previous projects. Endorsement, so the new one will not be bad, and everyone will have a better understanding of the relevant situation, which is euphemistically called ecology.

In such an environment, the industry has long been dominated by giants, and the relationships are complicated. Various early institutions have gradually grown into giants. There are many mountains, and there are people behind each institution. A long list of interests. If you have no background or resources, no one will pay attention to you, retail investors will not understand you, and institutions will not trust you. For the same product, it is completely different whether it is backed by an institution. For example, if well-known institutions like pradigm, BN and other institutions invest in you, no matter how bad the product is, everyone will pursue it. After all, if the institution endorses it, even if it is No matter how bad it is, they still have a pile of resources and various relationships. If you have no products, how can you compare with others.

Some leading institutions have launched various pipeline projects in batches, with a total market value of tens to tens of billions of dollars (you must know that projects with valuations of more than one billion US dollars are called Unicorn)Under the dumping of projects with large market value and low circulation, the market value of high-quality projects continues to increase, but the price does not move. Ordinary investors, let alone soup, directly become the last stick, one after another without saying a word.

In this environment, meme assets have replaced altcoins a few years ago and become an important part of the entire industry from bottom to top. The rise of meme assets can be said to be inevitable.

strong>This is inseparable from the anti-VC movement of retail investors. Part of the reason for the rise of BRC20 assets this year is the Bitcoin ecosystem, and part of it is because the project chips are relatively dispersed and belong to "fair distribution". No one institution will monopolize the profits, and this part of the profits will be Retail investors get it because everyone makes money and has a wealth effect, so it becomes popular.

03 Musk, the godfather of meme

Understanding the development of meme, if there are people who cannot be avoided , then the first one must be Musk. Musk has a close relationship with memes. It can be said that the current development of Dogecoin, the current meme leader, is inseparable from Musk's publicity. He has publicly supported Dogecoin many times, and each tweet will surely trigger widespread discussion and attention. Since Dogecoin surged in the last bull market and reached the top ten in market value, Musk’s reputation and influence in the blockchain industry have reached its peak. One of his tweets can cause huge fluctuations in the price of meme. Sometimes it even triggers market madness. Because he often posts tweets related to cryptocurrencies and memecoins on Twitter, he has become one of the key targets of retail investors in the industry.

Translation: "Whoever controls the meme controls the universe" - Frank "Tank" Herb Special

Currently Musk has nearly 169 million followers on Twitter. A small number of people will keep an eye on his Twitter 24 hours a day in order to discover on-chain projects or mass-produce meme tokens as soon as possible. When a tweet is published, or the Twitter display settings are changed, several local dogs named after the tweet content will be generated on the chain (mainly in Ethereum) in just a minute or two. For some projects that have special significance or are mentioned repeatedly, in just a few days, the market value of the project may soar from dozens of dollars to tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of dollars. The more representative ones are Q*, grok and recently troll.

Of course, these memecoins are very dependent on Musk. You can look at their historical trends. Most of them are in a wave, unless Musk mentions them again. Before BRC20 broke out last year, most people liked to play on Ethereum, and Musk's Twitter was one of the objects they focused on. They would even go so far as to find out why he posted it like this and what was the background source?

04 Those who want to be Musk

As the popularity of the industry increases recently, many project founders People started to call for orders, and the calls were all memes, mainly air. Here is a brief inventory of a few well-known ones. Follow their Twitter, follow them to eat meat in the early stage, and get beaten and take over in the later stage. Let’s have a brief understanding. You can see from it. Here are some features of memecoins.

1) Matt Furie: pepe founder matt, the hottest meme last year should be pepe and bonk. Both of them exceeded 1 billion US dollars at their peak. pepe relies on With the popular Sad Frog image and excellent team marketing, Pepe was promoted to BN in a short period of time.

The founder of pepe has also attracted everyone's attention under this situation. For a period of time in mid-2023, the founder only needs to change his avatar, change his signature, and tweet, and there will be short-term changes on the chain. Related memecoins appeared, and some had short-term market capitalizations ranging from tens of thousands of dollars to tens of millions of dollars, including dorkl, fine, etc. Later, because he promoted too many projects, the money-making effect eventually weakened, resulting in a weakening of influence, but sometimes he still promoted some projects.

2) Toly: Solana founder Anatoly, SOL’s outstanding performance last year, made everyone start to focus on the development of its ecosystem. Among them, Bonk, the first dog in Solana’s ecosystem, It emerged in this context, and memecoin Silly was a meme project that Solana founder Anatoly supported on Twitter many times. Until the Solana Breakpoint conference, founder Anatoly appeared at the conference wearing a dragon suit, which completely attracted Silly. Burn. In addition, because of SOL's own traffic, Anatoly's Twitter retweeted content attracted everyone's attention.

3) Sandeep Nailwal: Polygon founder, after Silly became popular, the Polygon chain also released the memecoin pory. On the day of the release, Polygon founder Sandeep retweeted the content on Twitter. On the day of the pory, The market value reached a high of more than 40 million US dollars, and many Polygon officials subsequently publicly supported it. However, the recent price correction has been severe, and it can only be worth a few million US dollars.

In addition to these, there are also the Coq, Bear and Inscription markets of the AVAX chain, which have been publicly supported by AVAX officials or relevant personnel, leading to the entry of a large number of short-term investors with FOMO. Recently, projects such as Lup and Bake have Start going off in person.

It can be seen that most meme assets are short-term hot. After a wave of heat, most of them will cool down quickly, and few of them can last. If there is no continuous ability to "make trouble", it is easy for the newcomers to take over. Most people here have a certain degree of attention, and then place orders with purpose.

05 Factors that make it popular

Meme assets emphasize more on the concept itself, rather than how strong it is Technology or financial system, so the threshold for issuing meme assets is low, which is its advantage and disadvantage, that is, anyone can issue it, resulting in many projects being launched, but very few actually being released. Why meme is so popular and what factors are at play? Based on the currently known projects, here are some reasons that will be reviewed afterwards. Welcome to add.

1) The popularity brings users outside the circle: Because memecoins are air, marketing becomes very important, and the best marketing is to make people You can make money, and when you make money, it will spread from person to person. If you ask some outsiders, some people may not have heard of mainstream assets such as ETH and BNB, but the vast majority of people know about Dogecoin. Why BRC20 is so popular? On the one hand, it is because it is backed by the Bitcoin ecosystem. Another important reason is that some people make money, and then everyone pours in.

2) Simple and easy to understand: The more classic one is "bit gold, lite silver". Teacher Li also mentioned it before, what is lite? Just because it has a good name. The slogan is well shouted and deeply rooted in the hearts of the people. It can be said that it saves a lot of words.

3) Familiar and easy to spread: This industry is very similar to the entertainment industry, 80% of the success will be achieved if there is traffic. For example, the sad frog image itself, the carrier of Pepe, has been widely circulated, including various well-known founders’ pet concepts, Musk’s concepts, BRC20’s sats, piin, etc.

4) Innovation: The story is relatively new and innovative. HarryPotterObamaSonic 10 Inu (Bitcoin) is an abstract memecoins that combines elements of Harry Potter, Obama and Sony. Aidoge is distributed to Arbitrum users on a 1:1 basis, rats’ early distribution model, etc.

5) Fairness: Fairness here is relative. It refers to the early stage of chip distribution, when retail investors have the opportunity to get cheap chips, and most BRC20 are included in this.

The above are some of the characteristics of some popular meme assets. Everything revolves around the word traffic, but no matter what, there are people behind the project.

06 Summary

Although meme assets have various high returns, only a few projects can truly Most of the projects that came out were short-term projects. After a wave of popularity, the popularity dropped sharply, and then there was no more. The latecomers took over for the former. Only a few projects can really come out. Meme assets have become an important part of the industry, and understanding meme culture is important to track and delve into the crypto industry.