I posted a meme. This is what I learned and felt.

Author: Aaron Elijah Mars, crypto investor; Translation: Golden Finance xiaozou

I've been in this industry for four years and have invested in more than 30 startups. I've worked with the largest Web2 and Web3 IPs. However, I've never issued a token myself, nor an NFT. It's time to put an end to this.

One of the hottest topics this year has been the debate over meme coins and utility tokens. Meme coin analyst Murad said it well: "Utility tokens are just meme coins that have taken a few more steps." It's a cool narrative to say that. But is it true?

Are Meme coins fairer than VC coins?

I have bought a lot of meme coins in a fit of rage, and most of the time their teams are really bad. Why is that? What's so hard about issuing a token? Well, I will share what I know about this industry and the meme coin market.

To be honest, I haven't issued a token yet - I run a CTO (Community Takeover) with my team (about 10 people). I like the CTO concept of reviving a dead token. You just need to find a ready-made narrative. I think there is a lot of potential to be tapped, and there are very good dormant tokens.

We accumulated a lot of tokens for the CTO (probably too much) and started creating content, developing strategies to revitalize the community, and trying to build a team.

It grew very fast, a hundred times in a day. To be honest, we made a lot of mistakes.

First, we didn’t make any profit, not a penny. We had an idealistic vision to build a "sect" that should have tens of millions of supporters in the long run. If marketing is a money game, thenmemecoins are the hardcore model.

KOLs are not your friends, they are not reliable at all. They just said that a certain token is the "new paradigm", but 30 minutes later they dumped it. Up and down, up and down, always end up down.

You will soon find that this is very similar to traditional advertising, you have to deal with data such as CAC and customer ROI. This is a PVP game, you need to fight against your ad network and users.

In this game, if you don't make money, you will be harvested. This is a very bad industry framework, but it is the truth. It's either you or they.

Speaking of community, it’s very hard to build something solid in this market. People have a short attention span, and if you don’t make any movement in a day, people are likely to sell at a 90% loss.

NFTs have a lot of flaws, but they do promote community building. This is very difficult for meme coins that are less than $10 million.

Right now, I see meme coins as a sandbox for building utility tokens (and building skills overall). You can become best at content creation (FWOG or using MERV) or community creation (Retardio). But in the end, if you succeed, you’re going to build a product.

This is also a really good way to build top teams because it’s a high risk/high reward environment with a lot of pressure. I’m shocked at how stressful it is, especially during price increases. And how frustrating it is, especially during price decreases.

I’m amazed at how the meme coin and utility token communities continue to build in the midst of this chaos. To be honest, you have to experience it to understand.

We’ve also seen how bad Twitter has been for crypto projects, but not sure if Farcaster has solved some of the problems. Ultimately, the best meme coins are the ones where people with existing audiences have pooled their social capital together.

This makes me really excited about social DEX/publishing platforms, holding people accountable and weakening the bundling effect.

I also think there’s a lot of opportunity for innovation in this space:

• Excited about Flaunch/Baseline and interested in how to do LP profitability and return volatility to users.

• Case studies/documentation are non-existent. You may have read some articles, but you can't find a single (good) article like mine on the internet about memecoins and how to properly launch and manage the community. We are in the early stages.

• There is room for new models of VCs, market makers, and products that specifically manage meme coins. Because it is very similar to startups, your pre-seed buyers bear the most risk (but they are not locked in).

• The Pump is really a casino. If you are a serious team, you don't need the Pump. And you are losing a lot of revenue.

I don't know if I am an asshole trying to create unnecessary regulation/complication. However, I really believe that this space can be more interesting and responsible.

The utility token vs meme coin debate is irrational. I would rather buy a token from a16z than a random token with a market cap of $5,000 tied to a dozen wallets. Unless we can reduce this risk, we can't really have fun because it is a zero-sum game.

I like the vision of meme coins, community building has never been more important, and I do think it will succeed. But we need better tools to do it, and the VC model is not that bad.

The utility token vs meme coin debate is irrational. I would rather buy a token from a16z than a random token with a market cap of $5,000 tied to a dozen wallets. Unless we can reduce this risk, we can't really have fun because it is a zero-sum game.

I like the vision of meme coins, community building has never been more important, and I do think it will succeed. But we need better tools to do it, and the VC model is not that bad. I want early adopters to buy my token, but I don’t want them to sell it 1 day later for only 10% of the price.

I also think VC funds are bullshit and will never make money nor create a lasting community. So we may need a hybrid model.

In the end I think it’s all about community building where meme coins are an attention mechanism. Like Pudgy Penguin or Milady.

The best memes win the hearts of the internet.

But I also wonder how much of a role community building really plays when you can automate meme creation. Is cryptocurrency just a framework to turn humans into AI agents with financial incentives?