Article author: JJ Alicea Article translation: Block unicorn
From a historical perspective, Meme has always been part of the human experience. They represent the migration of cultural products between generations-these ideas are enduring, significant, and snowball in all eras. Meme is the focus of society, and they carry value in the form of collective influence.
Today, people often associate Meme with triviality or even funny, mainly because Internet Meme is usually based on humor. However, the reason why humor resonates is that it contains a hint of truth.
"Memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by being passed from one brain to another, a process that can be broadly referred to as imitation. Just as genes are passed from one body to another through sperm or eggs and propagate themselves in the gene pool, the mechanism by which memes spread in the meme pool is also by being passed from one brain to another." - Richard Dawkins
Memes are the basic unit of cultural transmission. In ancient societies, religious stories and shared histories were often passed from person to person orally, with each narrator adding his own perspective or polish. This process helped to consolidate the beliefs and values of the community, embedding them deeply into the cultural structure. Similarly, in modern society, memes are cultural fragments or ideas that are passed from one mind to another, evolving with each retelling or reinterpretation. Both modes of communication rely on repetition, resonance, and subtle shifts that occur as people interpret and share, allowing the essence of ideas to persist and adapt over time. In this way, memes are modern narrative tools that distill complex ideas into simple, easily spreadable forms, convey cultural information, and spread rapidly around the world.
Community
Memes are the basic unit of cultural communication, and communities are the ecological environment in which memes accumulate value. In other words, memes are important ideas, and communities are the people who are concerned about those ideas.
Communities usually have the following notable characteristics:
1. Common interests and goals
2. Communication and interaction
3. Structure and identity
4. Knowledge and resource sharing
5. Collective identity
Communities are usually started by a small number of individuals who are committed to subverting mainstream culture. The open source software movement originated from a small group of developers, such as those who promoted the Linux project, who challenged the dominance of proprietary software and advocated for freely accessible and modifiable code. The punk rock movement began in cities such as New York and London, driven by a small group of passionate musicians, artists, and fans who rejected the sophisticated sounds of mainstream rock and the consumerism of popular culture. VaccinateCA is a group of techno-optimists dedicated to spreading information about vaccine availability to as many people as possible to combat a logistically constrained government system.
These communities all started out as highly localized, with a small number of devoted believers sharing a vision and collective belief in the malleability of the world. These communities ended up having a profound impact on areas such as technology, finance, culture, art, entertainment, and healthcare.
The Linux operating system saves businesses and governments more than $60 billion in licensing fees each year, Linux powers more than 90% of network infrastructure, and Android, built on the Linux kernel, powers about 70% of the world’s smartphones.
Punk rock became the soundtrack to political and social uprisings in places like Eastern Europe (such as the Solidarity movement in Poland) and Latin America. Punk fans and bands popularized zines, small, self-published magazines that typically focused on music, politics, and alternative lifestyles—becoming the grassroots forerunners of modern blogs and independent digital journalism.
The Linux operating system saves businesses and governments more than $60 billion in licensing fees each year, Linux powers more than 90% of network infrastructure, and Android, built on the Linux kernel, powers about 70% of the world’s smartphones ...Punk rock became the soundtrack to political and social uprisings in places like Eastern Europe (such as the Solidarity movement in Poland) and Latin America.
The Linux kernel is the foundation of the Linux operating system, which is the foundation of the Linux kernel.
The VaccinateCA provides reliable vaccine supply information to over 1,000 vaccination sites, while Google only provides 127 options - thereby improving the efficiency of vaccine distribution.
This is grassroots value creation, driven from the bottom up and by the community.
Meme
The first use of gold can be traced back to ancient civilizations in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and parts of Eastern Europe. In 4000 BC, people valued gold for its unique beauty, rarity, and malleability, and made it into jewelry, ritual objects, and status symbols. At the same time, copper, silver, and bronze were also popular for making tools and ornaments. So, what makes gold so unique?
Unlike other metals, gold neither tarnishes nor corrodes, which gives it a lasting property and symbolizes eternity and stability. Gold’s longevity means resistance to change, obsolescence, competition, and thus the odds of continued survival into the future. Gold has become a meme with lasting influence because it is important, unique, and resonates with humans.
Gold is one of the world’s largest asset classes, but it has no utility—no productive use, no cash flow, no business model. It has value only because we collectively assign it value. It is a metal with limited inherent utility, but its perceived value is derived from its beauty, rarity, and its symbolic significance in human culture. It is not a useful commodity like crude oil, nor a valuable representation of ownership like Apple stock. However, as gold’s collective influence continues to grow and more people adopt it, it has become a store of value and has the potential to become the world’s reserve currency, perhaps replacing another meme, the dollar.
One could argue that Bitcoin (BTC) is the original “meme coin” in a digital sense—an asset that initially seemed worthless but has now become a global store of value across economies.
Bitcoin has not only sparked a financial revolution, it has inspired a cultural movement. Through decentralized technology, it has enabled peer-to-peer value exchange, financial autonomy, and the rise of global grassroots communities bound by shared beliefs.
Bitcoin’s creation coincided with the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, a moment that was significant in that it tapped into widespread distrust of the traditional financial system and created a new narrative of decentralized value. People buy Bitcoin not because of its potential cash flow, but because of its unique value proposition: it is a store of value, a belief in future gains, and most importantly, a symbol of a new financial ecosystem, free from the control of corporations or individuals. It is a trustless asset that can support a trustless economy.
Bitcoin holders feel like they are part of something larger — a community, not just financial investors. If you doubt this, search for “Apple tattoo” or “Uber tattoo” and compare it to “Bitcoin tattoo”.
Assessing the Value of Communities
Outsiders often overlook the power and value of communities, just as they initially misunderstood Bitcoin. In the traditional financial world, professionals often rely on analytical methods taught at schools like Wharton - discounted cash flow, comparative analysis, cash flow, and EBITDA. As a result, companies shape their metrics and reporting around these frameworks. This limited perspective is exactly why many people initially misunderstood the value of GameStop, and why crypto assets like Bitcoin and Meme Coins are still misunderstood by traditional finance.
Today, the communities created by these "companies" have tremendous value. "Company" here can mean anything - a startup, a public company, a crypto protocol, a KOL, an idea, or even a subreddit. Over time, a company is valued not only by its profits, but also by the value created and accumulated by its community - whether internal or external (e.g. Reddit + GameStop).
More than 86% of internet users trust Reddit and its community more than ads when it comes to learning about new products and brands; adults under 45 trust news on social media platforms more than traditional news networks; and 63% of Gen Z and Millennials trust influencers more than brands. The average Gen Z member spends 8.5 hours a day online, 55% use their smartphones for more than 5 hours a day, and the average American sends 94 text messages a day.
TikTok’s book community has single-handedly driven bestsellers in the publishing industry, with some books seeing sales increase by 1,000% after gaining recognition in the community. Reddit’s r/WallStreetBets community was able to drive GameStop’s stock price from less than $20 to over $300 in a matter of days. Following the partnership, Bud Light sales fell 26% and AB InBev’s stock price dropped 20%, resulting in a $26 billion loss in market value—all at the hands of its conservative community.
Communities cannot be accurately predicted by traditional financial valuation frameworks because their meaning and impact are dynamic, often growing, shrinking, and shifting. They cannot be simply incorporated into tables and lists in investment prospectuses or financial models.
Financial firms often overlook the enduring power of communities, viewing them as anomalies and underestimating their influence as futile efforts.
We believe that communities will continue to grow and exert greater influence as the pace of connectivity accelerates and online interactions continue to grow. The ubiquity of digital platforms has made it easier than ever for individuals to find and connect with like-minded groups, breaking down geographic and social barriers that once limited the formation of communities.
Meme Coins: A Vehicle of Community Ownership
Meme coins are the perfect tool to measure the value of a community. They are a tokenized expression of culture.
Similar to social networks, meme coins derive their value from the communities they bring together. However, they represent a fundamental shift in how value is distributed and controlled. Unlike platforms like Instagram or Facebook, where the value generated by user activity (content creation, interactions, and data) is primarily captured by the platform and its shareholders, meme coins flip this model on its head, making users both creators and owners of network value.
Bonk was distributed to users via an airdrop and quickly became Solana’s meme coin of choice. The initial recipients were members who continued to contribute to the existing community, protocol, and core infrastructure after the FTX debacle. Bonk became a tokenized symbol of resilience in the face of adversity, and the enthusiasm of the initial recipients quickly spread to the wider user base, driving up the value of Bonk and creating wealth within the ecosystem. This wealth stayed in the community, supporting the development of projects such as Bonkbot, bringing tremendous value to Solana, product users, and the Bonk token itself. This is grassroots value creation - bottom-up, community-driven, with no external investors, only human capital within the community creating value for the community. As the world's assets become further digitized, more memes can be monetized, manufactured, and created spontaneously - expanding the concept of a "meme" to anything with social significance and turning it into a tool for community monetization through immutable smart contracts.
Future
The future will look like a continuation of the past, as technology continues to evolve, cities continue to expand, and culture adapts to the tools and media of the times. However, machines cannot take away the power to produce memes. Culture—its creation, dissemination, and persistence—cannot be outsourced to large floating-point matrix operations. While machines may be able to produce products that look like memes—empty, algorithmically optimized snapshots of familiar ideas, reproduced in large quantities for fleeting attention—they will lack the deeper resonance and transformative power of true memes.
Throughout history, culture has always been the result of collective efforts, and memes are the smallest unit of cultural transmission, encoding the ideas and values of their time. Memes are more than simple fragments of media, they are also carriers of shared meaning. Memes thrive when they are adopted, not created. They are not isolated creations, but rather the chemistry of shared understanding, humor, and affection.
There is a tiny Puerto Rican restaurant on Loisaida Avenue in Manhattan called Rinconcito. There are no reservations, no rewards programs, points systems, or digital membership cards. They don’t ask for your email address to send targeted ads, and there are almost no contact methods for people to find them. You won’t see them compromise to cater to some outrageous trend on TikTok, nor do they bottle their patented sauces and sell them to the masses.
They trade in culture, honest people cooking good food from the heart, and at a fair price—and it has been that way for decades. In every community, this approach resonates deeply, and people agree: This is how life should be. And that is their secret sauce—culture, for sale.
Hui Xin
Joy
Alex
Kikyo
Brian