Author: Arain, ChainCatcher
In 2024, Memecoin has emerged as a dark horse, growing into a super cycle amid mixed reviews, which surprised many Old Money investors.
In the Memecoin trading battlefield, there are genius scammers who set up "wealth traps" with cunning means, big players who play the game in the market with accurate judgment and operation, and the kings of goods who use their influence to bring traffic to tokens, and the kings of shouting orders who influence the market trend through shouting orders... These annual figures took the stage and jointly created the Memecoin carnival feast.
Without the Meme launch platform Pump.fun, this Meme feast carnival might be half less. So in this sense, Alone is a key figure in the Memecoin craze in 2024.
Alon created and launched the Pump.fun platform in January 2024, providing users on the Solana blockchain with a place to create and trade cryptocurrencies, allowing users to create Solana tokens for free in one minute.
As of December 26, 2024, the platform has created more than 5 million Memecoins, including some of the larger ones, such as Billy, Michi, Shark Cat, etc. The platform also laid the foundation for the mass production of celebrity Memecoins, such as Lggy Azalea's MOTHER token, Andrew Tate's endorsed DADDY, and Jason Derulo's JASON.
Although the mass production of Memecoin will oversaturate the market, it is undeniable that Pump.fu provides a platform and opportunity for the development and innovation of Memecoin, which has a profound impact on the development of the entire Memecoin ecosystem.
One of the top Memecoin KOLs in 2024, and known as the "Meme Theologian".
Murad has two main achievements, one is the successful investment in $SPX, and the other is the fame of proposing the Memecoin Supercycle theory.
Contents of the Memecoin Supercycle Theory Murad believes that Memecoin is acquiring attributes and speculative premiums from value coins and will enter a "Meme Supercycle", that is, Memecoin will not only surpass traditional cryptocurrencies, but also change investor behavior and market trends. Memecoin will evolve from a simple online joke to a legitimate investment asset with enthusiastic followers.
When Murad first held $SPX, the market value of the currency was only $10 million. Now it has soared to more than $700 million, with a floating profit of up to $8.3 million. While holding the currency, he actively spread investment ideas on Twitter. His holdings and shouting behavior have had a certain impact on the price trends of these currencies, and have also attracted the attention and follow-up of many investors. In addition to $SPX, Murad also holds giga, pepe, sigma, apu and popcat, and prefers the "cult attribute" Memecoin with medium and high market value.
According to Murad’s own summary, he mainly adopts the “price and belief index” investment strategy, which believes that investors should look for projects with high belief but low price, that is, Memecoin that is undervalued but meets most of the screening criteria. These projects usually have only one or two indicators that are not up to standard, are easy to improve, and have extremely enthusiastic community support.
After appearing and giving a speech at Token2049, Murad’s position in the Memecoin circle has reached a new level. Due to his systematic Memecoin investment and strategy, more investors have begun to study Memecoin-even some VCs.
Another KOL among the top Memecoin KOLs in 2024 can be as famous as Murad.
However, compared to Murad, Ansem has a heavier trading label and believes that technical analysis is more important than fundamental analysis. Ansem has attracted market attention mainly for investing in BONK and WIF. On October 30, 2023, Ansem posted X "bonk great coin" on social media and recommended BONK for the first time. At that time, the price of BONK was only 0.0000005618 US dollars. Subsequently, BONK skyrocketed. By March 2024, the price of BONK once exceeded 0.000045 US dollars, an increase of more than 80 times.
As for WIF, it can be said that Ansem called it to a market value of 3 billion step by step. On December 12, 2023, Ansem said on social media that only WIF has the potential of SHIB, and issued X "WIF = SHIB" on December 16. In the following 4 months, the price of WIF soared from $0.09 to a record high of $4.85, an increase of more than 520 times.
Due to frequent recommendations of some small-cap Memecoins that caused followers to lose money, Ansem is currently burdened with some lawsuits. Other KOLs accused Ansem of openly "cutting leeks". In the face of accusations, Ansem said that he was only choosing the best transactions in the market and could not ensure that every transaction would be successful, but he helped more people than hurt people. Some analysts backtested the investment returns through Ansem's past recommendations, and most currencies would become negative returns if bought after Ansem's recommendation.
Because he was "condemned" by many celebrities, when the incident was exposed, this scammer from India once caused a sensation in the market and caused a large number of investors to lose money.
Sahil Arora is a serial entrepreneur who started multiple crypto projects from 2020 to 2023. Although they ended in failure, they made him a lot of profit.
In 2024, Sahil Arora found a business opportunity on Memecoin, using his influence and certification marks on Instagram to contact many celebrities and cooperate with them to issue tokens. He helps these celebrities issue Memecoin, usually holding 25%-40% of the token supply, and quickly sells the tokens after the celebrities’ tweets are released, using the celebrity fans’ investment as his “exit liquidity”.
For example:
Spended $200,000 to invite Jason Derulo to tweet and promote the token;
Signed a contract with Caitlyn Jenner to issue the token JENNER for her, and agreed to pay a $50,000 advance payment and 80% of the revenue share, but the cooperation turned into a farce. Jenner accused him of breach of contract and publicly scolded him, saying that he had deceived herself and owed her "a lot of money";
Issued tokens for celebrities such as Rich the Kid and Lil Pump, and these celebrities also complained about similar experiences;
Data company Bubbleworks believes through data analysis that Sahil Arora earned about $30 million this year by issuing Memecoin on behalf of celebrities.
Lggy Azalea, a well-known Australian rapper, should be considered the leader of the celebrity Memecoin trend in 2024. In fact, Sahil Arora also tried to help Lggy Azalea issue Memecin $LGG, but it was not very successful.
Lggy Azalea decided to issue Memecoin herself. The reason was that she found someone pretending to be her on Telegram to issue coins, so she simply launched the token MOTHER on Pump.fun on May 28, 2024, and focused her X account with 7.6 million followers on promoting MOTHER coins, deleting all posts before May 29, posting 2,245 posts about MOTHER, and placing a link to MOTHER's Telegram channel on Instagram, and suspending her OnlyFans to guide fans to the Telegram channel. Within a week of the release, the price of MOTHER coins soared 1,200%.
Later, Lggy Azalea appeared in Spaces in multiple communities, interacted with community members, responded through voice messages, and appeared on the ThreadGuy podcast to share her insights on cryptocurrency and Web3.
As Memecoin became more and more popular, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin expressed dissatisfaction with the celebrity Memecoin craze, believing that these coins were only meant to make celebrities and early users rich and had no practical use. Lggy Azalea then confronted Vitalik, posting a spoof picture of herself holding Vitalik's baby, saying "he was angry and hungry". The price of random $MOTHER tokens once rose by 150%, and also led to the "family token" trend, such as the rise of tokens such as $DADDY and $SON.
Lggy Azalea is not just good at arguing. After arguing with Vitalik, she opened an online store, allowing T-shirts and other products to be purchased only with MOTHER, and announced that MOTHER or SOL can be used to purchase mobile phones and mobile phone tariff packages on a monthly basis, etc., to avoid the value of $MOTHER being empty.
Caitlyn Jenner is an American flag TV show celebrity and former track and field athlete. Like Lggy Azalea, Caitlyn Jenner's own media influence and public image attracted more people to pay attention to memecoin, but the difference is that the Memecoin issued by Caitlyn Jenner was not successful, and she was eventually sued by investors.
In May 2024, Caitlyn Jenner issued a token called $Jenner on Pump.fun, and posted a photo of her shaking hands with Trump through her Twitter account with a link to the $Jenner token. She also circled several well-known crypto KOLs, calling them "crypto kings". Subsequently, she posted a Story about the $Jenner token, which was also forwarded by her agent Sophia.
Since Caitlyn Jenner had not previously been involved in the crypto field, her fans suspected that her account had been stolen. However, Caitlyn Jenner said that her account had not been stolen, and posted a video showing her face to refute the rumor, saying that $Jenner was indeed released by her team.
During the period when the price of the currency fluctuated greatly due to various questioning voices, Caitlyn Jenner's Twitter account held a Space, and her agent Sophia planned to personally refute the rumor in Space. However, Sophia said in Space that the team might issue a new token, and the market began to sell $Jenner, although Caitlyn Jenner later declared that the team would only focus on $Jenner and would not launch other tokens.
According to Lookonchain monitoring, Caitlyn Jenner earned 2,381 SOL (about $405,000) by launching 12 MEMEcoins on Solana in the past 4 days of May 2024.
On November 13, 2024, Naeem Azad and Mihai Caluseru, as British and Romanian citizens respectively, filed a class action lawsuit in the California Federal Court, accusing Caitlyn Jenner and her manager Sophia Hutchins of fraudulently soliciting investors to purchase unregistered securities, causing them to suffer significant losses.
For $400,000, she consumed her fans' value and attracted legal disputes. I wonder if Caitlyn Jenner will feel that the gains do not outweigh the losses?
The new king of shouting orders of the year, once made 25 million US dollars by holding a large position in PEPE, but also overturned because of his ugly eating.
James Wynn quickly bought PEPE coins within 1 day after they were launched, and shouted a lot on Twitter. On April 16, 2023 alone, he released at least 24 promotional content about PEPE coins, which helped PEPE coins become more popular on social media and attracted more attention from investors and Meme communities.
On May 1, the price of PEPE coins rose 100 times compared to James Wynn's cost. James Wyn was found to have transferred his PEPE coins to multiple new addresses, and gradually aggregated the assets to the main wallet jwynn.eth through multiple wallet addresses, and finally transferred funds to the exchange address. According to media statistics, James Wynn earned about 25 million US dollars in the surge of PEPE tokens, with a principal of only 7,644 US dollars.
Afterwards, James Wynn began to call for ELON tokens. On April 24, 2024, James Wynn tweeted, "I think I have a 1,000x for you, who wants it?" One hour before posting the tweet, he had just completed the layout of two accounts in ELON tokens, and then announced the relevant information of ELON tokens. The price of ELON tokens rose nearly 100 times in a short period of time.
On April 27, the price of ELON suddenly fell by 70%. James Wynn then announced on Twitter that he had cleared his position and said that there was a problem with the ELON token. In fact, he had cleared his position with another uncommon address as early as 3 o'clock on the 25th, and his clearing behavior caused the collapse of ELON coins. According to statistics, during this operation, both accounts of James Wynn were in the top ten of the profit list, with a profit of about US$350,000.
James Wynn's liquidation directly led to the collapse of ELON prices, which ruined James Wynn's image in the community and was directly accused of cutting leeks.
Such a figure ceremony still has to include Sun Ge.
In August 2024, TRON launched the SunPump Beta version, which is known as the first Memecoin platform in the TRON ecosystem with the concept of fair issuance. SunPump can be understood as a benchmark for Pump.fun. Although TRON claims that SunPump is not Sun Yuchen's project, in the public's mind, Sun Yuchen will still be associated with SunPump.
After SunPump was launched, Sun Yuchen spared no effort to promote it, and published an article predicting that the tron chain will soon give birth to Memecoin with a market value of more than 1 billion US dollars, saying that TRON is a deep integration of TRON and Meme culture.
In addition, Sun Yuchen is also making arrangements in other areas of Memecoin. For example, he invested 10 million US dollars in Shib's forked token SHIB Ultra, making him the largest investor in the project.
In 2024, Sun Yuchen's most popular event on Memecoin was the "expensive banana" incident. He paid $6.24 million for the conceptual artwork "Comedian" (a banana taped to the wall) by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan, and ate it during a live broadcast to pay tribute to Meme culture, thus triggering public discussion on Meme culture. Through this event, he successfully combined art with Meme culture and expanded the Meme circle.
Elon Musk is already a heavyweight in the cryptocurrency circle. Although he did not deliberately promote the historical process of Memecoin, he certainly has a place in the history of Memecoin development. Elon Musk believes that meme is a modern art that can efficiently convey information and emotions. He once said, "Whoever controls the meme controls the world." This sentence reflects his understanding of Meme culture.
Elon Musk's most widely known Memecoin investment is Doge. In 2020, Musk began to frequently post content about Dogecoin on Twitter, such as "dogetothemoon" and other tweets, pushing Dogecoin from a relatively niche cryptocurrency to the vision of global investors. In early 2021, Tesla CEO's tweet "doge" plus a rocket emoji caused the price of Dogecoin to soar, breaking the historical mark of $1. In addition, Musk had planned for Tesla to accept Dogecoin payments, but the plan was later suspended. In April 2023, Musk changed the icon of X to a Shiba Inu, and Dogecoin rose by 30% on the same day. In 2024, Musk paid tribute to Kabosu, the original dog behind the Dogecoin meme, in an X post, sparking a bullish trend for Dogecoin.
In addition to Dogecoin, Musk also has no intention of promoting some Memecoins (note that this is different from shouting orders):
In December 2023, Musk announced the launch of the first AI model GROK. The Memecoin of the same name was subsequently established and rose fivefold in two days (but it was revealed that GROK was created by a scam artist and the coin later plummeted);
On January 9, 2024, Musk changed his Twitter profile to (CTO) chief Troll Officer, and then the price of TROLL soared;
On January 16, 2024, Musk released a Meme picture. Because the text on it contained Meme and smiley elements, SMILEY, a token previously deployed on Ethereum The price of
Musk's words and deeds have attracted much attention in the cryptocurrency circle, and the market often sees a large number of Memecoin creations with him as the theme or inspired by him. For example, the "ClosedAI" token rose by more than 2,800% in three hours after Musk criticized OpenAI.
Recently, Musk changed his Twitter avatar to a meme image similar to Pepe the frog, and directly changed his name to Kekius Maximus. PEPE rose in response, and multiple Memecoins with the Kekius Maximus concept also began to soar in a short period of time.
The incoming US President and former president, Donald John Trump, is often put together with Musk and brings some Memecoin trading opportunities. At least so far, Donald John Trump is the one who is lying in the crossfire.
In May 2024, at the Trump Card NFT Gala held at Mar-a-Lago, when a participant introduced him to the "boden" meme coin with a market value of US$240 million, Trump said, "I don't like that investment." But then, the meme coin rose 25% on Wednesday, reaching a high of $0.42.
On August 12, 2024, a trader allegedly spent 0.052 ETH (about $96 at the time) to buy 608,650 "TRUMP" tokens related to Trump. By June 2024, the market value of the coin had soared to $788 million.
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