$1 billion in three months, reviewing the growth path of "Golden Dog" Degen

Old Fashion Research

2024-04-01 11:40

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Original author: JX, crypto KOL

Editor's note: Recently, in the Ethereum ecosystem, the Base chain is a standout. This morning, according to CoinGecko data, the meme token DEGEN on the Base chain briefly broke through $0.06 and is now quoted at $0.05578, with a 24-hour increase of more than 37%. Reference reading: 《DEGEN and AERO hit record highs in succession, is the Base season really coming this time? 》 Crypto KOL JX shared his review of Degen on X, and BlockBeats reprinted the full text as follows:

If you have played Base chain recently, then you must know that the most popular Token on it is called Degen, and its market value has exceeded 1.5 billion US dollars today. After the launch of the Degen channel on Farcaster in January 2024, users can use Degen to reward high-quality content creators. As of now, there are more than 83,000 holders, and it is still growing rapidly. So how did Degen grow into a "golden dog" worth 1 billion US dollars?

Innovative airdrop gameplay (rewards)

Starting from January this year, Degen quickly became popular in the Farcaster community. Community members rewarded their favorite high-quality content in the form of number of comments + DEGEN. Degen will get the daily allowance for rewarding others based on the user's farcaster activity and engagement. The airdrop amount is based on the total amount of rewards received by the user from others every quarter, so users need to post good content on Farcaster to get rewards. Many active users even reward thousands of dollars a day.

Community niche communication

The price of Degen ushered in the first wave of increase along with the enthusiasm of the community. At this time, the market value of Degen rose from 10m to about 50m, and in turn, Degen also brought a wave of user growth to Farcaster. Teacher Pingfeng's description of Degen's reward is very appropriate:

Angel round financing

In February, Degen announced the completion of 490.5 ETH (about 1.47 million US dollars) angel round financing, led by 1confirmation, and participated by Farcaster OG, etc. The funds will be used to develop the Degen ecosystem and community. It can be seen that some shares were given to some community projects, such as Drakula, etc., which also laid the groundwork for Degen's utility.

Application Empowerment

The decentralized TikTok Dracula on the Base chain was launched on March 14. Dracula was created by Alex Masmej, the issuer of the fan token $ALEX, and received investment from Paradigm. Because the Degen community previously granted 10m DEGEN (now worth about 500,000 US dollars), Dracula's app uses degen as a token. Users can use degen to buy their favorite bloggers, similar to the gameplay of Friend tech. Users can also earn points by posting and watching short videos, sharing links, and purchasing creator tokens, and use BLOOD for rewards.

In addition, similar to the NFT casting platform Zora, community projects Bracket.Game and Rounds.wtf also use degen as a native token. At this time, the market value of Degen has grown to about 70m-100m. DegenCast will also use Degen to buy the creator's Key.

Degen L3

Degen started its cheating journey on March 20th. First, on March 29th, Degen announced the news of cooperating with Syndicate to develop L3 based on Base. The Gas token of Degen Chain is also DEGEN. Up to now, Degen Chain has had more than 4 million transactions and more than 100k wallets.

The second piece of news is that Farcaster's parent company, Merkle Manufactory, raised funds at a valuation of 1 billion US dollars, led by the founder of Paradigm. Since Farcaster did not issue a token, the community began to view this financing as a positive for $Degen.

Since Degen issued L3, the entire valuation space has been benchmarked against major public chains. It can even be said that $Degen has become the token of Base, and its market value has skyrocketed to 2B in a few days.

Inspiration from Degen

Degen originated from the Farcaster community and is rooted in the Base chain. It can be said that it complements Farcaster/Base. The price of Degen attracts users, and without the Farcaster community, Degen would not have been created. The Farcaster community project also provides an application scenario for Degen.

Degen's narrative evolved from a community project for self-entertainment token, to a social core project utility token, and then to a public chain gas token, from 10M to 100M to 1B. Each narrative advancement represents an increase in the magnitude of valuation.

The rise of Degen also provides a path for the development of Farcaster community projects. Subsequent projects like Drakula, DegenCast, etc. are worth looking forward to.