Original title: "Meme enters the second half, what to do next?"

Original author: Sammi

Last year, I wrote an article to explore the underlying logic and investment methodology of meme success. Two days later, $pepe$aidoge appeared and became popular. Meme began a bull market that lasted more than a year and gradually developed into the most profitable and popular track in the current crypto industry. Now that time has passed, meme has also evolved into a pvp battlefield. It is difficult to find a new continent with an old map. We need to start thinking about the new development direction of meme.

1. Meme homogeneity involution

According to CoinGecko data, on April 14, 2023, the total market value of global cryptocurrencies was about 1.34 trillion, and the total market value of the meme sector was about 20.8 billion. On September 19, 2024, the total market value of global cryptocurrencies was about 2.242 trillion, and the total market value of the meme sector was about 43.4 billion.

During this period, the market value of Bitcoin alone rose to 1.25 trillion, and the overall market value of the meme sector also doubled. From the beginning, meme was a fun, easy-to-spread, and wealth-creating community coin, and now it has developed into a purely involutionary PVP battlefield, competing in physical strength, tools, and speed....

Coin-issuing tools are rampant, and everyone can be a project party. For a good name, you send capital letters, I send lowercase letters, you send Sol, I send Trx. People who are not capable of doing a good project also try to get a piece of the pie and issue coins to cut leeks, and a large number of artificial garbage on the chain are created.

The life cycle of meme is constantly shortening; narrative culture cannot be precipitated; funds and attention are scattered, which have become the main problems in the current development of the track. This directly leads to the fact that hot spots are not scarce, VCs are not scarce, retail investors are not scarce, and good DEVs and communities have become scarce.

2. Binance's listing of coins extends the life of meme

When the development of meme entered a bottleneck and aesthetic fatigue, Binance's listing of coins extended the life of meme.

Among the 3 meme coins launched by Binance this time,

· $Neiro: A community coin with high popularity, dispersed chips and low valuation

· $Turbo: The founder was inspired by artificial intelligence and spent $69 to create a meme coin using GPT-4. (AI+meme)

· #babydoge: A meme coin on the BSC chain (public chain + meme)

Binance's preference for listing coins, whether on an active or passive level, will be instructive for the market for some time to come. After all, the ultimate goal of all coins is to be listed on Binance. This also guides a feasible development direction in the future.

3. Meme enters the second half

Meme 1.0 era:

By taking advantage of celebrity speeches, various cat and dog animal images, an expression, an event, and building a TG group, it may develop into a meme.

Next, the meme 2.0 era. There are three main branches of the development route:

1. Public chain + meme

Comparing the public chain to a city, meme is a tourist attraction, a specialty (Zibo barbecue), or a celebrity concert (Kanye’s Hainan concert). If it is well operated, it can drive the GDP of a city. There are many infrastructure projects in this round, hundreds of public chain L2s, with high valuations and few users. The official support of meme coins for infrastructure projects can achieve the effect of "small balls controlling big balls" and attract users, traffic and attention. For meme coins, it also avoids the situation of multiple chains with the same name and the diversion of communities competing for uppercase and lowercase letters, and builds a moat for meme coins.

Representative coins: #babydoge on Bsc, $sundog on trx, $bulb on sui

2. Application + meme, cross-track + meme

Application coins are products, meme is marketing, it is advertising. The mainstream voice in the market has always put meme coins VS institutional VC coins in opposing positions. If the advantages of the two coins can be combined, cross-track integration. Application coins are responsible for capturing value + meme coins to obtain community and user traffic, or in the form of "surface meme, inner utility token", there will be an opportunity to develop a composite narrative and form a 1+1>2 effect. For example, the aggregator Jupiter once airdropped the test coin $wen for active users

Representative coin: $turbo of AI concept + meme, $wen, a test coin on Jupiter, a DeFi track

3. Push meme

Previous online communities were for mutual recharge of faith and advocated hodl. Work together to build consensus. Most communities nowadays can no longer be called communities, but rather groups shouting orders to ship to family members, and communities have become pvp battlefields where leeks cut each other. Offline communities have higher stickiness, stronger authenticity and consensus, and enough users will also become the fat meat that major exchanges will compete to list.

Representative coins: $Neiro, $core

Fourth, the "meme+" era

At present, the entire industry is in a narrative shortage, and the development of each track has reached a bottleneck:

1. Institutional VC coins have high valuations, high selling pressure, ghost towns on the chain, and few users

2. Meme coins have many users, high activity, ultimate pvp, and mutual cutting of leeks

The pain point of VC coins is users, the pain point of meme coins is the lack of endorsement and platform, and the pain point of retail investors is the lack of small-cap, reliable memes to gamble with. If the goals and advantages of several forces are combined, such as the public chain creating memes, attracting users, and increasing on-chain activity; VC product projects airdropping meme coins to early contributors to encourage user participation, and then transforming into communities... In this way, cross-sector integration will usher in the "meme+" era, and there will be a chance to spark new sparks, revitalize the entire market, and trigger the "public chain meme wave" and "product meme" wave.

Finally

The retail investors in the market are against VCs, and they want fairness, but they are actually against not making money.

When we take off the narrative coat composed of various high-sounding nouns, what DeFi/L2/intention/GameFi/chain abstraction/RWA... In fact, the most original and successful crypto narrative of Web3 from beginning to end is only one, Let a small number of people achieve "small capital turn over a big body".

Only when ordinary people get rich and losers’ counterattack stories break through the circle can the market truly bring new funds, new users, and new traffic. This is the mass adoption that institutions and exchanges pursue.

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