Inside Meme Culture: Meme’s “Godfather” Musk and those who want to be him
Original author: Day
Recently, with the help of Musk’s Twitter, meme assets such as Troll and Zuzalu have soared in popularity. So, what exactly is a meme? Why are meme assets so popular? What do you think of meme assets?
What are meme assets
The word meme comes from Dawkins book The Selfish Gene and refers to the basic unit in human culture. It can be various forms of information, ideas or behaviors that are passed from person to person through imitation and communication. Meme aims to convey a specific phenomenon, theme or meaning and resonate in society. After the development of the Internet, meme is now not limited to traditional text or pictures, but also includes digital forms such as Token and NFT.
These memes spread quickly, widely and interestingly through social media and the Internet, and have become an important part of Internet culture and popular culture. They can express peoples emotions, opinions, humor and irony, while also reflecting current social trends and cultural phenomena.
The core concepts and appeal of meme assets come from meme culture. Meme assets attract investor attention by using meme images, concepts or ideas that are humorous and entertaining. They are a social infrastructure that spreads rapidly within the industry through community co-promotion and viral spread. The uniqueness of meme assets is that they are community-driven and fairly distributed compared to institutional currencies. Community members jointly participate in and promote the development of meme assets. The success of meme assets is closely related to the activity of the community.
Why meme assets are so popular
The development of the blockchain industry is no longer the reckless stage it was a few years ago. A few years ago, if you were working on multiple projects, investors would consider this to be unfocused and unreliable. But now it is just the opposite. A project is actually a good thing, because it has the endorsement of previous projects, so the new one will not be bad, and everyone will have a better understanding of the relevant situation, which is euphemistically called ecology.
In such an environment, the industry has long been dominated by giants, and the relationships are complicated. Various early institutions have gradually grown into giants. There are many mountains, and there is a long list of interests behind each institution. If you have no background or resources, no one will pay attention to you, retail investors will not understand you, and institutions will not trust you. The same product is completely different whether it is backed by an institution. For example, if well-known institutions like pradigm, BN and other institutions invest in you, no matter how bad the product is, everyone will pursue it. After all, with institutional endorsement, no matter how bad it is, people will still have resources. , there are various relationships, you have no products, how can you compare with others.
Some leading institutions have launched various pipeline projects in batches, with a total market value of tens to tens of billions of dollars (you must know that projects with valuations of more than one billion US dollars are called unicorns in the Web2 world), and projects with large market values and low circulation Under dumping, the market value of high-quality projects continues to increase, but the price does not move. Ordinary investors, let alone drinking soup, directly become the last stick, one after another without saying a word.
In this environment, meme assets have replaced altcoins a few years ago and have become an important part of the entire industry from bottom to top. The rise of meme assets can be said to be inevitable, and it is inseparable from the anti-VC movement of retail investors. The rise of BRC 20 assets this year is partly due to the Bitcoin ecosystem, and partly because the project chips are relatively dispersed and belong to fair distribution. No one institution will monopolize the profits, and this part of the profits will be eaten by retail investors. , because everyone makes money and has a wealth effect, it can become popular.
meme godfather musk
Understanding the development of meme, if there is someone who cannot be avoided, then the number one person must be Musk. Musk has a close relationship with memes. It can be said that the current development of Dogecoin, the current meme leader, is inseparable from Musk’s propaganda. He has publicly supported Dogecoin many times, and each tweet will surely trigger widespread discussion and attention. Since Dogecoin skyrocketed in the last bull market and reached the top ten in market capitalization, Musks reputation and influence in the blockchain industry have reached its peak. One of his tweets can cause huge fluctuations in the price of meme, and sometimes even trigger Due to the craziness of the market, he has become one of the key targets of retail investors in the industry because he often posts tweets related to cryptocurrencies and memecoins on Twitter.
Translation: Whoever controls the meme controls the universe - Frank Tank Herbert
Musk currently has nearly 169 million followers on Twitter. A small number of people will keep an eye on his Twitter 24 hours a day in order to discover on-chain projects or mass-produce meme tokens for the first time. Each of his tweets is published, or Twitter When the display settings are changed, several idiots named after Twitter content will be generated on the chain (mainly in Ethereum) in just a minute or two. For some projects that have special significance or are mentioned repeatedly, in just a few days, the market value of the project may soar from dozens of dollars to tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of dollars. The more representative ones are Q*, grok and recently troll.
Of course, these memecoins are very dependent on Musk. You can look at their historical trends. Most of them are in a wave unless Musk mentions them again. Before BRC 20 broke out last year, most people liked to play on Ethereum, and Musks Twitter was one of the things they focused on. They would even go so far as to find out why he posted it like this and what was the background source?
Those who want to be Musk
Recently, as the popularity of the industry has increased, many project founders have begun to call for orders, and the calls are all memes, focusing on the air. Here is a brief inventory of a few well-known ones, follow their Twitter, follow up on meat in the early stage, and eat meat in the later stage. Let’s take a brief look at the takeover, and you can see some of the characteristics of memecoins.
1) Matt Furie: Matt, the founder of pepe, the hottest meme last year should belong to pepe and bonk. Both of them exceeded 1 billion US dollars at their peak. pepe relied on the extremely popular sad frog image and excellent team marketing , pushing pepe to BN in the short term.
The founder of pepe has also attracted everyones attention under this situation. For a period of time in mid-2023, as long as the founder changes his avatar, changes his signature, and tweets, related memecoins will appear on the chain in a short period of time. Some of them will appear in the short term. The market value of tens of thousands of dollars has increased to tens of millions of dollars, including dorkl, fine, etc. Later, because he promoted too many projects, the money-making effect eventually weakened, resulting in a weakening of influence, but sometimes he still promoted some projects.
2) Toly: Anatoly, the founder of Solana. The outstanding performance of SOL last year has made everyone start to focus on the development of its ecology. Among them, the first dog of Solana ecology, Bonk, emerged in this context, and memecoin Silly is Solana. Founder Anatoly has supported meme projects on Twitter many times. Until the Solana Breakpoint conference, founder Anatoly appeared at the conference wearing a dragon costume, which completely ignited Silly. In addition, because of the traffic of SOL itself, the content forwarded by Anatoly on Twitter has attracted everyones attention.
3) Sandeep Nailwal: Founder of Polygon. After Silly became popular, the Polygon chain also released the memecoin Pory. On the day of the release, Polygon founder Sandeep retweeted the content. The market value of Pory reached a high of more than 40 million U.S. dollars that day. Subsequently, multiple Polygon official People openly support it, but the recent price correction is only a few million dollars.
In addition to these, there are also Coq, Bear and Inscription Market of the AVAX chain. AVAX officials or relevant personnel have publicly expressed support, resulting in a large number of short-term investors entering the market with FOMO. Recently, projects such as Lup and Bake have begun to exit personally.
It can be seen that most meme assets are short-term hot. After a wave of heat, most of them will cool down quickly, and few of them can last. If there is no continuous ability to make trouble, it is easy for the newcomers to take over for the predecessors. Most people here have a certain degree of attention, and then place orders with purpose.
Hot factors
Meme assets emphasize more on the concept itself rather than how strong the technology or financial system is. Therefore, the threshold for issuing meme assets is low, which is its advantage and disadvantage. That is, anyone can issue it, resulting in many projects, but the real Very few escaped. Why does meme become popular? What are the factors at play? Based on the currently known projects, here are some reasons after the fact. Welcome to add.
1) The popularity brings users outside the circle: memecoins are air, so marketing becomes very important, and the best marketing is to make people make money, and when they make money, they will spread from person to person. If you ask some outsiders, some people may not have heard of mainstream assets such as ETH and BNB, but the vast majority of people know about Dogecoin. Why BRC 20 is so popular? On the one hand, it is because it is backed by the Bitcoin ecosystem. Another important reason is that someone makes money, and then everyone pours in.
2) Simple and easy to understand: The more classic ones are Bit Gold, Lite Silver. Teacher Li also mentioned it before, what does Lite have? Just because it has a good name. The slogan is well shouted and deeply rooted in the hearts of the people. It can be said that it saves a lot of words.
3) Familiar and easy to spread: This industry is very similar to the entertainment industry, 80% of the success will be achieved if there is traffic. For example, the sad frog image itself, the carrier of pepe, has been widely circulated, and various well-known founders pet concepts, Musks concepts, BRC 20s sats, piin, etc.
4) Innovation: The story is relatively new and has innovative points. HarryPotterObamaSonic 10 Inu (Bitcoin) is an abstract memecoin that combines elements of Harry Potter, Obama and Sony. Aidoge is released to Arbitrum users at a ratio of 1:1. Rats early distribution model and so on.
5) Fairness: Fairness here is relative, which means that in the early stages of chip distribution, retail investors have the opportunity to get cheap chips, and most BRC 20 are included in this category.
The above are some of the characteristics of some popular meme assets. Everything revolves around the word traffic, but no matter what, there are people behind the project.
summary
Although meme assets have various high returns, only a few projects can really take off. Most of them are short-term projects. After a wave of popularity, the popularity drops sharply, and then there is no more. The latecomers take over for the former, and only a few projects can really succeed. run out. Meme assets have become an important part of the industry, and understanding meme culture is important to track and delve deeper into the crypto industry.
