Original author: Shenchao TechFlow

Usually in the eyes of Leeks, VC is a booster for the sickle, and Meme is a big red flag against the sickle.

Meme driven by culture and community often does not have too much primary investment and big VC endorsement. The relatively fair and random characteristics also make Chongtu Dog gradually become a carnival of leek---it is cut anyway, so it is not as good as Bo Meme lottery warehouse.

It’s just that this carnival has not belonged to VC for a long time.

VCs with top-notch predictions and vision can naturally understand this change in the direction of the crypto industry. Whether you are anxious or thinking, you still have to do something to seek a breakthrough in the big wave of the attention economy.

Recently, Variant co-founder Li Jin took action and wrote on his Twitter:

Born too late to explore the Earth; born too early to explore the universe; born in the right time to host a meme hackathon.

This event called Memecoin Hackthon,Introduction pageThe organizer is Li Jin and is scheduled to be held at the headquarters of Variant Fund in New York on April 20, calling for teams that can build the following aspects to participate:

• New memecoins, especially those seeking to have a positive-sum impact on the broader ecosystem

• Liquidity layer, including Telegram robot, DEX

• Using memecoins as an application for GTM strategy

• Applications that build utility around memecoin

What is worth pondering is that the event mentioned a word called Memefra, which is Meme infrastructure. Let a team with ideas and capabilities build Memefra. It is obvious that VCs also welcome anything that creates conditions for Meme.

Born at the right time, VCs who have always been high-level in infrastructure technology, really want to start catching up with the Meme wave with their own local dog temperament?

Attention economy, perpetual motion machine in the currency circle

In fact, VC co-founded the Meme Hackathon not on a whim, but more as a result of the trend.

VC investment pays attention to value returns, and Meme itself has attention value.

In Li Jin’s earlier blog, he was very keenly aware thatMemecoins, NFTs, and tokens are new “attention assets” that measure the value of attention in real time.

Abundance of information creates a scarcity of attention, so attention is a scarce resource. However, in the advertising business model dominated by Web2, the value brought by user attention is harvested by the platform rather than flowing to the user.

Cryptocurrencies can therefore be viewed as the next iteration of the attention economy, with more efficient markets.

Memecoin can measure and capture the value of attention in real time, and users can invest and own attention assets to express their belief in whether a specific meme, medium, creator, or network will gain more attention and interest in the future.

From this point of view, it becomes more reasonable that VCs also favor Meme coins.

After all, it is quite tempting and persuasive to successfully invest in products that can capture the attention of the public (even if it is a Meme).

While attracting users’ attention, the emergence of Meme has also taught many crypto projects a lesson in their marketing methods and market pace:

Under the traditional model, crypto projects follow the path of “product first, attention later”—building a product through technology first, then building a community around it through marketing, making it known and gradually developing;

Under the Meme attention economy, crypto projects can completely attention first, product later --- by launching a project that natively integrates with the popular memecoin, new applications/infrastructure can mobilize the memecoin holder base, They can experience more utility from their tokens.

Two different development ideas, obviously the times have chosen the latter one.

No matter what kind of encryption project it is, it is essentially attracting attention, allowing more people to participate and use it, and allowing more people to connect with the token.

Driven by the attention economy, the currency circle has gone through many stages. From Bitcoin to Ethereum, from NFT to Meme, a change of narrative is a shift of attention.

So, it’s no surprise that VCs revolve around attention and make timely changes.

Users are educated by VCs, and users educate VCs

But you have to know that the encryption market was not dominated by Meme carnivals without origin, but followed the traditional and serious venture capital path.

In the early years when Ethereum was first born, in 2014 even Vitalik had to give roadshows and explanations on Ethereum projects to investors from both the East and the West.

Although veterans in the currency circle often recall that everyone couldnt understand Ethereum at the time, and now they cant understand it, but they are still struggling, but as strong as Vitalik, encryption projects have always followed the same process:

First use your strength (or brag about your strength) to impress the attention of VCs, and then go to the market to grab (or harvest) the attention of users.

In this path, whether it is ICO or IEO, VCs take advantage of the early rounds to get a large number of low-priced chips, and then sell them according to different unlocking conditions when the project reaches the second level; of course there are smart retail investors who follow the meat and drink the soup. , but there are also a large number of successors who will take over the last step.

After a long time, they get tired; after a round of education, users can probably understand what is going on.

Therefore, we are increasingly seeing projects such as Inscription, Rune and Memecoin in the new cycle that VCs are not very involved in, have no time to participate in, or disdain to participate in. They not only break the above-mentioned inherent venture capital process, but also break the attention. Path to power growth:

First use explosive pull to directly attract the users attention, and then do other things based on the users basic base.

Users are not afraid of skyrocketing prices and plummeting prices, but they are afraid that I will not have a better chance than you to enjoy the skyrocketing prices and plummeting prices., obviously Memes give users a relatively closer channel, even if they will be cut off, it is better than explicitly taking over for VC.

So to a certain extent, users are also educating VCs in turn, adults, times have changed.

It is interesting to see a role exchange between the upstream and downstream of the ecological chain, and this is what is interesting about the currency circle:

Cutting each other off, hurting each other, and growing each other.

Original link