Musk is starting the meme craze again. What’s behind the meme’s take-off?

Whoever controls the meme controls the universe.

Written by: 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 is a meme asset

**The word “meme” comes from Dawkins’ book “The Selfish Gene” and refers to the basic unit of human culture. **It can be various forms of information, ideas or behaviors that are passed from person to person through imitation and dissemination. “**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 people’s emotions, opinions, humor and irony, while also reflecting current social trends and cultural phenomena.

**The core concept and appeal of meme assets come from meme culture. **Meme assets attract investor attention through the use of humorous and entertaining Meme images, concepts or ideas. 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. **They are 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 are meme assets 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 doing multiple projects, investors would consider this a sign of lack of focus and unreliability, but now it is just the opposite. Launching a new 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 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 has institutional support or not. **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, Others also have resources and various relationships. If you have no products, how can you compare with them?

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), large Under the dumping of projects with low market value and low circulation, the market value of high-quality projects continues to increase, but the price does not move. Ordinary investors, let alone 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 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 BRC20 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. Yes, 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 bypassed, 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 surged in the last bull market and reached the top ten in market capitalization, Musk’s reputation and influence in the blockchain industry have reached its peak. One of his tweets can cause huge fluctuations in the price of meme, *Sometimes even triggering market madness. Because he often posts tweets related to cryptocurrencies and memecoins on Twitter, he has become one of the key targets of retail investors in the industry.

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 most representative one is Q* some time ago. , grok and more 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 BRC20 broke out last year, most people liked to play on Ethereum, and Musk’s Twitter was one of the objects 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: **pepe founder matt, 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 will push pepe to BN in a short period of time.

The founder of pepe has also attracted everyone’s 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 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 good performance of SOL last year made everyone start to focus on the development of its ecology. Among them, Bonk, the first dog of Solana ecology, emerged in this context, and Memecoin Silly is a meme project that Solana founder Anatoly has supported 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 everyone’s 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 US dollars that day. Follow-up Several Polygon officials have publicly supported it, but the recent price correction has been so severe that it can only be worth a few million dollars.

In addition to these, there are also Coq, Bear and Inscription Market of the AVAX chain, all of which have been publicly supported by AVAX officials or relevant personnel, causing a large number of short-term investors to enter the market with FOMO. Recently, project parties such as Lup and Bake have begun to exit in person.

**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.

Factors that can make you popular

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. If you make money, it 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 BRC20 is so popular? On the one hand, it is because it is backed by the Bitcoin ecosystem. Another important reason is that some people make 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, Musk’s concepts, BRC20’s sats, piin, etc.

**4) Innovation: **The story is relatively novel and has innovative points. HarryPotterObamaSonic 10 Inu (Bitcoin) is an abstract memecoin that combines elements of Harry Potter, Obama and Sony. Aidoge is given to Arbitrum at a ratio of 1:1. users, rats early distribution models, and more.

**5) Fairness: **Fairness here is relative, which means that in the early stage of chip distribution, retail investors have the opportunity to get cheap chips, and most of BRC20 is included in this.

**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 there are only a few projects. Only then can we really run out. Meme assets have become an important part of the industry, and understanding meme culture is important to track and delve into the crypto industry. **