Solana Meme sentiment shifts rapidly, $Ghibli quickly reaches a market capitalization of 28 million.

Written by: Shenchao TechFlow

The trend in the Meme market can change in an instant. Today, most Meme players’ attention is drawn to $Ghibli — within less than a day of its launch, its market cap reached 28 million dollars.

Social media is also filled with AI-generated images in the style of Studio Ghibli, with Sam Altman and Elon Musk joining in the fun, and crypto project teams urgently jumping on the bandwagon, creating many derivative works in the Ghibli style.

A quick introduction to the ins and outs of entering the quick access token $Ghibli.

Ghibli? Ghibli? AI Ghibli?

Ghibli (hereinafter referred to as Ghibli) style refers to the unique visual style exhibited in the animated works created by the famous Japanese animation studio Studio Ghibli. The studio was co-founded by renowned Japanese animation director Hayao Miyazaki and his partners. The well-known works from Studio Ghibli are countless, with “Spirited Away,” “My Neighbor Totoro,” “Howl’s Moving Castle,” and many others being household names in the world of animation.

The formation of the Ghibli art style can be traced back to Hayao Miyazaki’s early creative experiences. The Ghibli art style is characterized by a gouache texture, high saturation colors, and unique character designs. When Ghibli is mentioned, many people can easily visualize a refreshing image composed of blue skies and green grass.

Master Hayao Miyazaki’s last work “The Wind Rises”

Studio Ghibli style + AI

The distinctive Ghibli style has become a classic painting style in traditional animation and gaming. Since the rise of AIGC in 2022, AI image generation technology has rapidly developed, and the Ghibli style has also been adopted by leading AI image generation models like Midjourney and Stablediffusion. In recent years, many AI adaptations in the Ghibli style have emerged.

The copyright issues surrounding AI-generated art have always been controversial, but a few years ago, the old master Miyazaki Hayao expressed his skepticism about AI-generated art, stating directly, “This is an insult to life.”

How did $Ghibli become popular?

The recent surge of the $Ghibli token can be traced back to the update of the GPT-4o drawing function.

Yesterday, the image generation feature of GPT-4o received a major update, allowing users to directly use the “image-to-image” function within the GPT-4o chat window. Specifically, this means that you can provide GPT with an image and then input simple natural language instructions, and GPT can generate a new image based on the original image and the instructions, for example: “Turn the image into a Ghibli cartoon style.”

Although this technology for changing styles has matured quite a bit two years ago, the update of GPT-4o has lowered the threshold for AI graphics creation, allowing AI users to easily operate the “image-to-image” function without the need for professional AI graphic design software.

The lowered barriers to entry, combined with the fun of Ghibli-style fan art, have led to viral sharing of Ghibli-style images on social media since yesterday.

Until around 6 PM yesterday, a token named $Ghibli appeared on Pump.Fun. The token icon is the avatar of Pump.Fun founder @a1lon9 generated in the style of Studio Ghibli.

It is clear that the concept narrative of $Ghibli is simple and direct, just riding the wave of the rapid dissemination of AI-generated images. However, $Ghibli did not attract much attention when it was first launched, and X user @Kris7146 pointed out that the token chips of $Ghibli are heavily bundled.

However, with numerous on-chain head relay purchases, the price of $Ghibli continues to rise, hovering around a market capitalization of 3 million USD after the $JellyJelly incident ended last night.

Early this morning, Sam Altman updated the profile picture of his X account to an image in the style of Studio Ghibli. Once the community discovered this, the price of $Ghibli soared from a market value of 3 million dollars. However, that’s not all. At 6:33 AM, Musk posted a meme that combines the Ghibli art style with The Lion King, a self-portrait, and Doge, captioned “Today’s theme.”

With the support of the big player, the price of $Ghibli couldn’t stop rising, reaching a market value of 28 million dollars before falling back, currently around a market value of 20 million dollars.

The explosive popularity of $Ghibli is essentially a manifestation of the market’s hot sentiment, concentrating attention and liquidity on the propagation chain. There is nothing particularly outstanding in terms of innovative narrative. However, for Meme tokens, whether the narrative is hardcore is just one of many influencing factors; when the market ‘feels it’, the rise naturally follows.

As a regular participant, when experiencing the market rhythm with real money, don’t get carried away and pay attention to the scale.

(PS: Besides the Ghibli art style, GPT-4o’s drawing capabilities also have a variety of styles to explore.)