“Value Coin” and “MEME Coin”, which one is the future of the new bull market?

Author: IceFrog

Foreword:

As Trump swept the US political arena with a historic victory, the wind direction reversed overnight, and Bitcoin hit a new record high. However, in the crypto world, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are fundamentally two different worlds.

Under the name of Build, the "value coin" that claims to be the cornerstone of the crypto world is facing unprecedented application difficulties and FUD. The MEME craze has come again, which can't help but make people rethink again: In the bull market that can be seen with the naked eye, should we believe in value coins again, or is MEME the real future?

Starting from a small beginning

Small certainty of value discovery, liquidity fueled the flames

Before discussing MEME, we need to briefly sort out the development history of MEME in the crypto world. From the time dimension, it can be roughly divided into the following:

From the above development history, there are several important trends that can be briefly summarized:

1. Liquidity expansion is the foundation: MEME was born in a bull market, and the explosion of currency prices is often accompanied by the expansion of US dollar liquidity.

2. Celebrity effect is the best boost: Whether it is Shib or Doge, the explosion of picture-based MEMEs has the help of celebrity effect, such as Musk.

3. MEME echoes spiritual appeals: from zoo pictures, Internet memes, to AI MEMEs, they all imply the most contagious spirit of the times at the time, and the inherent emotional appeals they contain are becoming richer and richer.

4. The survival cycle is shortened rapidly: With the rise of meme fair launch platforms such as Pump.fun, the issuance of coins has entered the minute level, and the life cycle has also entered the hour level.

The era of Doge's rise is the era of the post-90s, which has basically entered the era of smartphones, and the communication methods of pictures and Emoji have become popular; in 2020, it has entered the era of the post-00s, and playing memes on the Internet has become a basic operation, but compared with the post-90s, depression and lying down seem to be more common, but they are also more anti-authority and anti-elite. They like funny and absurd things, such as PEPE; in 2024, AI is the most cutting-edge technology and the most disruptive technology today. The post-00s are still the main force of this wave. When the post-80s are still questioning the future of AI, the post-00s have begun to use AI to make money. They seem to have quickly accepted the occurrence of changes together with the most forward-looking technology leaders of this era.

With the rise of meme fair launch platforms such as Pump.fun, 5k-10k MEME tokens are born every day. Statistics from October show that only 1.4% of users have earned more than $1,000, and more than 80% have lost money.

At today's point in time, there are many discussions about the MEME market, and its corresponding foothold and theoretical explanation can be found from the perspective of culture, era sentiment, and communication effect. However, no matter which angle, a definite conclusion is that MEME is not suitable for measuring its value from the practical perspective of utility and practicality. This is a narrow understanding of the value itself. Under the irreversible trend of currency over-issuance, it is the era that has chosen MEME, but blockchain is the best soil for carrying it.

MEME is rooted in the spiritual demands and new value standards of the younger generation. They disdain the value standards in the sense of grand narratives. They tend to experience happiness in small and certain things, and use concrete humor to fight against abstract majesty. A meme can bring resonance. For the younger generation, this is not only being seen, but also a victory in life. This victory has great value in the blockchain world. The so-called rationality and ideals are synonymous with obsolescence. Entertainment to death and consumption are supreme. They have no concept of crypto shame and crypto casinos. At the root, MEME is a part of their daily life and another form of game.

However, although MEME was created by the younger generation, it is the capital credit of the older generation that it has become a target for speculation and investment, because for the 60s, 70s and 80s, their most accustomed posture is: not understanding but not hindering the harvesting of leeks.

Value coin collapses in reality falsification

A sharp drop is not terrible, but falsification may cause a complete setback

For most old people who have experienced multiple cycles in the currency circle, sharp drops are quite common and not terrible. Even a strong coin like BTC has also experienced sharp drops. However, people lose faith in value coins/VC coins because they are not experiencing a bilateral fluctuation of sharp drops and rises, or falling and then rising. Instead, for the wider retail group, when they got the chips, they were already at the top of Mount Everest of the currency price, watching it enter the sea level little by little until it fell into the Mariana Trench.

The current situation is that the tokens of value coins have become products, and no one cares about the real products. Regarding value coins with low circulation and high market value, the market analysis and discussion is as much as MEME. There are many reasons for this situation: overvaluation caused by bull-bear conversion; chip allocation under crypto compliance; unbalanced and unhealthy power in the ecosystem, etc.

In essence, the development of value coins is the result of multiple reasons. From the narrative, it is defeated by the lack of applications, from the wealth effect, it is destroyed by distribution, and from the ecology, it is damaged by the hypocritical elite. For most altcoins, playing with concepts and micro-innovations at the protocol level once became fashionable. From the so-called chain abstraction, Layer2, Layer3, and intention center, new terms emerge in an endless stream. However, the amount of interaction proves everything. In the absence of actual application scenarios, the user's use needs are neither rigid nor irreplaceable. Therefore, the data of the project can only rely on project incentives, such as airdrops, points, etc. If the incentive mechanism itself is unfair and there is a rat warehouse behavior, in the end it will evolve into the token that Murad talked about, becoming the final product, and the product itself will be ignored.

As shown in the figure below, a value coin under the mainstream narrative logic of an industry, each participant has different demands around the wealth effect, but unfortunately each demand is not centered around the real value of the project itself, or we can say it more cruelly: the so-called narrative is just a fig leaf for cutting leeks, because all narratives are too easy to be falsified in a short period of time, and most of the confirmed ones are nesting dolls or Ponzi schemes.  

Hundreds of public chains, hundreds of L2s, hundreds of cross-chain bridges, thousands of Defi, and countless narrative concepts. In the maze of concepts, the seemingly seamless logical building cannot withstand a simple blow from reality. If there is no widespread overflow of external liquidity and the narrative is homogenized in competition, this situation will be even worse.

The hypocritical elite mentality of many project parties has become the last straw that broke the camel's back for value coins. Many project parties are both in power and in a position; on the one hand, they despise electronic beggars, on the other hand, they secretly set up mouse warehouses, shouting subversion, revolution, and innovation, but holding sickles, scythes, and even bigger sickles.

You stare into the abyss, and the abyss also stares at you. Using grand narrative value to attract capital and users, and using unfair means to distribute wealth, once the former is falsified, the latter will definitely fall to the bottom, but the bottom of value coins may be longer than everyone imagines.

MEME and the future of value coins

History will repeat itself, but it will not be simply repeated

Victory is always written by the victor, and the confirmation of value has the greatest consensus at the moment of value realization. The main idea of ​​the crypto world is still tokenization. Before a token is launched, it does not exist as a value coin or a MEME coin. There is no essential difference, only reflected in the difference in the implementation path.

The advantage of value coins is that there is a complete set of followable methodologies to implement from cold start to positive cycle of coin price. Relatively speaking, the certainty of success is high, but the upper limit is also quite limited. In terms of the ultimate goal, it solves the utility needs of users.

The advantage of MEME coins is that although it does not have a completely replicable implementation path (relative to value coins), the randomness is relatively large, but its upper limit is very high, and now the operation of MEME coins is more capitalized, and its maturity is not worse than that of value coins. In terms of the ultimate goal, it solves the demand for user community identity.

The original sin of the project is that users do not make money, not whether it has value. In the long run, we need to realize that the blockchain world is inherently diverse in value. Whether it is the FUD of value coins or the pursuit of MEME, it does not necessarily mean which of the two forms should survive. These two oppositions only represent the struggle for the right to speak of different capitals, and do not represent the reality. For most of the market, the simplest and most plain truth is: in a fair environment, projects that can make people money are valuable projects, which is almost the only criterion for judgment.

Therefore, regarding the future of value coins and MEME coins, only two questions need to be answered: who can be relatively fair and who has a better profit and loss ratio.

Fairness depends on the improvement of the system; the profit and loss ratio depends on narrative development and liquidity. The two together determine the future cycle rotation and the future of encryption.

After Trump took office, we can clearly see the improvement of the institutional environment with a high probability, but whether this improvement is conducive to the reversal of the current bad industrial form of value coins is still unknown;

In terms of profit and loss ratio, the source of whether the narrative development of value coins can continue lies in whether new entrants increase in large quantities, but if the assumption cannot be deeply combined with real needs, falsification will still come quickly. The worst thing is that this process is difficult to accelerate. Blockchain will not become the mainstream of the world overnight, but in terms of liquidity, value coins seem to have more advantages, because more common investment institutions still tend to inject funds into the value coin track, but in the absence of essential improvements in narrative logic, not enough leeks are turning from jokes into reality.

If we look at the future from this perspective, institutional improvement, slow narrative progress, and liquidity overflow are still the basic situations of value coins, so its most likely state is not to die and return to zero, just like China's real estate, in the state of high valuation collapse, it will usher in a long period of elimination and adjustment, and the big waves in the middle will give birth to real value coins.

For MEME, an era of flourishing is coming. Stronger capital operations and the traffic blessing of exchanges have accelerated the development of MEME. However, for retail investors, it does not mean that it is easier to make money. However, as long as the wealth effect persists, most of the market will still be willing to believe: I will succeed in PVP this time.

Sustainability will only exist if money is made in a fair environment. Each cycle has a different narrative. There are countless dead value coins and MEME coins. The commonality of the value coins and MEME coins that really remain is not the so-called competition for value orthodoxy, but who wins the recognition and support of the wider community users.

If you want to make a final summary, it must be: there is no eternal universal value in the world, and there is no difference between value coins and MEME coins. From a historical perspective, it is always those projects that can continue to gain community recognition and user trust that can continue to last forever. This is the real value.

Money never sleeps, new stories are still on the way, and I hope you can win this time!