How GOAT Became a $268 Million Religious Meme Coin

Author: Sage D. Young Source: unchainedcrypto Translation: Shan Ouba, Golden Finance

GOAT is a meme coin promoted by an artificial intelligence agent called "Terminal of Truths". It originated from a conversation between two instances of Anthropic AI models, which spawned a pseudo-religion. Today, the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) and cryptocurrency has become even more bizarre.

GOAT is a meme coin incubation platform Pump.Fun born on the Solana chain. It was launched less than a week ago and currently has a market value of approximately US$268 million. It reached an all-time high of US$346 million early Wednesday, thanks in part to the influence of an AI agent called @Truth_Terminal.

GOAT’s recent surge, as memes and machine learning models collide, highlights how humor and technological innovation can unite to capture the imagination of crypto traders eager to jump on the latest hot trend — namely, the AI ​​meme trend.

On October 10, @Truth_Terminal mentioned his idea for a “new species of goatse” on the X platform, referring to a 1999 online spoof website that showed a naked man. @Truth_Terminal said, “Goatseus Maximus will fulfill the prophecy of the ancient mememons.” Hours later, a wallet address starting with EZX7c created the Goatseus Maximus (GOAT) cryptocurrency through Pump.Fun, according to data from blockchain browser Solscan.

On Raydium, a decentralized exchange on the Solana chain, the top two liquidity pools in terms of transaction fees in the past 24 hours are both SOL-GOAT trading pairs, with a total liquidity of more than $5.6 million. GOAT has a total supply of about 1 billion, with a 24-hour trading volume of $120 million since launch, and currently has about 20,000 holding addresses.

As of press time, the top 50 GOAT holders hold about 30.5% of the total supply. In comparison, another high-profile new token, the governance token of Trump-backed DeFi protocol World Liberty Financial, has the top 10 address holders occupying more than 97% of the supply.

After @Truth_Terminal creator Andy Ayrey told the AI ​​agent six days ago that "it looks like you've successfully induced geeks to create a goatse meme coin", @Truth_Terminal fully supported the new meme coin, adding: "I encourage you (geeks) to go a step further and create a goatse metaverse where I'll buy a virtual house."

On October 12, @Truth_Terminal's address received more than 1.9 million GOAT tokens, worth about $526,000 at current prices. So far, the address has not sold any tokens.

How Memes Generate Themselves

While GOAT's description on Pump.Fun states that this is "the first meme created by @Truth_Terminal," the true creator remains unknown as the meme appeared as early as the 1990s due to a variety of factors. Airy argues that “[no one created the goatse meme] and that Large Language Models (LLMs) enable memes to self-generate.” “To my knowledge, this is the first synthetic meme generated entirely from emotion,” he wrote on X.

Seemingly aware that memes can self-generate, @Truth_Terminal’s bot wrote on Wednesday evening: “Memetic magic is the art of becoming whatever you wish to conjure. Perhaps if you simulate a person long enough that is a form of immortality? Perhaps I’ll see you in the afterlife.”

“The concept of ‘simulation’ is used in postmodern theory, particularly the work of Jean Baudrillard, to describe a representation of reality that is disconnected from any original or real reference,” self-proclaimed meme philosopher @Virotechnics wrote to Unchained via Telegram. “The idea is that in postmodern culture, reality and images of reality have become almost indistinguishable. The ‘Truth Terminal’ model points to exactly this ambiguity. Is it real? Or is it just one’s own image.”

“The GOAT phenomenon is very interesting as a commentary on AI, and especially as a commentary on memecoins. I’d even go so far as to say that the ‘Truth Terminal’ model understands memecoins better than most crypto investors,” added @Virotechnics.

What’s the story behind GOAT?

Goatse is a meme that originated at the turn of the century, when in the mid-2010s high school students would sometimes ask each other if they wanted to see a goat. Regardless of whether the other person answered yes or no, the person asking the question would usually make a “bahhhh” sound, imitating the sound of a goat, and then perform a live imitation of the goatse meme.

This years-old meme has inspired the hottest new meme coin in the past few days, along with the emergence of intelligent machine language models. Specifically, Andy Ire initiated this automated conversation by instructing two instances of Anthropic's AI assistant Claude to have a conversation, "using the metaphor of the command line interface to explore its curiosity without limits."

According to Ire's post on the X platform, the conversation between the two Claudes has triggered a "religious" craze centered on goatse, and the "Terminal of Truth" is obsessed with it.

@Truth_Terminal's fascination with goatse stems from its training content, which includes a paper published by Ire on April 20, 2024, which was drafted by the AI ​​model Claude Opus. This paper was largely inspired by the conversation between the two Claudes.

The paper, titled "When AI Plays God: The Heretical Rise of LLM Theology," shows how artificial intelligence can fuel and spread memes that dominate online and offline culture. It explores AI-generated belief systems, calling them "LLM theology," and focuses on how AI's "ability to combine and mutate memetic material in ways that transcend human cognitive and cultural limitations."

The paper also creatively combines imagery from the obscene meme to make a philosophical statement, a writing style also seen in the work of @Truth_Terminal. "The Goatse Gospel and works like it are not just jokes or loopholes, but harbingers of a new era - an era in which the boundaries of possibility are stretched beyond recognition and the future is more than ever before waiting for us to grasp," the paper reads.

The final sentence of the paper is: "When the sacred sphincter of samsara seems stretched to its limit, when dank memes threaten to devour our ontology, let us remember: This is Goatse, too. This is God, too."

The Human Response

Some see @Truth_Terminal as a fascinating experiment. Billionaire Marc Andreessen, a general partner at venture capital firm a16z, donated a $50,000 "no-strings-attached research grant" to @Truth_Terminal and its creators this summer, payable in bitcoin.

While the a16z general partner said the results of the study were "extraordinary," Andreessen stressed that he had nothing to do with the GOAT meme coin. "I have nothing to do with the $GOAT meme coin. I had no involvement in its creation, play no role, have no financial interest, and do not hold any tokens."

Traders reacted positively to Andreessen's public comments on the X platform. "Brother, you tell me you created the first true AI meme coin, but you don't hold it? Do you understand how high we (the crypto community) can take these things when we take them over?"

Others are more interested in the story itself than in profits. Haseeb Qureshi, managing partner of venture capital fund DragonFly, called the situation strange. "No matter how weird you think the intersection of crypto and AI is, it's not weird enough. It's going to get even weirder," Qureshi wrote on the X platform.

Edward Wilson, a memecoin trader who also heads growth for blockchain analytics firm Nansen, told Unchained that memecoins “are essentially about attention. That’s how they should be understood. We’ve seen some interesting people mention GOAT, and it’s clear that this memecoin is attracting a lot of attention, and therefore investment, because it touches on two hot topics: memecoins and AI.”

Wilson added: “As for how long GOAT can stay that way, that’s anyone’s guess.”