What's wrong with PING and PAYAI?

Author: haotian

Regarding $PING and $PAYAI, the most frequently asked question these past two days is: What are these two doing if they're not pumping their prices? One, MEME, is making a high-profile announcement about launching Launchpad, while the other, a utility token, is planning a migration and pool change, as if it's abandoning its platform. It's certainly fraught with uncertainty.

Frankly, given the current environment, I'm completely unsure myself. Let me share some observations that I can understand:

1) What these two are doing is quite normal, and in a better market environment, it would definitely be a positive development. MEME's biggest problem is its lack of sustained empowerment; it relies entirely on consensus and sentiment. Facilitator, on the other hand, is a technically practical project with a low ceiling and low technical barriers, resulting in neither project currently having any "confidence" to support it.

The recent moves by PING and PAYAI are actually addressing their respective weaknesses: PING is attempting to use Launchpad to strip away its purely meme-like attributes while adding a positive flywheel, while PAYAI is expanding from its original tool-like attributes to an infrastructure protocol layer through token migration. Both are upgrades that open up possibilities. 2) Since the anticipated benefits haven't been fully delivered, we can only discuss the logic. PING's launch of Launchpad is not surprising, because in a bear market, there is no sentiment or consensus to sustain prices. The narrative it ignited in the x402 sector is likely to be extinguished due to its overly meme-like attributes. Conversely, the attributes of Launchpad as a platform coin are very different. It can rely on projects launched on the platform, one, two, three, continuously trying and learning until it encounters a good liquidity node, completing its underdog transformation. From this perspective, this strategic upgrade is incredibly wise. PAYAI's token migration is more likely to arouse suspicion and misunderstanding. I've heard many claims that the project team lacks tokens and is using migration to control the situation. But if it's just a conspiracy, wouldn't a FUD (Fact-Understanding, Uncertainty, and Debt) approach be more effective? Therefore, I actually lean towards the idea that the project team genuinely considered the limitations of the Facilitator tool and attempted to upgrade to a protocol layer to continuously empower the token, including staking mechanisms, reward systems, ecosystem incentives, CEX locking, etc. So, this decision, viewed from a long-term perspective, isn't bad. 3) As for why the market doesn't understand, it's the same old story: most people entered the x402 sector with the mindset of speculating on MEME, the old MEME "get rich quick" mentality. But the growth and transformation logic of the x402 sector is completely beyond MEME's capacity, and it's impossible to see immediate results in the short term. PING's launchpad is just the beginning of the x402 asset issuance narrative. It may be very successful, or it may be terrible, but more launchpads are still in the works. Look at the signals revealed by the ideas in the c402 Market; the new round of launchpads is not simply about issuing useless coins. Practical business scenarios like GameFi and SocialFi can all be incorporated into coin issuance, which is a significant improvement over pure chat. PAYAI's protocol service layer upgrade is even more subtle. I've heard this team has a very technical, engineering-oriented mindset, but I think it's a good thing that such a team is appearing in a bear market, giving them enough time to prove themselves. Facilitator, in particular, is a niche market with significant potential for both value capture and commercial expansion. This new positioning is the team's way of continuously empowering Facilitator, ultimately changing Facilitator's ecological niche and value capture capabilities within x402.