原文来源： ANDREW HONG
原文标题：A Social and Financial Study of Memecoins
编译：深潮TechFlow
Every market cycle is accompanied by the emergence of Meme coins. A group of people rallied around a certain meme and temporarily inflated the price of an asset (ranging from a day to several months). In the cryptocurrency space, this has become a popular market strategy that encompasses everything from the blockchain layer to the application layer – as it not only raises the price, but also draws attention to the ecosystem. Some projects, such as Avalanche, have even gone further and created dedicated meme coin funds.
The line between Meme coins and other tokens can sometimes blur, but the general assumption here is that there is nothing to back up the token except Meme. For example, DOGE as a token is actually only supported by an image/concept of Shiba Inu doge. This is different from ETH tokens, which are secured by the Ethereum blockchain, UNI tokens, which have the full Uniswap protocol behind them, or MKR tokens, which have a full collateralized stablecoin service.
Farcaster's meme coins (such as DEGEN) are the latest style, and their main advantage is that social is completely open. So, I wanted to test the social and financial data with some basic analysis.
Measure memes
I start with the assumption that we can compare the social and financial health of all Meme coins with a simple chart:
I've categorized five main areas in this chart:
- Extreme Risk: Meme coins with low liquidity and trading volume are very dangerous and vulnerable to sell-offs (as there may only be a few who provide liquidity)
- Bot Arena: Most meme coins will never make it out of this phase, where thousands of coins (many with the same token name/variant) compete for social and financial attention
- Volatile Growth: Meme coins that broke out of their initial circle must now maintain their momentum and growth. You may see the price move 100-500% in a day, all in different directions, and at the same time there will be a bunch of influencers starting to pay attention to this meme.
- Well Established: Leaders will be at the top of the social and financial ladder for a long time, clearly distinguishing themselves from other meme coins. The week-to-week numbers may not fluctuate too much, and attention is constant as the inflow and outflow of people reach a balance.
- Sleeping Giant: Meme coins that are growing quickly socially and financially, but haven't suffered a sell-off, are likely to be silent in this corner for a while. There may have been a DAO formed, and they started and dealt with the chaos of the community. At the same time, they want to be in the spotlight again.
Most of the meme coins should be trapped in the "robot arena", there are some attractive meme coins that sit in the "volatility growth" segment, and there may be one or two that reach the "already established" meme coin. In the process, some may lose their social strength and become "sleeping giants", while others may lose financial support (liquidity) and become "extremely high-risk".
I believe that a successful meme coin usually goes through the following stages:
You may see many meme coins being pushed by bots/influencers, resulting in high social scores, but low financial scores (liquidity), leading to sell-offs.
After a lot of data engineering and cleaning, I was able to make this chart of the FarcasterMeme coin on Dune:
IN FACT, THIS IS VERY MUCH IN LINE WITH MY EXPECTATIONS, AND YOU CAN SEE THAT DEGEN IS FAR IN THE TOP RIGHT CORNER, AND THEN THERE ARE A FEW OTHERS LIKE ENJOY, HIGHER, TN100X, AND VERY IN THE MIDDLE. Everyone else is trapped on the left, vying for attention and liquidity.
It's worth noting that I haven't screened out copycats/bots here, so the social scores of some meme coins may be skewed. This is the way forward for improvement!
Now, let's explain how these two scores were created backwards from the final chart. I will also present further research questions and detail the origins of my inquiry for those wishing to dig deeper.
Dune's dashboard can be found here, along with some charts that I haven't covered in this article.
Social scoring
Each score consists of a "foundation" component and a "growth" component. For social scoring, we first measured the casts (posts) and engagement of the token mentions. So, in this method, "$DEGEN" calculates, but "DEGEN" doesn't.
The above provides our five main columns:
- Thrower: The number of people who have thrown a given codename
- Recipient: The percentage of casters who have previously received the token
- Number of throws: The number of times a given code name was thrown
- Channels: The number of channels that have been thrown for a given codename
- Activity level: Engagement (likes + replies) plus the number of throws multiplied by the cubic root of the number of channels.
Activity Level: Engagement (likes + replies) plus the number of casts multiplied by the caster's cube root multiplied by the channel's cube root.
The overall social score is "based on" activity level and has a "growth" multiplier based on week-to-week variation in the amount of thrower and receiver projection. The idea here is that if you see a huge increase in the number of people casting a given ticker and those people buying/acquiring tokens, that's an extremely healthy sign.
In general, it looks like this in the table:
Financial scoring
The following are the key financial indicators:
- Total Diluted Value (FDV): Total supply multiplied by price
- Price: The latest price based on DEX trading
- Daily, Weekly, MonthlyPrice Change: The percentage change in price on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis
- Liquidity: This is non-token liquidity, meaning that for DEGEN-WETH pools, we only count the WETH portion of it. This gives us a more stable indication of how much good liquidity a given token has.
- Transactions: The number of DEX transactions in the last 30 days
- Transfers: The number of ERC20 transfers in the last 30 days
- Total Trading Volume: The USD trading volume of DEX transactions over the last 7 days
The "base" of the financial score is its non-token liquidity and DEX trading volume, and the "growth" is based in part on the weekly change in liquidity.
In general, it looks like this in the table:
Follow-up questions
Here are some of the brainstorming questions I'd like to see people dive into from here:
- How do casters be scored?weighted based on the value of tokens in the wallet?ranked casters based on their relationship with known clusters and/or communities?
- Categorizing fluctuations in social and financial growth – what is the correlation between them, and is there a time delay or one-way dependence?
- Was it the same circle/type of people that drove the initial wave of growth?What about the people who participated in the meme early, in time, and late?Is it related to user hierarchy?
- What happens when a meme "shifts"? What or who is driving the shift?
- How much of a person's social or financial interest is there, and do people throw more/less after buying/selling a certain token?
- What is the average lifespan of a meme, and how long is it socially and financially?