原文作者: flowie, ChainCatcher
原文来源： Chaincatcher
It took 4 years for Doge to break through the market cap of $1 billion, while BOME took only 3 days. It seems that it has become a portrayal of the hearts of more retail investors.
But as memes become more and more popular with retail investors, VCs seem to be a little unhappy.
The top VC a16z criticized meme coins one after another, and a16z first posted an article on its official website pointing the finger at the SEC, accusing the crypto policy of letting meme run rampant, but not protecting real blockchain innovation.
Lazarrin, CTO of a16z Crypto, then complained on the X platform, "Memecoin undermines the long-term vision of keeping many people in the crypto space, and is not technically appealing;
而Compound VC 管理合伙人Michael Dempsey 也指责"meme币让真正的建设者大量流失"。
VC threw the pot that undermined crypto innovation onto the meme coin, which quickly caused discontent in the crypto community.
Solana co-creator raj stood up to defend the meme coin, and sarcastically said that if these so-called real builders were vulnerable and even afraid of meme coins, he would not succeed at all.
Retail investors, in turn, questioned the value coins advocated by VCs. A fierce debate on the value of meme has evolved into a VC coin/value coin complaining conference.
A reverse education for VC in the community
VCs who like to educate users have been educated by users.
First of all, the pot meme coins that undermine crypto innovation are not back. @MarinadeFinance sarcastically says that people often look for excuses that nothing can stop you from building something truly innovative.
And @XBEBEeth to make up for it, no one hates these real builders, just the "builders" who deceive users with flashy narratives.
Instead of criticizing meme coins for having no value, it is better to reflect on whether the innovation advocated by VC is a real innovation. @mfer7166 believes that pseudo-innovation is more to blame. And the problem is not meme, but that under this cycle, there is no epic narrative in the industry.
became only daring to speculate on meme, which exhausted the helplessness of retail investors.
AI+Crypto, DEPIN, RWA, Modular, Bitcoin Layer 2...... VCs are becoming more adept at concocting ambiguous narratives, and it's better to have the project side overlay these concepts and sell them to second-tier retail investors in the hope that they will pay for these long-term visions.
The former retail investors are not unaware of this set, and hope that some new narratives will be applied on a large scale, and they can drink some soup if they can't eat meat with the projects endorsed by VCs.
But times are different. Retail investors are beginning to find that the technological innovation advocated by VCs seems to be just hype, and there is no real progress in the application landing. In terms of speculation, if you follow VC, not only will you not be able to drink the soup, but you may also lose all your money.
The bull market theory of "not taking orders from each other" mentioned some time ago has resonated with many people. But @connectfarm1 bluntly said that there is nothing that does not accept each other, and if you don't take it, you can't accept it.
At present, the market value of the so-called value currency has risen but the price of the currency has generally not risen, and retail investors are tossed enough by the value currency with large market capitalization, high valuation, low circulation, and has been unlocked.
Some of the new value coins on the exchange have generally lost their wealth-creating effect. WLD was valued at $3 billion before it was launched, and its FDV was as high as $28 billion on the day it was launched, which was equivalent to OpenAI's valuation at that time. New coins such as Bitcoin Layer2 leader Merl have also fallen all the way after their launch.
And there are too many new concepts, and the plates flow rapidly, and I can't understand it at all. @Eason_Jiang_'s experience is that holding a value coin, the currency price has taken a roller coaster ride back to the "place where the dream began", and the profit has been greatly withdrawn or even trapped, because the attention went to other tracks.
It seems that retail investors will not be able to chase the bottom and chase higher. Ethereum Layer 2 leader, value coin on behalf of ARB fell from $2 to $1, retail investors want to buy the bottom, but VC unlocks a large amount, VC hands of the currency has doubled, and may be buried in the end.
In the case that encryption as a whole has not yet been adopted on a large scale, 90% of the market is currently speculators. Although MEME has no intrinsic value, compared with value coins, retail investors are closer to 100 times 100 times the opportunity.
@BTCdayu said the voice of many retail investors, "MEME coins are very simple, release better, basically in a relatively fair environment for everyone to gamble directly, its biggest value is actually a 'buy me, I can't get it up 100x'."
Although the fairness of memes needs to be put in quotation marks, retail investors are more tolerant of memes than the open-card attempts of VC value coins.
MEME is nothing more than a game between players and players, life and death are just a few days, most users gamble a big return with a small amount of money, even if most of them lose money, they also lose a refreshing and refreshing loss, without suffering from PUA for several years.
Of course, not all VCs are rejecting memes. Some VCs also know the current affairs and join if they can't beat it.
Mechanism Capital has already started to take a position on memes. Its co-founder, Andrew Kang, said on his social platform that Mechanism Capital has completed the first batch of positions for 2024, with the underlying assets being Trump-themed meme tokens and NFTs.
DWF Ventures has publicly stated that it will be interested in investing in similar large-scale community engagement projects in the future.
According to DWF Ventures, the Meme Coin will be the new GTM (Go-to-Market) strategy for many ecosystems and projects, and believes that the Meme Coin will serve as an effective marketing strategy in the following verticals: infrastructure ecosystems, consumers and games, new projects with a Meme Coin background.
Variant co-founder Li jin started running meme marathons, writing that "born too late to explore the Earth, born too early to explore the universe, born at the right time, to hold a meme hackathon".
meme 暂扛 Mass Adoption 的重任
看似毫无价值的meme，或许正扛起了Mass Adoption 的重任。
@mdudas refuted a16z CTO, saying, "The meme coin has attracted a lot of users, so much so that Base, Blast, and Solana chains have been activated. ”
In fact, compared with the disdain of some VCs for meme, meme coins have become the top priority to activate the public chain ecology.
After Solana founder Anatoly personally led the fire to Silly Dragon last year, Solana continued to enjoy meme dividends. The explosion of a BOME coin has made Solana the first in terms of the number of active addresses. Within 3 days of BOME's launch, Solana's active wallet addresses increased from 1.24 million to 2.42 million, a 95% surge.
In addition, Solana's on-chain network fees and revenue have increased significantly.
It is questioned that there is no public chain that no one uses, at least because the meme is used. Solana's huge success on memes has also attracted the attention and imitation of other public chains.
Base 创建者称,Meme 币将是让数百万用户加入 Base 网络的关键。 Arbitrum 社区新提案拟成立 Memecoin 基金。
Some public chains even issue meme coins.
On March 17, Aptos launched the official meme coin $LME.
3 月 18 日,比特币 Layer 2 公链 ligo 宣布在 Solana 上推出 Meme 币 SOLIGO。
There is also a public chain to hold a meme innovation competition to incentivize meme innovation on the chain.
BNB Chain recently announced the launch of the "Meme Innovation Battle" campaign, where it competed for a prize pool of $1 million. TON announced the launch of Memelandia, a meme coin and community token cultural hub, to reward becoming the top meme coin and community token on TON.
The TON Foundation also airdropped more than 200 perfect yuan of TON to active meme coin traders in the ecosystem.
Fantom has set out to develop a standard for the meme framework. Recently, Andre Cronje, co-founder of Fantom Foundation, tweeted that he was busy doing due diligence on memecoin so that a framework could be created to launch, support, and nurture community-safe meme coins on Fantom.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin previously mentioned in his talk about memes, "I want to see higher quality interesting projects that contribute positively to the ecosystem and the world around me (not just 'attracting users')."
In fact, in addition to the traffic responsibility of many public chains, some meme coins have also begun to do things.
Shib, known as the "Dogecoin Killer", announced the launch of a beta version of Shibarium, a Layer 2 solution, early last year, which aims to reduce the load on the blockchain network and improve the user experience of the metaverse and gaming applications.
meme 抢跑,山寨季还会有吗?
Meme coins and value coins are not completely opposites either. For most retail investors, it is a track to participate in.
In general, in the three stages of the bull market, Bitcoin rises, and Ethereum rises, and drives hot altcoins to soar together. Finally, the crypto market entered a full-fledged rally, and the meme coin began to rise.
However, in this cycle, the order of plate rotation seems to have been rearranged, and meme coins have taken the lead, which has first become the main line under this cycle.
After the outbreak of meme, will the copycat season dominated by the so-called value coins come?
Shenyu said in a recent interview that the copycat season may not come. "Because the current market player is different from the previous player, from the miner's side, after the Bitcoin spot ETF was approved on January 10, risk hedging has been carried out months in advance to deal with the risk of Bitcoin halving. ”
Shenyu mentioned that this cycle is characterized by the inflow of funds into Bitcoin mainly through channels such as ETFs. It remains to be seen when these funds will flow to other cryptocurrencies.
Crypto trader Thiccy also expressed unoptimism about whether the copycat season will come. According to Thiccy, FDV is growing faster than circulating supply due to more and more projects issuing coins, with an increase of about 70% year-to-date. "Now 3-5 'premium' tokens are added to the market every week, and everyone looks happy. But ask yourself who will buy all these tokens. Unless there is a massive influx of institutional or retail investors, this will just be a PvP forever. ”
Crypto KOL@BTCdayu think the copycat season is over. "The current altcoins, especially the various L2 and new narratives, are already at the high point of the last bull market. ”
But there are still investors who believe that the copycat season will not be absent. At a time when the market is generally not optimistic about value coins, crypto researcher @0xNing0x believes that it is the best time to open a position. "At this stage, I silently buy the head assets of modular public chain, RollAPP, AI Agent, ZK hardware acceleration, RWA, Bitcoin L2 and other sectors, and actively act as the exit liquidity of the market. ”
The logic of @0xNing0x is that the golden rule of investing has always been "people abandon me, and people take me away". When meme coins account for an increasing proportion of everyone's portfolio, the alpha opportunities with really high profit and loss ratios are beginning to emerge in the value coin sector.