Original author: 1912212.eth, Foresight News
The MEME coin is dancing again, with prices of coins like PEPE, BONK, FLOKI, etc. soaring yesterday, and WIF even reaching a new all-time high. Is the familiar MEME market about to come again? Buying MEME is a technical skill, but how about creating a successful MEME project?
Before answering how to create a MEME, let's first ask a question: why is MEME important?
MEME, also known as "meme" in Chinese, in the world of meme coins, we don't talk about fundamentals, forget about total market value and FDV, and abandon the advanced vocabulary mouthed by mainstream VCs.
Here, it is a paradise for ordinary players.
Here, entertainment spirit is paramount, Xiao Zhao plays slot machines, Xiao Ming plays A-shares, Xiao Wang plays sneakers, Xiao Zhang plays US stocks, Xiao Chen plays mainstream coins, and at this moment, we play MEME, maybe we have a chance to win a big prize and have a bright future.
It is because of this that MEME has flourished in the financial market, especially in the cryptocurrency industry.
Decentralization, community, anti-VC, anti-traditional, fair launch, grassroots, and so on, these Web3 vocabulary are naturally prepared for MEME players.
In the past few years, there have been well-known MEME coins such as Dogecoin, BONK, PEPE, and SHIB. Every successful MEME is not an easy task to go viral.
So, let's get back to the point, how do we create a successful MEME?
Large supply, low price
MEME is different from public chains, L2, or DeFi, where the issuance quantity is usually between 1 billion to 10 billion, while the total supply of MEME is counted in the trillions or tens of trillions. Let's take the top 150 MEME coins by market capitalization as an example, as shown in the statistics in the diagram below.
(Data as of February 23, 2024)
Behind such a large total supply is the capture of players' speculative expectations about MEME. Smart project teams won't let the MEME token be worth several dollars as soon as it goes online. Smart project teams will use low-price strategies to attract players with a high risk appetite and retain those small retail investors who don't have much capital.
We must make the price per token low, so that players see a larger quantity when they buy, playing for big gains with small bets, and players will be more inclined to hold.
Another important point is facilitating the "zeroing out" action.
Not only in transactions, "eliminating zero" represents a very strong bullish indicator. As for the project community, it is also easier to ignite community sentiment FOMO and quickly spread.
During a bull market, the speed at which stories of sudden wealth spread is often the fastest, and the range of spread is the widest. Once MEME occupies a position among them, it will receive the influx of bold capital.
Design Popular Cultural Symbols
Many well-known global brands, their brand image is often related to globally recognized mascots, such as Ferrari's logo is a horse, Lamborghini's logo is a bull, and QQ's logo is a penguin. These globally recognized animal images and logos are visually appealing, easy to remember, and easy to understand, providing a huge advantage for widespread brand dissemination.
If we want to create a successful MEME coin, we certainly need to learn from experience. The mascots of Dogecoin, SHIB, and BONK are all dogs, specifically Shiba Inus. These animals are based on popular culture, and their expressive images are widely spread. In addition, the tipping culture of Dogecoin, at one point, made it a very popular tipping token in the United States.
As the oldest MEME coin, Dogecoin has been repeatedly tested in multiple bull and bear cycles and is still creating legends.
Looking back at the latest PEPE that came out last year, it stands out by choosing the frog, which is widely loved in Western communities, as its mascot. Its image is quite unique, with large eyes and green skin design, making it highly recognizable.
Not only that, this frog has been derived into various expression packs, with ever-changing temperament, expressing happiness, anger, surprise, and other emotions. Some crypto KOLs occasionally use this frog image for comments and replies, bringing it a lot of popularity.
Therefore, if we are good at leveraging well-known popular culture or mascots, it will have a significant impact on creating MEMEs.
We can see that MEME coins are not instantly noticed and liked by celebrities. Dogecoin has only gained favor from Musk in recent years because of its cute and interesting symbols as well as tipping culture.
Musk has hundreds of millions of fans on Twitter, and under tremendous exposure, as well as the advantages of micro payment tipping on X platform, it has brought a lot of attention to Dogecoin.
In 2023, Musk even changed his Twitter logo to a Dogecoin avatar for a continuous 3 days. Previously, Musk even claimed himself as the CEO of Dogecoin and posted on Twitter about Dogecoin payment methods and his opinions.
Every mention of Dogecoin in Musk's tweets, and even the collaboration between his companies and Dogecoin, injects a lot of attention into Dogecoin.
Aside from the opportunity of having a god-level spokesperson, riding on the celebrity effect is also a good choice.
Although SHIB, which took off in the previous cycle, is now performing mediocrely, it made a smart move at the beginning. It started by leaving a comment in Elon Musk's comment section, successfully prompting Musk to post a tweet asking about it, attracting attention.
Later on, it transferred half of its tokens to Vitalik, who at the time chose to donate the tokens to a charity organization in India, causing quite a buzz and leading many Indians to learn about SHIB. After this incident, a considerable number of memes imitated the action, transferring tokens to Vitalik, but the effect was not as pronounced as with SHIB.
It is worth mentioning that even the Solana ecosystem protocol for meme coins, Nuts, chooses to ride on Musk's written comments. Whenever Musk's written comments go nuts (strange choice of words), it causes a surge in the Nuts token price.
Another influential figure with endorsement power is Toly, the co-founder of Solana. SILLY, with its cute and fun appearance, successfully caught Toly's attention. Even at the Solana Breakpoint 2023, SILLY appeared on stage dressed in a dragon costume, leading to a trend of "silly dragon."
Cultivating More "Community Consensus"
The price increase of cryptocurrencies is heavily correlated with attention. The more attention it receives, the more people will understand it, leading to more buyers and pushing the price up.
In order to create a successful meme, we need to understand its essence. It is different from other utility or governance tokens. It completely abandons the narrative, staking, and other traditional concepts and straightforwardly admits that its token is "useless". In this case, the value of the token depends entirely on "community consensus".
And the community and decentralization are what best fit the original intent in the crypto community. This also means that its viral spread needs resonation and "spontaneity" from the community, rather than deliberate marketing efforts.
Of course, some marketing efforts may still be necessary when the hype subsides.
The "Doge-1" moon mission sponsored by DOGE continuously boosts the price of its token. Besides having high online traffic along with Dogecoin, SHIB also stands out in its offline integration. Some cinemas, supermarkets, brands, etc. accept it as payment, such as luxury brand Gucci, US telecom operator AMC, and US television, game, and entertainment software retailer giant GameStop, which undoubtedly gives their brand exposure a boost.
As a meme coin, just tweeting images frequently is not enough to gain a large community support. Although BONK may not be as active as its predecessors in expanding partnerships offline, it still has notable interactions within the Solana ecosystem, such as collaborating with other DeFi products, adding liquidity, staking tokens, and so on.
PEPE, on the other hand, publishes interesting images, memes, comics, and other works within the community. In addition, it promotes the frog emoji through sponsoring art competitions.
Whether online or offline, regardless of using celebrity aura or hot events, gathering more "community consensus" is the key to providing enough fuel for MEME coin price to take off.
Choose mainstream public chains with the most funds and users (such as Ethereum and Solana) as much as possible
From the existing MEME projects, most of them are on popular public chains, such as Dogecoin, SHIB, and PEPE on Ethereum. With the rise of emerging public chain SOL, BONK, WIF, SILLY, and others have also gained fame.
Other public chains, for various reasons, currently do not have particularly successful MEME projects. Public chains are like reservoirs, where there is more wealth and users, there will be more funds flowing into MEME. In addition, since MEME-type assets largely rely on the "spillover" of on-chain active funds, there is almost no survival space for MEME-type assets on relatively early public chains or public chains other than the top few.
Take the previous MEME coin FUD on Sui as an example. Although FUD received attention from Sui official accounts at the beginning of its launch and chose a dog image with a very high "fault-tolerance rate", FUD did not achieve the "expected" results even against the backdrop of eye-catching Sui coin prices and continuously creating new TVL highs. In fact, the Sui ecosystem has not had any MEME token successfully "breaking through" so far.
When we shift our attention to L2, we suddenly find that there are very few MEMEs. Airdoge, which emerged earlier, gained some popularity through wide-scale airdrops but then disappeared, and no other L2 has produced MEMEs with high notoriety to this day.
During key events such as project airdrops, mainnet launches, and token model announcements, if properly arranged, it may attract considerable attention.
Make good use of airdrops to attract market attention
In the absence of other favorable conditions, conducting wide-scale airdrops to selected public chains and token holders is one of the most effective ways to quickly establish the reputation of a MEME.
A notable example of an airdrop is the rising star BONK on Solana. At first, it had some ups and downs, but when the Solana ecosystem was heavily influenced by the SBF incident, it generously used 60% of its tokens for airdrops to ecosystem users. With SOL rapidly recovering in the past year and attracting market attention, BONK has also been listed on exchanges like Binance and OKEx. Without the support of celebrity aura or hot events, BONK has carved out its own path with extensive airdrops and the recovery of the Solana ecosystem.
Even non-MEME projects often gain great attention through airdrops. For example, Flare, Celestia, Dymention, AltLayer, Wormhole, etc. Some project tokens have become money shovels, and as long as users complete staking in wallets, they can receive airdrops from new projects.
For example, if we conduct airdrops in the Cosmos ecosystem, we often choose token holders of TIA, ATOM, and other tokens for airdrops because these users are usually more numerous and there are more token holders. With the reputation of other project parties, we can quickly establish our own reputation.
Summary
If you've read this far, I believe attentive readers already know what to do, right? We need to consider the token economics design, mascot, airdrop method, and the choice of blockchain for a successful MEME. With the right timing, favorable conditions, and human resources, the probability of success will increase.
If you need some small animals as mascots, you may consider these few options. Let me read out their names for you: Cotton-Rumped Frog, Chasen's Reed Rabbit, Silawa Monkey, Utah Goose, South African Elephant Shrew, Marimba Bear...
