The Rise and Evolution of Meme Coins: From Internet Culture to Speculative Frenzy

In the movie "The Last Bet", which exposes telecom fraud, there are some elements from the cryptocurrency circle, such as "币Coin" and Ketaicoin, etc. With the release of the movie, Ketaicoin was quickly issued in the crypto market. There are trading pairs of the same name Ketaicoin on multiple blockchains, mainly concentrated on Ethereum, BSC, and Base chains. Among them, Uniswap v2 on the Ethereum chain has the largest liquidity. After the movie's screening on August 5, the price of Ketaicoin skyrocketed over 3000 times in just two days. However, less than 24 hours later, it began to decline, and by August 19, it had almost returned to its issuance price.

Tokens like KTT coin are widely referred to as Meme coins. The term "Meme" first appeared in the 1976 book "The Selfish Gene," where it was defined as a cultural factor that can spread continuously at the level of human thought. For most people, the common form of a Meme is the humorous images on the internet that satirize current events, such as reaction images. These reaction images carry interesting information, are easy to replicate and spread, and ultimately form a cultural consensus among a wide audience.

The most famous combination of memes and cryptocurrency is Dogecoin. In 2013, Jackson Palmer combined the Doge meme with cryptocurrency to satirize the hype around cryptocurrencies, creating Dogecoin. Software engineer Billy Markus then forked the Bitcoin code to create one billion Dogecoins and rushed to launch it. Dogecoin quickly rose through Reddit, where tipping bots on the platform provided its initial use case. In December 2020, the CEO of Tesla began posting about Dogecoin on social media, causing its price to fluctuate with his statements. In early May 2021, Dogecoin peaked at $0.74.

The success of Dogecoin has garnered significant attention in the crypto world. From 2013 to 2017, many Meme coins based on Dogecoin emerged in the market, mostly as derivatives based on internet culture material. From 2017 to 2020, some Meme coins raised funds through ICOs and explored more use cases.

In May 2021, Shib quickly gained popularity after launching on a certain trading platform. In the early stages of the project, the founder transferred half of the tokens to the founder of Ethereum. With the consecutive surges of Dogecoin and Shib, the Meme coin market was dominated by the "animal-based" tokens.

After the bull market turned into a bear market, the Meme coin market experienced a brief surge. One project combined AI and Doge, using the "mining" concept to incentivize user participation. Another project became a dark horse, with over 1.5 million transactions and more than 200,000 holders.

The current Meme behind Meme coins has lost its original meaning. A Meme can simply be a simple story, or it may not have any story at all. Unlike conventional Web3 projects, the price growth of Meme coins purely comes from investors' FOMO emotions.

As market liquidity withdraws, the new generation of popular Memes hardly spends time building active communities or future plans. Most are backed by centralized teams and stakeholders conspiring to create market focus. Speculators are no longer concerned with whether there are interesting stories and cultures behind Meme coins; the wealth myths of early participants are more attractive.

Due to the fact that the teams behind Meme projects are mostly anonymous, it is easy for them to sever ties with the project and leave without any burdens after making profits, thus lacking motivation to maintain the project. The development of Meme coins is becoming increasingly "short, flat, and quick", but it will still be closely linked to the cryptocurrency market. In the current market environment where a large amount of stablecoins are flowing out, cautious investment seems to be wiser.