Do MEMEs live forever? Thoughts on their integration with public blockchains?

6 min readNov 4, 2024

As the results of the US election approach, the hype about Trump and Harris concept meme coins has become a hot spot in the industry. The fluctuations in the support rates of the two candidates affect the heartbeats of the entire industry, and the price of meme coins has also fluctuated repeatedly. In the industry, this meme culture has been prevalent for a long time. In addition to lamenting the increase and income of “one day in the blockchain industry, one year in the human world”, many investors are discussing a question: “Why is meme coin so early in this cycle?”

According to the sector rotation in the past few cycles, when the popularity of a new concept and new narrative reaches its peak, accompanied by the relay of meme coins, the flowers fade, which is the prelude to the end of the bull market. But in this cycle, the order of sector rotation seems to have been rearranged, and meme coins do not play by the routine, and have become the main line in the early and middle stages of this cycle.

According to past investment experience, meme coins and dog coins have always been marginalized. Many value investors are not optimistic about meme coins at all, and they despise them in their hearts. But from this round of market conditions, meme has become an area of focus and layout for many investors, researchers, and even VCs. The reason is that other sectors have been in a slump, such as Ethereum, L2, public chains, NFTs, and even games, DeFi, etc. Only meme gives hope to investors who have been silent.

MEME is the gene of blockchain

Speaking of meme coins, Richard Dawkins is definitely a person who cannot be avoided.

In 1976, Richard Dawkins first proposed the concept of meme in his groundbreaking work “The Selfish Gene”. In the last chapter of “The Selfish Gene”, Richard Dawkins introduced the concept of “MEME”, defining it as a unit of cultural communication, similar to genes in biological inheritance.

A meme can be a melody, an idea, a clothing style, a language habit, a technology, or any other phenomenon of cultural communication. They spread from one person to another through imitation, thus replicating themselves in human culture. The success and survival of memes, like genes, depends on their replication accuracy, durability, and their “attractiveness” or utility to the host.

In more popular terms, a meme can be a joke, a joke, an emoticon, etc., a subculture formed after widespread dissemination. And meme coins are a way to value this subculture.

Looking back at the meme coin leader, DogeCoin was originally created as a light-hearted version of Bitcoin, with the popular “Doge” meme (a picture of a dog named Shiba Inu, accompanied by inner monologue-style text) as its logo. Its founder did not expect that this joke-based currency would attract Musk’s attention and eventually become the largest meme coin in terms of market value today.

Flowing narratives, iron-clad meme culture

There is no shortage of new narratives in the blockchain industry, but there is a cycle of fate, and good narratives will also come to an end. For example, NFT is a typical example. Blockchain is not only a technological innovation, it has also become a huge emotional field, and meme coins are a good example of this. Whether the market is good or bad, meme culture is always around, playing an extremely important role in driving the value of cryptocurrencies.

The trading market is a magnifying glass for emotions and narratives

Where there is capital, there are people, and where there are people, there are emotions. From investors’ passion for future technology to fear and greed for market fluctuations, blockchain, as an emerging technology and financial field, amplifies the influence of these basic human emotions, thereby affecting market dynamics and investment decisions.

Memes are born with the function of conveying emotions. From enthusiasm to panic, in the form of humor, irony, or even exaggeration, memes can spread quickly among communities, trigger emotional resonance, and thus invisibly affect the direction of the market.

In a short period of time, a successful meme can attract a lot of attention and discussion, thereby promoting investors’ purchasing behavior and leading to a short-term rise in prices. This phenomenon is particularly common in the crypto market, where market sentiment can often affect price fluctuations to a large extent.

People form a common imagination through storytelling to build more general trust, such as religion, country, currency, company, etc. Similarly, individuals in the crypto community can also form a strong group identity and goals through shared memes and narratives.

This trust based on shared imagination is the key factor that enables memes to generate prices in the market, and it is also the reason why they can attract a large number of investors and users to participate.

Memes do not need public chains, public chains need memes

From the development of meme coins this year, meme culture has evolved from BTC to Solana chain, and then to TON chain and Base chain, as well as Sui recently. Every popular public chain needs meme coins, encourages and even creates meme culture, and the prevalence of memes has successfully promoted the development and value increase of major public chain ecosystems.

The most representative of these is Anatoly, co-founder of Solana. On the opening day of the Solana Community Annual Summit last year, which was the Western Halloween, Anatoly appeared in a green dinosaur costume and became the most unique and eye-catching presence at the summit. Anatoly stood in front of everyone and introduced himself: [I’m Anatoly, and I’m a silly dragon]. After saying this, Anatoly smiled embarrassedly, and the audience in the entire venue was also amused.

Everyone knows the story that followed. Silly became the hottest meme coin at that time. The community rediscovered that it was really smooth to speculate on coins on Solana, and Ethereum killer returned to the community’s attention.

Later, we can also see that TON chain and Base chain want to share a share of the transaction liquidity of meme coins. TVL has reached a new high, and the on-chain activity and on-chain transaction volume have also increased exponentially. The TON Foundation also publicly announced that it is recruiting a memecoin ecological director. All of this points to the fact that meme culture can parasitize on any public chain in any form, and public chains need memes more.

What does the popularity of MEME mean?

From the initial ridicule to the active embrace, meme culture has become the mainstream narrative of the industry. This irony not only questions the technology itself, but also criticizes the blind enthusiasm of the entire cryptocurrency market for new technologies and its neglect of their substantial applications.

“I don’t understand it anyway, so I might as well speculate on memes” The old leeks in the community seem to be overwhelmed, and the new leeks are even more confused. Under the narrative of rapid iteration like water, the meme culture has flourished. The rapidity of BOME’s listing on Binance has made many crypto projects “break the defense”. After years of hard work, they have not been able to be listed, but BOME did it in three days.

Back to the questions that the community often asks recently: “Is the end point of blockchain meme?” Or “Value investment is dead, MEME is eternal?” Although these questions seem absolute and even a little extreme. But we have to admit that the biggest role of blockchain in ten years is still speculation, which may be a truth.

About Starcoin

Starcoin provides the utmost security from the origin via its enhanced PoW consensus and Secure smart contract, using the language of Move. Through layered and flexible interoperability, it optimizes the building of ecosystems such as DeFi, NFTs, Gaming, etc., with higher efficiency and convenience. This process redefines value by empowering every participant in the ecosystem to enjoy the multiplication of values.

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