Memetic power and coins
I will go straight to the point in this article.
First of all, what is a meme?
meme
/miːm/
noun: meme; plural noun: memes
an image, video, piece of text, etc., typically humorous in nature, that is copied and spread rapidly by internet users, often with slight variations.
"celebrity gossip and memes often originate on the site"
an element of a culture or system of behaviour passed from one individual to another by imitation or other non-genetic means.
verb: meme; 3rd person present: memes; past tense: memed; past participle: meming; gerund or present participle: meming
create an internet meme from (an image, video, piece of text, etc.).
"there's always one audience reaction shot at the Oscars that gets memed"
So, important thing to ask here. What makes a good meme?
It must be easy to understand/digest
It must be easy to spread (!) and reproduce (virality)
It must be harmless
First, it must be easy to understand.
Let’s examine some of the biggest meme coins of recent past:
Doge
Doge is very easy. At its root, it’s just a dog.
A yellow dog. It’s a shiba inu dog, but that’s already secondary. The original memes had also a funny talk to it, it was easy to reproduce - much pump, many gains, wow.
It was the first “useless” token to giga pump, made more or less as a joke, it went viral.
It was easy to understand, it was easy to make memes, just use a shiba inu dog, hell it was even easy to draw, so it could spread like wildfire, and it was harmless.
By harmless I mean it generates no controversy, no offense, it’s “family friendly”, not racist, etc.
The ticker is simple, 4 letters easy to remember: $DOGE.
Pepe
Pepe is a green frog.
Easy to understand. Now, pepe has kind of a stigma because of associations with 4chan, racist/nazi memes, etc. but it got so worldwide popular that it’s now been “normified” and neutralized enough. Even girls now have “green frog sticker packs” in their instant messaging apps.
Again, easy to draw, easy to reproduce, and even a tons of memes already made at your disposal. Virality easily attained.
Pepe is on bloody Amazon. Enough said.
The ticker is simple, 4 letters easy to remember: $PEPE.
HarryPotterObamaSonic10Inu ticker $BITCOIN
Now here, we go a little more exoteric, but it still kind of works.
Originally, the meme originated from some chinese backpacks with hilarious printing on them:
The thing is, this can be very much simplified for digestion and virality purposes:
The symbol is Sonic. Iconic, everyone knows sonic, it even got movies.
Not to mention Sonic collects coins, etc. It fits with the crypto theme quickly.
The ticker is $BITCOIN. Which is hilarious, because Bitcoin own ticker is mostly $BTC now ($XBT in the past).
It has some obstacles for mass adoptions, some CEXs may be reluctant to list a token with ticker $Bitcoin, so not a clear path to billions, but great potential.
Plus, a cult formed around it, and many cultists on twitter adopted a sonicinu image profile (it’s easy to draw, easy to recognize = easy to reproduce and go viral), so never a great idea to fade cults.
JOE
Joe is a recent meme, and it didn’t reach hundreds of millions yet, but I think from a memetic power point of view, it checks all boxes:
It’s just a yellow round guy (emoji).
At it’s core, that’s all there is to get and understand. This is extremely flexible for memes and reproduction.
The ticker is 3 letters, easy to remember, $JOE. Basically a dude’s name.
You can even stretch it to just “emoji round face in yellow” and still keep sufficient recognizability for memetic power:
It’s also harmless. It has no stigma, no associations to racism, or against any minority, it’s not sexual, etc.
Being harmless is extremely undervalued when it comes to memes, because it can severaly hinders virality.
For example, if your meme features sexy/naked girls, or pornographic themes, or can be perceived as offensive.
Just for completion, I will show you a few example of funny memes that do not necessarily translate well to potential - or existing - tokens:
Funny meme, but it’s not so easy to understand digest and to tell others:
“it’s a fat farmer in US living a simple life and being happy with his own results…” etc etc. Now compare this to “yellow dog” or “green frog” or “blue sonic” or “yellow ball”.
Clearly overcomplicated.
“It’s a “wagie”, an underpaid 9 to 5 worker who hates his job but must work to eat and can’t save and can’t invest and thinks all day about crypto going up…”
Too long. Also has connection to complicate issues, minimu salary, payments, rent, fast food chains, etc. Difficult to make it work.
Too sexualized, too young, it’s gonna be hard to convince “normal” people to buy a token whose mascot is a highly sexualized young girl.
Can it pump? Yes, a lot, but I doubt it can reach “Pepe on Binance” levels.
See you on the blockchain, lads.
- Heart