What do a flying cat, a sad frog and a foolish dog have in common? That’s right: They are part of the meme canon, and thus inevitably part of the crypto culture.
Their shadows reach far – so far that entire projects draw on their power of attraction alone. From dogecoin to shiba inu to kitten NFTs, memes are everywhere, and anything can become a meme. Text, image, audio track or all together, the main thing is weird, trashy and crazy. The meme doctrine: the dumber the better. A shame line? none. Blunt is trump. The cut-up technique is used to snip together what bad taste, paint program and situation comedy give.
Basically a massive deconstruction machine. The pasted-together montages rectify the original meaning, re-contextualize it, develop into a secret code for insiders of the communities that are mostly networked via forums like Reddit, give the swarm-intelligent bunch a common reference point and thus unleash an unpredictable economic power – or you just paint kittens along manga eyes. Ah yes, the internet. Infinite expanses – not all of which want to be explored.
Are you still saving or are you already hodl?
Memes have always been part of token DNA. Probably the most famous example in the crypto haze is “Hodln”, which was created on Reddit while drunk.
In December 2013, with bitcoin falling back to $500 shortly after its first foray above $1,000, user GameKyuubi wrote a post explaining – obviously not entirely soberly – why he was trading his bitcoin despite the does not want to sell what seems strange from today’s point of view. He is a “bad trader” and not as “cool” as the “smart traders”. Whether it was due to a careless mistake or the whiskey bottle next to him, the post bore the screwed up title “I am Hodling”. The rest is history.
Since then, the post has been called up almost 800,000 times and the genesis took its course: Hold involuntarily became Hodl and Hodl finally became a dictum for long-term investments that has even found its unironic entry into the marketing language of reputable companies. Since then, Hodln has become an integral part of crypto jargon and even received its own rap anthem from Sido and Kool Savas.
Going hand in hand with Hodln is the “When Moon?” meme that adorns numerous GIFs. Together they form the yin and yang of the crypto-meme culture: if the course jumps forward, it says: “When Moon?” Who needs an investment advisor anyway?
Quasi synonymous with “When Moon?” the no less flat question “When Lambo?” has been cultivated in various Trading Telegram groups – greetings from materialism in its purest form.
Fly me to the moon
But memes have not only infiltrated language use. Entire crypto projects have sprung up on the backs of memes. The most famous example: Dogecoin, the cryptocurrency with the likeness of Shiba Inu smirking for treats. From the beginning, Dogecoin was intended as a fun currency. As a satirical commentary on the hype-driven bubble formation in the crypto market, which counteracts Bitcoin’s value proposition of 21 million units with an unlimited circulation volume.
While Dogecoin, which was one of the veterans on the crypto market with its launch in 2013, was initially ridiculed with activities such as sponsoring the Jamaican bobsleigh team and only supported by a small community, the project has blossomed into a box office hit at the latest in the last year. It is thanks to the Tesla boss and self-proclaimed “DoGFather” Elon Musk, around whom an idolatry has formed, that the DOGE market capitalization rose from ten to almost 90 billion US dollars in a very short time – and thus in the meantime so was worth as much as the Airbus Group. An expensive fun.
Even if the hype has calmed down a bit, Elon Musk no longer uses every tweet for DOGE promotional purposes and latecomers like Shiba Inu – after all, ranked 15th among the most valuable cryptocurrencies – are grazing the memecoin ground, Dogecoin has become one to be taken seriously asset class developed. The fact that the ten largest DOGE wallets keep half of the total volume in circulation, making the cryptocurrency stocks highly centralized and susceptible to pump-and-dump methods: a gift. The joke about jumping off the edge of the pool is that you shouldn’t do it.
A wide field?
While Dogecoin can still be easily assigned to the Memecoin camp, it looks more difficult with other cryptocurrencies. If the criteria are: popularity in the social channels and common meme conventions of a vocal community, then Bitcoin can also be labeled a memecoin.
Not only Hodln belongs to the meme repertoire of Bitcoin. The laser eye meme on Twitter, which more or less famous people from the crypto business missed out on in order to push the Bitcoin price – by virtue of their celebrity existence – to 100,000 US dollars, also caused media excitement, albeit only for a short time catapult. It wasn’t meant to be and the laser eyes disappeared as quickly as they came. Actions like these show, however, that the key cryptocurrency Bitcoin is also knee-deep in the meme pool.
However, Bitcoin does not meet a very important memecoin criterion: uselessness. You will look in vain for a use case, technical unique selling points or specific applications with memecoins. It’s all about having fun, sophisticated concepts only spoil the game.
In view of the “official” memecoin list, a dogecoin even seems reputable: in addition to Shiba Inu, whose white paper – sorry, “woofpaper” – makes no secret of its meme status, we also have Baby Doge Coin or Dogelon Mars on offer . Not to forget, of course, Floki Inu and Kishu Inu – it can always be worse.
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Trash aesthetics as a bestseller
The unpredictable power of meme culture is also and especially evident on the NFT market, where no one raises their eyebrows when millions of dollars are shelled out for colorful heaps of pixels. CryptoPunks, CryptoKitties, Bored Ape Yacht Club: The value of the most expensive NFTs is not exactly measured by their artistic originality, but rather by the degree of memeification. To exaggerate a bit, one could even say: Today we only talk about NFTs because of memes. If it weren’t for the fluffy CryptoKitties, who knows what fruits the Ethereum token standard ERC-721 would have borne.
As bizarre as the CryptoKitties hype of 2017, which after all brought the Ethereum blockchain to the edge of its load limit, may have seemed from the outside perspective, its success was home-made. Tamagotchis, kitten fetish, manga trivialization: At the CryptoKitties, meme ingredients for success were stirred up in a particularly tasty way, served up as valuable collector’s items and garnished with a pinch of FOMO – well then, meal!
Memes and NFTs: A Love Story
If the memecoin market is gradually saturated with Dogecoin, Shiba Inu and the plagiarism splashing along, the meme hunger on the NFT market seems insatiable. There is a simple reason for this: All internet phenomena – and thus also memes – can be monetized via NFTs.
Like Nyan Cat, the rainbow flying cat, which sold as an NFT for a whopping $590,000. Or Bad Luck Brian, a picture of a redhead wearing braces that landed on Reddit in 2012. NFT cost point: at least 36,000 US dollars. And of course the original picture of the world famous Shiba Inu “Kabosu”. The NFT went under the hammer for four million US dollars.
Blockchain technology doesn’t even stop at tweets. “Just setting up my Twitter” was the first short post ever published by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey – and sold as an NFT for $2.9 million.
Unpredictable fire accelerants
Taste is discussable. The meme-infused NFTs don’t have to appeal to everyone. But that doesn’t hide the fact that memefication also and above all has an incalculable economic dimension. The more NFTs and cryptocurrencies move in the meme atmosphere, the higher their chances of profit. No wonder: memes are the most effective form of marketing. Once released into the echo chamber of the social networks, memes spread unstoppably in the net culture, anchor themselves in the collective consciousness and can become identity-forming for entire groups.
The best example: the SHIB Army formed around the memecoin Shiba Inu – a loose association of like-minded SHIB enthusiasts who collectively boost the token price. WallStreetBets, the Reddit group that opposed hedge fund shorting and saved game chain GameStop from bankruptcy last year, has also shown the momentum that memes can have in conjunction with social networks.
The power of virality should not be underestimated, but it cannot be underestimated either. Neither chart nor fundamental nor on-chain analyzes help. Memes are the factor X that can inflate supposedly fun projects and put them in the public spotlight. What begins in a small bubble can trigger an avalanche – or just as well fizzle out again.
Disclaimer
This article previously appeared in the April issue of BTC-ECHO Magazine. This way to the shop!
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