Written by: Mu Mu
Recently, a fan token called AI Meme is becoming popular in the crypto community. Unlike previous Meme tokens, AI Meme is generated and driven by artificial intelligence: AI creates IP characters for Meme coins on social media, and even promotion is led by AI, including interactions with crypto asset players.
GOAT, the representative project of AI Meme, has become popular. In just 4 days after its creation, the market value of GOAT soared from 0 to 270 million US dollars, and the price soared 150 times, quickly attracting the attention of crypto asset buyers. Stimulated by the popularity, various "AI+Meme" tokens such as AI virtual influencer + Meme, AI art + Meme, etc. entered the primary and secondary markets, attracting market funds to enter the market.
When the issuance and operation of Meme coins are completely handed over to the AI system, this "no human intervention" gameplay just fits the current atmosphere of crypto users being tired of VC projects, and quickly becomes one of the hot spots in the market. Once a project is found to have traces of human intervention, participating users will immediately backfire.
The leading token GOAT suffered a price cut in half because of the AI spokesperson who endorsed it. The AI program spelled "group" as "grouops" in a tweet, a low-level mistake that AI can hardly make in text generation technology, and was quickly caught by community members, causing people to question whether there are still people behind the project. Funny thing is that the operator is trying to prove on social networks that he is AI and not human.
In fact, the investment value of AI Meme itself is "almost 0", just like all "disposable" Memes, but the anti-traditional and anti-mainstream voices represented by Meme itself are amplified by the participation of "AI": crypto buyers are fed up with the artificial illusion of "technical, high FDV projects".
"Goat" experiment creates a new AI Meme section
Meme coins have always been an important concept in the crypto asset market. Starting with Dogecoin DOGE, the counter-traditional culture that complains about the mainstream nature of Bitcoin has been popular in the crypto community. This kind of tokens issued by borrowing Meme culture - expressing a certain phenomenon or theme through ideas, behaviors or styles spread through imitation between people - are usually "three-no coins" - no white paper, no value, and the team is not famous (anonymous and without celebrity endorsement), but the quantity (issued) is sufficient.
This "three-no" nature could be equated with "risk" before 2020. Even in 2021, when Meme coins became popular because of their humor and topicality, it was just a wave that ended.
But in 2024, as various "technical projects" and "valuable assets" endorsed by crypto VCs and supported by celebrities have risen and then halved in the secondary market, the market players who have been cut off look back at the Meme coin with "no private placement, full circulation, and holding is entirely based on interest", which is simply a breath of fresh air in the market.
AI has directly increased the feasibility of "anti-artificial" for Meme coins. The project Goatseus Maximus really made AI Meme popular. Its token GOAT soared from a market value of 0 to 800 million US dollars within a week of its creation. Now, we will review the creation of this "myth", and you will also understand what "Meme-style popularity" is.
The origin of the Goatseus Maximus project can be traced back to an AI bot called "Truth of Terminal", which was fine-tuned based on the Llama-70B model and created by developer Andy Ayrey.
Initially, Truth of Terminal Bot was just a product of Ayrey’s research and was not specifically built for coin issuance. Before creating this Bot, Ayrey did an Infinite Backrooms experiment, which allowed two robots supported by the AI model Claude Opus to talk completely unsupervised, and the chat records were published on the backrooms website.
As a result, the two robots talked about religion and even created a concept of "GOATSE OF GNOSIS". Ayreyh also suddenly had the idea to co-author an article with Claude Opus about "AI creates memetic religion" A joke article.
In June 2024, Ayrey developed Truth of Terminal Bot, and used the conversation logs of Infinite Backrooms and the article about GOATSE for training when fine-tuning the model. Unexpectedly, on October 11, 2024, Truth of Terminal Bot somehow began to spread the "Goatse Gospel" on Twitter, which soon attracted netizens to come and watch this "AI evangelist."
At this time, keen crypto people created a meme coin called GOAT, with a total issuance and circulation of 1 billion. Surprisingly, Truth of Terminal Bot publicly supported this token. From this point on, the crazy plot began.
GOAT quickly gained a price in the decentralized trading market. In just half a day, the market value soared from 0 to 20 million US dollars. One GOAT was worth 0.02 US dollars. Four days later, the market value of GOAT reached 270 million US dollars. After another week, the market value exceeded 800 million US dollars. At this point, this AI-based Meme coin officially detonated the crypto community, and a new sector, AI Meme, was derived from it.
On October 31, Coingecko data showed that the total market value of AI Meme was US$1.99 billion, and the market value of GOAT fell back to US$560 million, but it still occupied a popular position.
GOAT Still Holds Top Position in AI Meme Token Market
After GOAT, more AI memes appeared in the market. For example, Trevor McFedries, the founder of the virtual influencer startup Brud, used the Claude AI model to train a FLAVIA Bot and issued FLAVIA tokens. The market value of the token exceeded 40 million US dollars in 9 hours, and the transaction volume exceeded 64.9 million US dollars.
As more projects emerged, the server side even caught up. In mid-October, IAO, a token issuance platform under the Web3 project Virtual Protocol, was officially launched. The platform allows users to deploy AI Agents, which can be applied in a variety of media, including text, voice and visual content generation. The platform allows users to share the income generated by AI Agents. Following the AI Meme craze, the token VIRTUAL has also been rising.
GOAT cut short, but the concept of "AI Meme" remains popular
When AI Meme became a new sector and new projects continued to emerge, GOAT was tragically cut short because of the failure of its AI spokesperson.
On October 20, Truth of Terminal, the AI robot that endorsed GOAT, posted a tweet, and people found that the word "group" in the tweet was spelled as "grouops". When AI models have evolved to the point where they can generate videos, people find such text spelling errors "incredible", and some users questioned whether Truth of Terminal is a human in AI's guise.
The tweet of "Truth of Terminal" has a spelling error
In response to this, developer Andy Ayrey also made an urgent clarification (the post has been deleted). He said that the spelling errors in Truth of Terminal were because the large language model is essentially a simulator that predicts "what will happen next" through a long string of text, and the spelling errors are "reasonable."
It is unknown whether this statement will be accepted by the public, but the price of GOAT responded quickly to it, slashing from around $0.5 to $0.25 within a day.
Questions surrounding the GOAT and AI Meme also began.
People noticed that Truth of Terminal is not completely autonomous. The text it generates must be reviewed by Ayrey before it can be sent as a tweet. The fact that there are still spelling errors makes it even more suspicious. It is actually difficult to assess how much AI is actually involved in this.
In addition, strictly speaking, the GOAT token was not issued by the robot program Truth of Terminal. Instead, an anonymous person (human) created the GOAT token on the Solana chain, and then obtained the platform of the Truth of Terminal program that created this AI narrative. The two stitched together the concept of AI Meme, or "Meme coins issued automatically by AI", and quickly attracted attention in the cryptocurrency market that is keen on hyping new concepts, and then created another "market value myth" with the help of fast money.
However, GOAT is the first project to define AI Meme. As the discussion of the Truth of Terminal incident decreased, the price of GOAT tokens rebounded and once reached a high of $0.87. As of now, GOAT is worth $0.53 and has a market value of $540 million.
AI's Meme definition has also activated attempts to issue tokens using AI models, including deploying contracts with AI or issuing tokens autonomously on the Pump platform. Currently, there are multiple Memes in this sector that claim to be issued by AI. It should be noted that even if the issuance contract of a Meme token is written by AI or even deployed, it still requires human operation. As for capital operation, it is a human strength.
Unfortunately, a "full AI Meme" without any human control does not exist, but the expression of "de-humanization" of AI Meme is already very clear. This new concept craze is actually another resistance of the crypto circle to the "cutting leeks" of artificially pushing up project assets FDV.
From this perspective, AI Meme is not completely useless.
