Original author: JJ Alicea
Original translation by: Block unicorn
Historically, memes have always been part of the human experience, representing the migration of cultural products across generations—ideas that endure, hold significance, and snowball across eras. Memes are the focal point of society, carrying value in the form of collective influence.
Today, people often associate memes with triviality or even absurdity, mainly because online memes are often humorous. However, the reason humor resonates is because it contains a kernel of truth.
"Memes propagate themselves from one brain to another in the Meme pool, a process broadly termed imitation. Just as genes are transferred from one body to another through sperm or eggs and propagate in the gene pool, memes propagate in the Meme pool by being transferred from one brain to another." — Richard Dawkins
A meme is the basic unit of cultural transmission. In ancient societies, religious stories and shared histories were often passed orally from person to person, with each storyteller adding their perspective or embellishments. This process helped solidify the beliefs and values of a community, embedding them deeply within the cultural structure. Similarly, in modern society, memes transmit cultural fragments or ideas from one mind to another, evolving with each retelling or reinterpretation. Both forms of transmission rely on repetition, resonance, and subtle shifts that occur as people interpret and share them, allowing the essence of ideas to persist and adapt over time. Thus, memes are modern narrative tools that distill complex thoughts into simple, easily spreadable forms, conveying cultural information and rapidly disseminating it worldwide.
Community
Memes are the basic units of cultural transmission, while communities are the ecological environments in which memes accumulate value. In other words, memes are important ideas, while communities are the people to whom those ideas pertain.
Communities typically exhibit several notable characteristics:
1. Shared interests and goals
2. Communication and interaction
3. Structure and identity
4. Knowledge and resource sharing
5. Collective identity
Communities often start with a small number of individuals committed to disrupting mainstream culture. The open-source software movement originated from a small group of developers, such as those promoting the Linux project, who challenged the dominance of proprietary software and advocated for free access and modifiable code. The punk rock movement began in cities like New York and London, driven by a small group of passionate musicians, artists, and fans who rejected the polished sounds of mainstream rock and the consumerism of pop culture. The VaccinateCA organization is composed of a group of tech optimists dedicated to spreading vaccine supply information to as many people as possible to combat a government system constrained by logistics.
These communities were initially highly localized, with only a few loyal followers sharing a common vision and collective belief in the malleability of the world. Ultimately, these communities had a profound impact across technology, finance, culture, art, entertainment, and healthcare.
The Linux operating system saves enterprises and governments more than $60 billion annually in licensing fees, supports over 90% of internet infrastructure, and the Android system built on the Linux kernel powers about 70% of smartphones worldwide. Punk rock became the soundtrack for political and social uprisings in Eastern Europe (e.g., Poland's Solidarity movement) and Latin America. Punk enthusiasts and bands popularized zines, small self-published magazines that typically focused on music, politics, and alternative lifestyles—becoming grassroots pioneers of modern blogging and independent digital journalism. VaccinateCA provided reliable vaccine supply information for over 1,000 vaccination sites, while Google offered only 127 options—thus improving the efficiency of vaccine distribution.
This is grassroots, community-driven value creation from the bottom up.
Meme
The first uses of gold can be traced back to ancient civilizations in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and parts of Eastern Europe. By 4000 BC, people valued gold for its unique beauty, rarity, and malleability, using it to make jewelry, ritual items, and symbols of status. Meanwhile, copper, silver, and bronze were also popular for making tools and decorations. So what makes gold so unique?
Unlike other metals, gold neither tarnishes nor corrodes, endowing it with enduring characteristics that symbolize eternity and stability. Gold's longevity means it resists change, obsolescence, and competition, thus having a better chance of continuing to exist in the future. Gold has become a meme with lasting influence because it is important, unique, and resonates with humanity.
Gold is one of the largest asset classes in the world, yet it has no practical utility—no production use, no cash flow, and no business model. Its value exists solely because we collectively assign it value. It is a metal with limited intrinsic utility, but its perceived value stems from its beauty, rarity, and symbolic significance in human culture. It is not a useful commodity like crude oil, nor is it a valuable ownership representation like Apple stock. However, as gold's collective impact has grown and more people adopt it, it has become a store of value, potentially even becoming the world's reserve currency, perhaps replacing another meme—the US dollar.
One might say that Bitcoin (BTC) is the earliest 'meme coin' in a digital sense—a seemingly worthless asset at first glance, but now a global store of value across economies.
Bitcoin not only sparked a financial revolution; it also ignited a cultural movement. Through decentralized technology, it enabled peer-to-peer value exchange, financial autonomy, and the rise of grassroots communities bound by shared beliefs.
The birth of Bitcoin coincided with the financial crisis of 2008, a moment of great significance that touched on widespread distrust of the traditional financial system and created a new narrative of decentralized value. People buy Bitcoin not because it has potential cash flow, but because of its unique value proposition: it is a store of value, a belief in future appreciation, and most importantly, it symbolizes a new financial ecosystem free from the control of corporations or individuals. It is a trustless asset that can support a trustless economy.
Bitcoin holders feel they are part of a larger group—a community, rather than merely financial investors. If you doubt this, search for 'Apple tattoos' or 'Uber tattoos' and compare them to 'Bitcoin tattoos.'
Assessing the value of communities
Outsiders often overlook the power and value of communities, much like they initially misunderstood Bitcoin. In the traditional financial world, professionals usually rely on analytical methods taught at schools like Wharton—discounted cash flow, comparative analysis, cash flow, and EBITDA. Consequently, companies shape their metrics and reports around these frameworks. This limited perspective is why many initially misunderstood the value of GameStop and why cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and meme coins continue to be misunderstood by traditional finance.
Today, the communities created by these 'companies' hold enormous value. Here, 'companies' can refer to anything—startups, public companies, crypto protocols, KOLs, creative entities, or even a subreddit. Over time, a company's valuation depends not only on its profits but also on the value created and accumulated by its community—both internal and external (e.g., Reddit + GameStop).
In terms of discovering new products and brands, over 86% of internet users trust Reddit and its communities more than ads; adults under 45 trust news on social media platforms more than traditional news networks; and 63% of Gen Z and millennials trust influencers more than brands. Gen Z members spend an average of 8.5 hours online daily, with 55% using smartphones for over 5 hours each day, and Americans send an average of 94 text messages daily.
The book community on TikTok has driven bestsellers in the publishing industry, with some books seeing sales increase by 1,000% after gaining recognition in the community. The Reddit r/WallStreetBets community was able to push GameStop's stock price from less than $20 to over $300 in a matter of days. Following a collaboration, Bud Light's sales dropped by 26%, Anheuser-Busch's stock price fell by 20%, resulting in a market cap loss of $26 billion—all of which was caused by its conservative community.
Communities cannot be accurately predicted by traditional financial assessment frameworks, as their significance and impact are dynamic, often growing, shrinking, and transforming. They cannot simply be incorporated into tables and lists within investment prospectuses or financial models.
Financial companies often overlook the lasting power of communities, viewing them as anomalies, underestimating their influence, and considering their actions as mere futile endeavors.
We believe that as the speed of connectivity increases and online interactions continue to evolve, communities will continue to grow and wield greater influence. The proliferation of digital platforms makes it easier than ever for individuals to find like-minded groups and connect with them, breaking down the geographical and social barriers that once limited community formation.
Meme coins: Vehicles of community ownership
Meme coins are the perfect tools for measuring community value. They are a tokenized expression of culture.
Similar to social networks, the value of meme coins derives from the communities they gather. However, they represent a fundamental shift in how value is distributed and controlled. Unlike platforms like Instagram or Facebook, where the value generated by user activities (content creation, interaction, and data) is primarily captured by the platform and its shareholders, meme coins disrupt this model by allowing users to become both creators of network value and its owners.
Bonk was distributed to users through airdrops and quickly became the preferred meme coin on Solana. The initial recipients were those who continued to contribute to existing communities, protocols, and core infrastructure after the collapse of FTX. Bonk became a tokenized symbol of resilience in the face of adversity, and the enthusiasm of the initial recipients quickly spread to a broader user base, driving up Bonk's value and creating wealth within the ecosystem. This wealth stayed within the community, supporting the development of projects like Bonkbot, bringing substantial value to Solana, its product users, and the Bonk token itself.
This is grassroots value creation—bottom-up, community-driven, without external investors, only human capital within the community creating value for the community.
As the world's assets become increasingly digital, more memes can be monetized, produced, and spontaneously created—extending the concept of 'meme' to anything of social significance, and transforming it into a tool for community monetization through immutable smart contracts.
The Future
The future will resemble a continuation of the past, with technology continually evolving, cities expanding, and culture adapting to the tools and media of the times. However, machines cannot usurp the right to produce memes. Culture—including its creation, distribution, and persistence—cannot be outsourced to large floating-point matrix operations (referring to techniques that use floating-point numbers for matrix operations). Although machines may generate products that appear to be memes—they are hollow, algorithmically optimized snapshots of familiar ideas, replicated en masse for instant attention—they will lack the deeper resonance and transformative power of genuine memes.
Throughout history, culture has always been the result of collective efforts, and memes are the smallest units of cultural transmission, encoding the ideas and values of their time. Memes are not just simple fragments of media; they are carriers of shared meaning. The vitality of memes comes from being accepted rather than created. Their birth is not an isolated act of creation, but a chemical reaction woven from shared understanding, humor, and emotion.
On Loisaida Avenue in Manhattan, there is a small Puerto Rican restaurant called Rinconcito. There are no reservations, no loyalty programs, no point systems, or electronic membership cards. They do not ask for your email address to send targeted ads, nor do they have much contact information for people to reach them. You won't see them compromising on TikTok to cater to some outrageous trend, nor will they bottle sauces to patent and sell to the masses.
They trade in culture, with honest people cooking good food at fair prices—this has been the case for decades. In every community, this approach resonates deeply, and people agree: this is how life should be. And that is their secret ingredient—culture, waiting for the right price.
