Picture source: "Deep Wave TechFlow"

Do memes have value? This question may have become a Nikkei thread.

But memes are good and memes are bad, as long as they are popular, everyone will love them.

In the currency world where everything can be meme-able, any joke or event may be transformed into a machine for making money, which naturally attracts an endless stream of dreamers to gamble on memes.

And a piece of trivia you may not know is:

Currently, there are 9 meme coins in the TOP 100 crypto market capitalization.

Big dog, two dogs, hat dog, blue frog, green frog, open-mouthed cat... Cats, dogs and frogs are gradually moving closer to the big C position in the group portrait of cryptocurrency.

Picture source: "Deep Wave TechFlow"

With the rebound of the market in the past few days, if you look at the gainer list among the top 500 companies by market capitalization, you will also find that a group of memes are also among the ones with the strongest gains.

Born in the wild, strong at pulling the strings, good at communication, trapped in risks.

Memes are a mixture of charming and dangerous qualities, similar to the 108 seats of Liangshan Heroes. As long as you sit on them, you are a hero. As for whether the hero was a mat weaver and shoe seller before, or a murderer and a gangster, the logic of success and failure does not apply. important.

More important than arguing about "who is the value coin" is embracing change.

Barbell strategy, both ends are attention investments

In this encryption cycle, a gameplay that everyone increasingly agrees with is the "barbell strategy."

One side of the barbell holds tokens such as Ethereum plus $SOL that are recognized to have relatively stable market capitalization, while the other side holds various meme coins that follow hot trends.

One side stabilizes the lower limit, and the other side bets on the upper limit; one side holds it stably, and the other side quickly changes hands.

Picture source: "Deep Wave TechFlow"

As for the VC coins and so-called value coins in the middle of the barbell, positions will be relatively reduced, or simply given up.

Based on the materialism that materiality determines consciousness, you can think that this is the result of investors' shrewd thinking in the face of changes in the current market structure.

And in this barbell strategy, the consensus between both ends of the barbell is growing.

Infrastructure is valuable, applications are valuable, narratives are valuable...but none of them are as valuable as attention.

The left side of the barbell condenses long-lasting attention, while the right side represents short-lived attention. Crypto investment itself is also an attention investment. Only by capturing the pulse of attention can there be liquidity, and it also provides the basis for price pump (possibly dump).

You think so, and smart institutions actually think so too.

Stratos, a hedge fund powered by a16z, has been running a liquid fund holding $WIF since December, when $WIF was trading at $0.01, and at one point Stratos saw a 300x profit.

Picture source: "Deep Wave TechFlow"

Coincidentally, top VC Pantera also publicly stated that it holds meme coins. Its partner Paul Veradittakit once wrote that memes are Trojan horses disguised as toys, using allusions to prove that memes will attract more people to get started in encryption.

When you are struggling with the high VC currency and low circulation of FDV to cut leeks, the VCs themselves are also playing memes on one side of the barbell.

Attention is value, this is the truth that any participant in the crypto world must be in awe of.

Project memeization, the effect is infinite

Born in the grass, good at communication. These two characteristics of memes are also noticed by the project developers.

So you will see more and more that projects are gradually embracing memes from launch to operation, trying to use more people-friendly expressions to close the distance with the crypto community.

For example, the next highly anticipated king-level project, Monad with parallel EVM narrative support, has even built a "meme mapper" on the official website to facilitate the community to use Monad based on its positioning of underlying infrastructure and hard-core technology. Make memes about the topic.

And you will see more and more that in the introductory posts and articles about Monad, there will always be a sad frog image corresponding to Monad’s purple logo.

Picture source: "Deep Wave TechFlow"

In the same way, Berachain, the most meme-like among Layer 1, even positioned itself as a cute bear from the beginning of the brand concept. The name Bear Chain naturally spread.

In the more detailed product design later, you can also see the bear eating honey theme used in its token and liquidity design.

This actually reflects that in the current encryption market environment with limited attention span, memes have the value of better memory and dissemination.

If you carefully observe the attention marketing of encryption projects, in fact, nothing has changed:

In the early years, encryption projects preferred to promote themselves in hard-core geek terms, such as million TPS, directed acyclic graph, high concurrency, EVM compatibility... Capital and Leek will definitely have a feeling of "Although I know everything" I don’t understand it but I think it’s awesome.”

With the development of the currency circle today, market participants have gradually fallen into a kind of "cool fatigue". They have heard too many terms and there is nothing new about them.

On the contrary, the frog heads that spread easily are more interesting.

Whether it is a communication strategy or a trading strategy, embracing memes has become an irreversible wave.

Don’t get bogged down in debates about whether memes have value. There’s no value in spending precious time in metaphysical mental innards.

Question the meme, understand the meme, and either embrace it or stay away from it, it's that simple.

[Disclaimer] There are risks in the market, so investment needs to be cautious. This article does not constitute investment advice and users should consider whether any opinions, views or conclusions contained in this article are appropriate for their particular circumstances. Invest accordingly and do so at your own risk.

  • This article is reprinted with permission from: "Deep Wave TechFlow"