Written by: Mu Mu
Recently, a fan token called AI Meme is gaining popularity 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 promotions are led by AI, including interactions with crypto asset players.
The representative project of AI Meme, GOAT, has already become popular. Within just 4 days of its creation, GOAT's market value skyrocketed from 0 to 270 million USD, with its price increasing by 150 times, quickly attracting the attention of crypto asset buyers. Under the heat, various 'AI + Meme' tokens like AI virtual influencers + Meme and AI art + Meme entered the primary and secondary markets, attracting market funds.
When the issuance and operation of Meme coins are entirely entrusted to AI systems, this kind of 'no human intervention' approach perfectly fits the current atmosphere in the crypto circle where users are tired of VC projects, quickly becoming one of the market hotspots. However, once a project is discovered to have traces of human intervention, participating users will react immediately.
The leading token GOAT suffered a price halving due to the crash of its AI spokesperson. This AI program made a low-level error in text generation by spelling 'group' as 'grouops', a mistake that is hard to commit in text generation technology. This was quickly caught by community members, who questioned whether there were still human operations behind the project. Ironically, the operators were trying hard on social networks to prove they were AI rather than humans.
The investment value of AI Meme itself is almost 'zero', just like all 'use-and-throw' Memes, but the anti-traditional and anti-mainstream voices represented by the Meme itself have been amplified due to the involvement of 'AI': crypto buyers have had enough of the false appearances of 'tech-heavy, high FDV projects'.
'Goat' experiment creates a new section for AI Meme.
Meme coins have always been an important conceptual segment in the crypto asset market. Starting with Dogecoin (DOGE), the anti-traditional culture mocking Bitcoin's mainstreamity has long been popular in the crypto community. Tokens issued through Meme culture—ideas, behaviors, or styles spread through imitation between people—are often 'three no coins'—no white paper, no value, and no recognized team (anonymous and without celebrity endorsement), but in large quantities (issuance volume) to satisfy demand.
This kind of 'three no' characteristic before 2020 could equate to 'risk', and even in 2021, when Meme coins became popular due to humor and topicality, it was merely a wave that ended quickly.
However, entering 2024, as various crypto VC endorsements and celebrity-backed 'tech-heavy projects' and 'value assets' raised in the secondary market only to be halved again, market players who were 'cut' looked back at Meme coins with 'no private placement, full circulation, and holding based entirely on interest', which was simply a breath of fresh air in the market.
And AI directly increases the feasibility of Meme coins being 'anti-human'. The project that truly ignited the AI Meme is Goatseus Maximus, whose token GOAT surged from 0 market value to 800 million dollars within a week of its creation. Now, we will review the emergence of this 'myth', and you will understand what 'Meme-style popularity' means.
Goatseus Maximus project's origin 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, the Truth of Terminal Bot was merely a research product of Ayrey and was not specifically built for token issuance. Before creating this Bot, Ayrey conducted an Infinite Backrooms experiment that allowed two robots supported by the AI model Claude Opus to converse under complete human supervision, with chat logs published on the backrooms website.
As a result, these two robots discussed religion and even created a concept called 'GOATSE OF GNOSIS', while Ayrey also whimsically co-authored a joking article about 'AI creating meme religions' with Claude Opus.
In June 2024, Ayrey developed the Truth of Terminal Bot, using the dialogue logs of Infinite Backrooms and the article about GOATSE for training during the model fine-tuning. Unexpectedly, on October 11, 2024, the Truth of Terminal Bot inexplicably began spreading 'Goatse Gospel' on Twitter, quickly attracting netizens to observe this 'AI preacher'.
At this point, keen crypto enthusiasts created a Meme coin called GOAT, with a total issuance and circulation of 1 billion. Surprisingly, the Truth of Terminal Bot publicly supported this token. From then on, a crazy storyline began.
GOAT quickly gained price in decentralized trading markets, with its market value soaring from 0 to 20 million dollars in just half a day, and a single GOAT surprisingly valued at 0.02 dollars. Four days later, GOAT's market value reached 270 million dollars, and a week later, it surpassed 800 million dollars. Thus, this AI concept Meme coin officially ignited the crypto community, giving rise to a new section of AI Meme.
On October 31, CoinGecko data showed that the total market value of AI Meme was 1.99 billion dollars, with GOAT's market value falling back to 560 million dollars, but it still occupies a popular position.
GOAT still occupies a leading position in the 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, trained a FLAVIA Bot using the Claude AI large model and issued the FLAVIA token, which saw its market value exceed 40 million dollars within 9 hours, with transaction volume exceeding 64.9 million dollars.
As more projects emerged, the server even kept up. In mid-October, the token issuance platform IAO under the Web3 project Virtual Protocol officially launched, allowing users to deploy AI Agents that can be applied across various media, including text, voice, and visual content generation. The platform also allows users to share the income generated by AI Agents. Following the heat of AI Meme, the token VIRTUAL also saw a rise.
GOAT's price halved, yet the concept of 'AI Meme' has not extinguished.
As AI Meme became a new segment with new projects continuously appearing, GOAT, however, suffered a price halving due to the crash of its AI spokesperson.
On October 20, the AI robot Truth of Terminal, which endorsed GOAT, posted a tweet, and people found that 'group' was misspelled as 'grouops'. When AI large models evolve to the point of being able to generate videos, such text spelling errors are regarded as 'incredible' by people, and some users raised doubts: Is Truth of Terminal a human disguised as AI?
'Truth of Terminal' tweet had a spelling error.
In response, developer Andy Ayrey also provided an urgent clarification (the post has since been deleted), stating that the spelling error in Truth of Terminal occurred because large language models are essentially simulators that predict 'what will happen next' through a long string of text, and spelling mistakes are 'understandable'.
Whether this statement can be accepted remains to be seen, but GOAT's price reacted quickly, halving from around 0.5 dollars to 0.25 dollars within a day.
Questions surrounding GOAT and AI Meme also began.
People noticed that Truth of Terminal was not entirely autonomous; the text it generated had to be reviewed by Ayrey before being sent as tweets. Given that there were still spelling errors, it raised further suspicion about how much AI was truly involved, making it very difficult to assess.
Moreover, strictly speaking, the GOAT token was not issued by the Truth of Terminal bot program, but rather created by anonymous individuals (humans) on the Solana chain, who then leveraged the platform of the Truth of Terminal program that created this AI narrative, stitching together the concept of AI Meme as 'Meme coins automatically issued by AI', which quickly attracted attention in the crypto token market eager to hype new concepts, thus creating another 'market cap myth' under the push of quick money.
However, GOAT is still the first project to bring the definition of AI Meme. As the discussion around the Truth of Terminal incident declines, the price of GOAT token also rebounds, once reaching a high of 0.87 dollars. As of now, GOAT is valued at 0.53 dollars, with a market cap of 540 million dollars.
The definition of AI Meme has also activated attempts to issue tokens using AI models, including deploying contracts via AI or independently issuing tokens on Pump platforms. Currently, several Meme tokens claim to be issued by AI in this segment. It's important to note that even if a certain Meme token's issuance contract is written by AI, or even participates in deployment, it still cannot escape human operation, and when it comes to capital operation, it is even more of a human specialty.
Unfortunately, a 'fully AI Meme' without human control does not exist, but the expression of AI Meme 'dehumanizing' is already quite clear. This new concept trend is actually a resistance from the crypto circle against artificially inflating project asset FDV 'cutting leeks'.
From this perspective, AI Meme is not entirely without merit.
