Memecoin can be thought of as the digital asset version of influencer marketing. Virality can create a cult following, causing market capitalization to skyrocket overnight. This article originates from an article written by Nina Bambysheva and Steven Ehrlich, compiled, compiled and written by Foresight News. (Preliminary summary: Base chain meme currency issuance platform "Wow is online", can the new reward mechanism beat Pump.fun?) (Background supplement: Interpretation of Binance Meme currency report) Insight into the global market environment and understand the rise of meme currency ) We are going to Miami! We want to buy Lamborghini! Oliver Szmul, a 16-year-old university student from London, has a hoarse voice and can barely contain his excitement. It was mid-May, and he had just watched a cryptocurrency called Jail Cat, which he and a few friends had built on a whim a few weeks earlier, surge to $1.9 million in market capitalization almost overnight. Jail Cat’s overnight surge and plunge A day later, the cat-themed token’s valuation soared to more than $2.5 million. The token features a tabby cat standing in a line of police officers holding a sign that reads "I chewed a $3,000 check." But soon, the excitement wore off and Jail Cat's price plummeted, now having a market value of about $87,000. Jail Cat has no underlying purpose or theoretical utility other than to entertain, satirize, and provide a vehicle for speculation. As a so-called “memecoin,” the token has no intrinsic value other than what others are willing to pay for it. There are many such memcoins, the most famous of which is Dogecoin (DOGE), which today has a market capitalization of $47 billion, ranking sixth among all cryptocurrencies. Szmul, who immigrated to the UK from Poland with his family, decided to stake his future on memecoin. In April, weeks before Jail Cat launched, he released his first video on his personal YouTube channel, dedicated to teaching others his secrets. Szmul claims that in just a few months, he made around $100,000 by building, buying, and selling these silly blockchain-based tokens. His most successful trades include: "Cat Poop Joystick", "Livemom" and "Sigma".(Note: Sigma is a slang term used in the masculinist subculture to refer to a popular, successful, yet highly independent man.) “This is not for the faint of heart,” said the 31-year-old memecoin trader says Rachael Sacks, who works for Berlin-based Web3 marketing agency Hype from her home in Charleston, South Carolina. Like Szmul, Sacks has a penchant for memes and holds about $110,000 in her MetaMask and Phantom wallets. "Sometimes I trade almost all day long," admits Sacks, who says it's not uncommon to lose $10,000 in a day. On the other side of the world, in Dubai, a 23-year-old YouTube star “K Crypto” claims to have made more than $1 million through emoji tokens. The most valuable token he built was “BrianWifHair,” a mockery of the famous bald head of Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase, the largest U.S. cryptocurrency exchange. "In about three or four hours, it reached a market value of a million dollars," he said, "and then it slowly disappeared like a bubble." Rachael Sacks' obsession with memecoin began in Bushwick, Brooklyn. "I'm bipolar and was born to do this. I'm used to the highs and lows." Welcome to the craziest and dumbest money-making craze in the cryptocurrency world. In the past, to build a new cryptocurrency, you had to have some math and programming skills. That is no longer the case. Anyone can use free, off-the-shelf software to create a memecoin with just a few mouse clicks. According to Estonian blockchain consultancy BDC, 40,000 to 50,000 new memecoins are created every day. By 2024, nearly 13 million memecoins have been created. What is the total market capitalization? About $100 billion. MarketVector’s Meme Coin Index, which tracks the performance of six major memecoins, has soared 215% this year, more than double Bitcoin’s 100% gain. Memecoin: Influence Marketing in Digital Assets Memecoin can be regarded as the digital asset version of influence marketing. Virality can create a cult following, causing market capitalization to skyrocket overnight.Take the token "Dogwifhat" built on Solana a year ago as an example. It is just a picture of a dog wearing a knitted hat. There was no business plan or technical white paper, just a low-cost website with a picture of a dog wearing a hat and a music video. In March, Binance decided to list the token, and its price soared. Dogwifhat currently has more than 190,000 holders, a market capitalization of $3.1 billion, and daily trading volume of approximately $3 billion, according to Singapore-based analytics platform Solscan. Memecoin speculation is not for the faint of heart. According to BDC, memecoin is 50 times more volatile than Bitcoin and is a breeding ground for fraud. About 40% of the projects are aimed at pumping and selling, and the other 30% are outright "scams" that simply take away the money. This is a place outside the law that is difficult to regulate. The situation is made worse by the addition of AI bots, which manipulate markets and cause wild price swings. If volatility doesn’t scare you yet, the lifespan of these coins might. BDC estimates that an average memecoin will only last 78 minutes before becoming worthless. "I know this is essentially a giant casino," K Crypto said, "but I wasted three years getting a useless degree (computer science) and then discovered that programmers can be replaced by AI." Pump .fun significantly lowers the barrier to entry for creating meme coins If there is a driving force behind this surreal economy, it is a memecoin factory called Pump.fun. Since launching in January, Pump.fun has helped ambitious crypto millionaires like Szmul and K Crypto create no less than 3 million new memecoins. The software is free to use: all it takes is a smart (or not) idea, a digital image, and a few clicks. Pump.fun is built on the Solana blockchain, which takes a 1% "transaction fee" on all memecoin transactions...

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