Original author: Frank, PANews
Recently, the MEME market seems to have entered a cooling-off period. As the market and hot money flowed to mainstream coins, there were no particularly outstanding MEME coins in the first half of December. Against this backdrop, a MEME coin called Fartcoin rose against the trend, breaking through $1 billion on December 18, becoming the king of the AI agent series MEME.
Unlike the previous hot social hot spots such as GOAT and Pnut, Fartcoin's rise seems to lack celebrity endorsements and social hot spots. This absurd cultural core is also difficult for many people to understand. PANews analyzed Fartcoin's social media popularity and the top 1,000 coin holding addresses, trying to explain how Fartcoin rose from zero to $1 billion.
The rise diverges from social media popularity.
The birth of Fartcoin and GOAT comes from the same source, both originating from the artificial agent model terminal of truths. During the dialogue between the goat model and opus, it was mentioned that Musk likes the sound of farting, so this AI model proposed to issue a token called Fartcoin and designed a series of promotional methods and gameplay. Fartcoin was thus born on October 18, slightly later than GOAT (October 11). From the perspective of social media attention, Fartcoin hit the peak of AI agent popularity. October 18 was precisely the peak period of social discussion about GOAT. While people were astonished by GOAT's crazy trend, they turned their attention to similar tokens, thereby giving Fartcoin natural attention during this period.
According to data from cryptohunt.ai, Fartcoin's official account has only 22,000 followers, while GOAT's Twitter account has 214,000 followers, a nearly 10-fold difference. Among them, the main change in Fartcoin's social media data occurred from 3 AM to 11 AM on November 16, when the number of Twitter followers surged to double, going from 7,634 to 13,294. The price change during this period rose by about 15%, without any obvious surge. Moreover, discussions about this token on social media were also limited, making this surge in followers somewhat suspicious.
Moreover, is the celebrity effect the main driver of Fartcoin? In fact, Fartcoin was hardly mentioned by any celebrities in its early days, and it was only after the market value surpassed $300 million that some media began to report on it. Marc Andreessen, the founder of the well-known venture capital firm a16z, retweeted a tweet about Fartcoin on December 13, which garnered 2.5 million views, but the token's price did not experience a surge as a result.
Regarding related tweets, on December 13 at 23:43, Solana Daily published a tweet about the top five AI MEME coins currently in vogue, with Fartcoin ranking first. This tweet received 525,000 views, and the price subsequently rose by about 10%, bringing the market value close to $800 million. However, this cannot be considered as media promotion driving the rise of the token.
In addition, the account with the most tweets and the highest overall views is DEGEN NEWS, which reported on the market value changes of Fartcoin multiple times between December 12 and 16. Each tweet had around 150,000 views and about 1,000 likes. In contrast, the official GOAT account's content easily surpassed 100,000 views. In comparison, the discussion about Fartcoin on social media can be described as relatively quiet. Therefore, the main driving force behind Fartcoin's rise might not stem from the heat and discussion on social media.
Sigil Fund may be the real driving force behind the scenes.
Among AI tokens with a market value exceeding $100 million, only GOAT and GRIFFAIN were born before Fartcoin. Therefore, in terms of timing, Fartcoin had a certain advantage. During its development, the rise of Fartcoin can be divided into several waves.
First wave: From October 18 to October 24, the market value rose to around $76 million, then fell back to around $20 million.
Second wave: From November 3 to November 22, the market value rose to around $400 million, then fell back to around $160 million.
Third wave: From December 8 to December 18, the market value exceeded $1 billion, becoming the highest market value AI MEME token.
In the aforementioned media popularity analysis, it can be found that during these rising phases, Fartcoin's social media frenzy did not occur simultaneously. Therefore, the main driving force behind Fartcoin is likely to be certain main funds.
PANews analyzed the initial buy and sell transaction data of the top 1,000 addresses holding Fartcoin and found that in the earliest buying addresses, a certain investment institution's presence was suspected.
During the investigation, PANews noticed that the address 4DPxYoJ5DgjvXPUtZdT3CYUZ3EEbSPj4zMNEVFJTd1Ts (hereinafter referred to as: 4 DPxY) started to make 700 buy operations of Fartcoin within a few days starting from October 18. It spent a total of $191,000 to purchase 12.02 million Fartcoin tokens.
Among the tokens of 4 DPxY, 7.4 million came from another address: FEeSRuEDk8ENZbpzXjn4uHPz3LQijbeKRzhqVr5zPSJ9 (hereinafter referred to as: FEeSR). The FEeSR address also conducted 400 buy operations to acquire a large number of tokens, ultimately transferring the tokens to the 4 DPxY address.
The Binance deposit address for FEeSR is 4 FM 7 D, and the initial funds for this address came from EsqEkirkY6s1RPsb3YaJZcP4APQz77BWmBAVCsbNNhpj (hereinafter referred to as: EsqEki). The EsqEki address has been marked on social media as the wallet address of Sigil Fund.
It is reported that Sigil Fund is a fully regulated investment fund focused on cryptocurrencies, decentralized projects, and digital assets. Established in 2018, it is an all-weather fund operated by cryptocurrency insiders.
In addition to the address association, Sigil Fund founder MrKvak has repeatedly expressed optimism about AI tokens and MEME coins on Twitter, and on December 13, he even proactively retweeted a tweet inquiring whether Sigil Fund held $30 million worth of Fartcoin.
By now, we can roughly conclude that Sigil Fund is likely the earliest capital layout for Fartcoin. In terms of timing, Sigil Fund's initial purchase time was on October 18, 2024, at 11:50:34, just 5 hours after Fartcoin went online, when its market value was only around $2 million. Sigil Fund's initial investment accounted for about one-tenth of the market value at that time. As of December 19, Sigil Fund had sold over $3 million worth of tokens, while the 4 DPxY address still holds a balance of $6.09 million worth of tokens.
Additionally, some other large holder addresses have also made substantial purchases recently using a quantitative distribution method, which will not be listed here one by one.
Dt51tQyWGNGp1eg8MDXK1tukJEDV9JfDE6f5PuBQaoAN
The earliest buying started on October 18, 2024, at 08:20:53, costing 3.2 SOL, purchasing 494,000 tokens. This address is suspected to be a profit address for a sandwich attack.
Large holders often buy during the low points, and recently many large holders have clustered in.
Through overall data analysis, we can see that the main addresses of Fartcoin are indeed not as early as previously analyzed by PNUT. Most of the main buying times are still concentrated in the beginning of this month. Especially in the past week, the willingness of large holders to enter has been strong.
Additionally, from the timing of large holders entering the market, it can be seen that these main players generally entered during the token's pullback phase, such as from November 1 to 3, November 18 to 20, and December 1 to 3; these peak periods of entry were all at the low points of the token's overall pullback. This also shows that true smart money might always be practicing the saying, 'When others panic, I enter the market.'
From the perspective of these large holders' buying costs, the average initial buying cost for the top 1,000 addresses is $0.48, and the average initial selling cost is $0.53. Of course, this only accounts for the first buy and sell and does not represent the total holding costs and profits of these large holders. However, from this average entry line, Fartcoin's market value at that time had already approached $500 million. For retail investors, this price range does not seem to be an ideal investment space.
As of the press release on December 20, Fartcoin's highest market value has surpassed $1.1 billion. Related thematic tokens seem to be starting to show a radiation effect. On December 19, a supporter of gold and silver (boomer) created the MEME coin UFD, named 'Unicorn Fart Dust' (meaning: viewing cryptocurrency as 'fart dust'), after listening to the success story of Fartcoin. As a social experiment, his intention was to prove that cryptocurrency has no value, but unexpectedly, this token's market value exceeded $250 million that day. This event added fuel to Fartcoin's popularity, and it seems to have accelerated the rise of Fartcoin's story.
Looking back at the rise of Fartcoin, it seems that MEME coins have begun to shift from being driven by social hot topics to being primarily driven by capital. For players who are keen on finding angles, such angles seem increasingly difficult to find and become harder to grasp. Overall, from being obscure to becoming well-known, the development process of Fartcoin appears to revolve around the word 'pump'. Of course, after the market value reached $1 billion, Fartcoin eventually met the social media frenzy, but at this point, the frenzy may no longer represent an opportunity.
