The birth of PumpFun has greatly lowered the threshold for token issuance, and traders no longer have to worry about the various contract security issues like being blacklisted or encountering dubious contracts; they only need to assess the chip structure.
The points for criticism are, first, the rough and shoddy assembly line entrepreneurship with no cost, and second, the easy accessibility of bottom chips, which can easily create massive selling pressure in the early stages. Both factors lead to a short lifecycle for most projects and create a PVP environment, humorously referred to as 'the trenches' in the English-speaking community.
The first wave of brilliance from PumpFun comes from the combination of trending events and Meme coins. The first batch of leading tokens are either easily spreadable animals or timely hot topics. Players with sharp instincts have become the first winners.
Problems soon follow. It is actually quite hard to determine whether Zhang San's dog or Li Si's cat is cuter, which meme is better between the second and fifth on TikTok's hot list, and 'First is first' has been overturned by later-arriving conspiratorial groups. In the end, it comes down to competing in funds, volume, and controlling the supply for price manipulation – the advantages for retail investors gradually diminish.
The emergence of AI agent-related tokens is reversing everything. From financial, narrative, and application perspectives, this is a rapidly growing track. The previous scenario where homogeneous Meme coins drained each other has been replaced by a scene of various subcategories vying for dominance and progressing together.
Debating what level of AI technology exists in Web2 is meaningless; otherwise, it becomes even more incoherent for public chains that have issued tokens but are empty shells with valuations in the hundreds of millions. It remains unexplained how a metaverse that has yet to be truly realized could explode in popularity in 2021. The objective fact is that in less than three months, several hundreds of millions and dozens of tens of millions in market cap AI-related tokens have emerged, and well-known Web2 developers have begun to get involved.
Out of convenience or to win community favor, most of these projects use PumpFun to launch tokens, allowing retail investors to have a substantial chance of acquiring chips at market caps of several hundred K or even lower, which was hard to imagine before. The two leading protocol tokens, Virtuals and AI16Z, broke through 4B and 2B market caps respectively without any top-tier exchanges listing their spot markets.
This may very well be the beginning of the paradigm shift from CEX to DEX. When the great Peng rises with the wind, it soars up to ninety thousand miles. A grassroots storm has begun to sweep across the chain.