MOODENG, SPX, GOAT... In this meme craze, the emergence of big golden dogs gradually pushed the name Moonshot to the eyes of crypto players. This new product, which was launched not long ago, has become the "Binance of memes" in people's mouths after three months of quiet building. This mobile application with its own "buy memes with fiat currency" narrative seems to have become a floodgate in the meme track, and is regarded by players in the circle as the key driving force for the rise of all big golden dogs.
On the other hand, Moonshotâs explosion in popularity was so sudden that many meme players still know very little about it. What did Moonshot do right in the months before its rise? Is it really the ultimate gateway to money and traffic in the meme track as people say?
How to be a Golden Dog Pusher
Moonshot was launched on July 18. Less than a week after its launch, Murad, who had not yet delivered a meme supercycle speech at Token 2049, tweeted to introduce Moonshot and attached an interactive demonstration video of Moonshot. "I am not involved in this project in any way, but startups like Moonshot will drive the Memecoin supercycle to become even bigger. Their users do not need to know anything about wallets or blockchains, just one click, just like paying to upgrade an iPhone game."
Moonshot launched many tokens at the beginning, but its influence did not spread beyond the circle until it encountered MOODENG, whose market value had not yet increased significantly. When MOODENG was launched, Moonshot did not post a special tweet for it. After MOODENG continued to rise, the official tweeted "The increase after listing" was constantly updated. On September 26, Moonshot posted a tweet "Moonshot's highest trading volume day ever" with a MOODENG hippopotamus emoticon.
On September 27, Moonshot popped up a message saying that MOODENG had achieved a 100-fold increase since it was listed on the app, and also launched a vote to "change Moonshot's name to MOODENG." On the other hand, MOODENG's official Twitter account often recommends the community to use Moonshot to purchase tokens on its homepage.
Dune data shows that from September 24 to September 28, the market value of MOODENG quickly increased from about US$100 million to about US$300 million, while the daily fee of Moonshot quickly increased from about US$3,681 to US$24,000, and the number of daily trading users increased from 396 to 3,458.
When MOODENG was promoting Moonshot, Murad was giving his "memecoin supercycle" speech at the Token2049 conference in Singapore and calling for $SPX6900. Since the beginning of September, the market value of SPX6900 has risen from less than $9 million to $900 million in one month. Moonshot had already listed SPX6900 before Murad gave his speech, and its market value was less than $30 million at the time.
After hitting the big golden dog, Moonshot really started to have the "currency listing effect". The meme coin project also hopes to be listed on Moonshot. The meme coin APU on Ethereum started to rise from a market value of about 60 million US dollars in early September. When the increase was about 2.5 times and the market value reached about 150 million US dollars, APU announced on October 6 that it would be listed on Moonshot and would cross the chain from Ethereum to Solana chain through Wormhole. After that, APU continued to rise, and the market value was 330 million US dollars at the time of writing.
Although the "mutual achievement" with MOODENG has brought Moonshot rapid development, the daily fee has risen rapidly from $3,700 at the end of September to $32,000 last weekend, and the number of daily trading users has also increased from more than 300 to an average of nearly 4,000. However, since MOODENG, the number of Moonshot users has not increased significantly, and the daily fee has even experienced a period of decline. In the meme market dominated by emotions, Moonshot brings memes more popularity than trading volume.
Last week, AI meme coins became popular, and $GOAT, with a market value of over $500 million, was launched. For related reading, see (Behind the GOAT explosion, the hype expectations and concerns of AI memeïœ100x review). Moonshot announced the launch of the coin when GOAT's trading volume suddenly increased and started to climb from the bottom. It accompanied GOAT from a market value of less than $40 million to $500 million, and the market once again witnessed the "magic" of Moonshot.
However, from the perspective of "currency listing effect", the transaction volume on Moonshot accounts for a small proportion of the total transaction volume of meme coins. At 1 a.m. today, Moonshot launched the meme coin slop. According to Dune data as of around 1 p.m., the transaction volume of slop on Moonshot was $110,000, while according to Dexcreener data, the total transaction volume of slop during this period was $46 million, which means that Moonshot contributed 0.2% of slop's transaction volume.
From the chart, we can see that after the Moonshot news was released, Slop increased by nearly 20% in half an hour, but it started to fall after reaching a market value of 50 million US dollars. The current market value is 25.48 million US dollars, which is nearly halved from its high point.
Pump.fun, the perfect partner for MoonPay
What many people donât know is that Moonpay and Pump.fun are actually âfellow studentsâ, both incubated by Alliance DAO, and have taken a step further on the road of âcrypto new retailâ. Alliance DAO founding partner QW once talked about Moonshotâs market opportunity in a podcast, saying that âthere are not enough retail gambling scenarios in the market.â
Of course, finding the right direction is not the only reason for Moonshot's success. What makes it better than its senior Pump.fun is the effort it put into user experience.
One of the incubation principles of Alliance is that when developing crypto products, we should not only focus on blockchain technology itself, but also ensure that our products can provide the same smooth and simple onboarding experience as those traditional Internet applications that are already very mature and have excellent user experience. Imran Khan, founding partner of Alliance DAO, once tweeted that the competitors of crypto products are not just other crypto applications, but the user onboarding experience of traditional Web2 applications.
The day after Moonshot went online, it reached a cooperation with MoonPay. Moonshot's product highlights such as "fiat currency purchase, Applepay payment" all benefited from MoonPay's functions.
In terms of fees, users have to pay extra fees on Moonshot in two categories: one is charged by Moonshot officials during the transaction process, and the other is charged by its partner MoonPay during the deposit and withdrawal process. The former covers network fees (gas fees) and management fees. A 2.5% handling fee (between US$0.3 and US$6.25) is charged for transactions below US$250, and a 1% handling fee is charged for transactions exceeding US$250.
For details on MoonPay's fee collection mechanism, please refer to the official description. The deposit and withdrawal fees for purchases made using PayPal are 4.5% and 3.4% respectively. As for the payment function of Apple Pay, MoonPay began exploring it as early as 2022.
In addition to MoonPay, non-custodial wallet Turnkey is also a partner of Moonshot. According to the article published by TrunKey, after the user logs in to Moonshot, Turnkey will create a non-custodial wallet in the background, and the user only needs to register with an email or biometric technology (such as Face ID) to easily verify the transaction.
Alliance DAO, which incubated Pump.fun, controls the product direction, MoonPay is responsible for the payment side, and TurnKey is responsible for the wallet side. The "first application that can easily trade meme coins with Apple Pay" made a stunning appearance, which is a natural result if you think about it carefully.
Moonshot's official description lists specific listing criteria that have not been publicly stated, but mentions that "generally, the total 24-hour trading volume of the token must reach approximately $1 million." Moonshot listed many coins in its early days, including MAGA, SCF, SPX6900, MUMU, and other less well-known meme coins, and its "out-of-the-box work" is MOODENG.
Obviously, in terms of product experience, Moonshot has met Alliance's ideal standards. Imran even proudly stated that many current founders of consumer startups have taken Moonshot's user onboarding experience as a benchmark or model for their learning.
The fiat currency meme market already has competitors
As a newcomer in the payment industry, Moonshot has taken advantage of the meme bull market. Moonshot uses fiat currency payment as a breakthrough to further simplify the threshold for users to enter the meme market. Moonshot's success lies not only in providing a more efficient transaction experience, but also in providing a new path for mass adoption for industry development.
Of course, Moonshot will not be left alone in the fiat currency meme segment. A fiat currency meme payment product that competes with Moonshot has also appeared in the market: Prerich.
Prerich is an application that simplifies on-chain transactions. It has a slogan similar to Moonshot, "Buy memecoins with ease!" Prerich provides a user-friendly interface similar to Robinhood, allowing users to conduct fast and efficient on-chain transactions. Users can also log in with email and credit cards. Prerich's unique meme design interface has also become one of the factors that attract community users.
However, the listing effect of Prerich is far inferior to that of Moonshot, and it has not produced any golden dogs like Moondeng and GOAT. In addition to differentiated meme icon marketing, if Prerich wants to surpass Moonshot, it needs to continue to launch golden dogs for support.
As long as the Crypto meme carnival continues, there will be more innovative products in the payment track. In terms of fiat currency payment, moonshot has opened up a larger space for mass adoption after taking the lead.
Moonshot is the Binance of the Meme world. In addition to bringing huge liquidity and wealth-creating effects to the memes on the chain, its products are closer to the Web2 model and are also quietly changing later entrepreneurs.
