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 deviates from social media popularity.
Fartcoin's birth and GOAT originate from the same source, coming 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. Therefore, this AI model proposed to issue a token called Fartcoin and designed a series of promotional methods and gameplay. Fartcoin was born on October 18, slightly later than GOAT (October 11). From the perspective of social media attention, Fartcoin seems to have hit the trend of AI agents, with October 18 being the peak period of social discussion about GOAT. While people were astonished by GOAT's crazy performance, they turned their attention to similar tokens, and Fartcoin thus gained natural attention during this period.
According to data from cryptohunt.ai, in terms of total followers, Fartcoin's official account has only 22,000 followers, while GOAT's Twitter account has 214,000 followers, with a nearly 10-fold difference. Among them, the main change in Fartcoin's social media data is that from November 16 at 3 AM to 11 AM, the Twitter follower count surged by 100%, from 7,634 followers to 13,294 followers instantly. The price change during this period rose by about 15%, which is not considered a significant surge. Additionally, there has not been much discussion about the token on social media, making this increase in follower count somewhat suspicious.
Additionally, is the celebrity effect the main driver of Fartcoin? In fact, Fartcoin was hardly mentioned by any celebrities in its early stages, until its market cap surpassed 300 million USD, when some media began to report it. Marc Andreessen, founder of the renowned venture capital firm a16z, retweeted a post about Fartcoin on December 13, which had 2.5 million views, but the token's price did not experience a surge as a result.
From related tweets, on December 13 at 23:43, Solana Daily posted a tweet about the top five AI MEME coins currently attracting attention, with Fartcoin ranking first. This tweet received 525,000 views, and subsequently, the price rose by about 10%, bringing the market cap close to 800 million USD. However, this cannot be considered as media promotion driving the token's rise.
Moreover, the account with the most tweets and overall highest views related to this topic is DEGEN NEWS, which reported several times on Fartcoin's market cap changes between December 12 and 16. Each tweet garnered around 150,000 views and about 1,000 likes. The official GOAT account's content easily surpassed 100,000 views. In contrast, discussions about Fartcoin on social media can be described as quite sparse. Therefore, the main driving force behind Fartcoin's rise may not originate from social media popularity and discussion.
Sigil Fund may be the true driving force behind it.
Among AI tokens with a market cap exceeding 100 million USD, only GOAT and GRIFFAIN were created before Fartcoin. Therefore, in terms of timing, Fartcoin had a certain advantage. During its development, Fartcoin's rise can be divided into several waves:
First wave: From October 18 to October 24, the market cap rose to around 76 million, then fell back to around 20 million USD.
Second wave: From November 3 to November 22, the market cap rose to around 400 million USD, then fell back to around 160 million USD.
Third wave: From December 8 to December 18, the market cap surpassed 1 billion USD, becoming the highest market cap AI MEME token.
In the aforementioned analysis of media popularity, it can be observed 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 key funds.
PANews analyzed the trading content of the top 1000 addresses holding Fartcoin and discovered that a certain investment institution likely appeared among the earliest buying addresses.
During the investigation, PANews noticed that the address 4DPxYoJ5DgjvXPUtZdT3CYUZ3EEbSPj4zMNEVFJTd1Ts (hereinafter referred to as: 4DPxY) began making 700 buying operations of Fartcoin within a few days starting from October 18. A total of 190,000 USD was spent to purchase 12.02 million Fartcoin tokens.
Among the tokens of 4DPxY, 7.4 million come from another address: FEeSRuEDk8ENZbpzXjn4uHPz3LQijbeKRzhqVr5zPSJ9 (hereinafter referred to as: FEeSR). The FEeSR address also used 400 buying operations to acquire a large number of tokens, which were eventually transferred to the 4DPxY address.
The Binance recharge address of FEeSR is 4FM7D, with initial funds coming from EsqEkirkY6s1RPsb3YaJZcP4APQz77BWmBAVCsbNNhpj (hereinafter referred to as: EsqEki). The EsqEki address is marked on social media as the wallet address of Sigil Fund.
It is reported that Sigil Fund is a fully regulated investment fund focusing on cryptocurrencies, decentralized projects, and digital assets. Established in 2018, it is an all-weather fund operated by crypto insiders.
In addition to address associations, Sigil Fund's founder MrKvak has repeatedly expressed optimism about the AI token MEME coin on Twitter and even actively retweeted a post on December 13 asking whether Sigil Fund held 30 million USD in Fartcoin.
At this point, we can roughly conclude that Sigil Fund is very likely to be the earliest capital involved in Fartcoin's layout. From a timing perspective, Sigil Fund's initial purchase was on 10-18-2024 at 11:50:34, just 5 hours after Fartcoin's launch, when its market cap was around 2 million USD. Sigil Fund's initial investment accounted for about one-tenth of the market cap at that time. As of December 19, Sigil Fund had sold over 3 million USD worth of tokens, and the 4DPxY address still holds a balance of 6.09 million USD in tokens.
Additionally, some other large addresses have also been buying in large quantities recently using a quantitative distribution method, which will not be listed here one by one.
Dt51tQyWGNGp1eg8MDXK1tukJEDV9JfDE6f5PuBQaoAN
Buying started as early as 10-18-2024 at 08:20:53, spending 3.2 SOL to purchase 494,000 coins. This address is suspected to be the profit address of a sandwich attack.
Large holders often buy in during low periods, and recently many large holders have gathered to enter the market.
Through overall data analysis, we can see that Fartcoin's main addresses are not, in fact, as early to enter as PNUT previously analyzed. Most of the main buying time is still concentrated at the beginning of this month. Especially in the past week, the willingness of large holders to enter has been strong.
Additionally, looking at the timing of large holders entering, it can be seen that these key entry peaks mostly occurred during the token's pullback phases, such as from November 1 to 3, November 18 to 20, December 1 to 3, etc. These peaks all coincided with the overall pullback to low points. This also illustrates that true smart money may indeed be practicing the saying, 'When others panic, I enter.'
From the buying costs of these large holders, the average initial buying cost of the top 1000 addresses is 0.48 USD, and the average initial selling cost is 0.53 USD. Of course, this only counts the first buy and sell and does not represent all the holding costs and profits of these large holders. However, based on this average entry line, Fartcoin's market cap had already approached 500 million USD at that time. For retail investors, this price range does not seem to be an ideal investment space.
As of the time of writing on December 20, Fartcoin's highest market cap had already surpassed 1.1 billion USD. Related thematic tokens also seem to be experiencing a ripple effect. On December 19, a supporter of gold and silver (boomer) created the MEME coin 'Unicorn Fart Dust' (interpreted as viewing cryptocurrency as 'fart dust') after hearing about Fartcoin's success, intending to prove that cryptocurrency is worthless. Unexpectedly, this token's market cap surpassed 250 million USD on the same day. This event added more fuel to Fartcoin's popularity and seems to have accelerated Fartcoin's rise.
Looking back at Fartcoin's rise, it seems we see that MEME coins have begun to shift from being driven by social hotspots to being primarily capital-driven. For players who are keen on finding angles, such angles seem increasingly difficult to find and will be harder to grasp. Overall, from being unknown to becoming famous, Fartcoin's development process seems to revolve around the term 'pump.' Of course, after the market cap reached 1 billion USD, Fartcoin eventually welcomed a wave of social media frenzy, but by then, this frenzy may no longer represent opportunities.
