The following text is organized from the Twitter Space series #Dialogue with Traders, hosted by FC, founding partner of SevenX Ventures, Twitter @FC_0X0
This episode's guest: Honest Mr. Mai, Twitter @Michael_Liu93
Mr. Mai's MEME journey: After a five-minute hundred-fold profit, he became addicted to MEMEs
Before getting into Crypto, Mr. Mai followed a very 'orthodox' financial path: studying finance at university, then working as a banker on the sell side, and later moving to the buy side. On the buy side, he looked at the enterprise service track, where many blockchain founders wanted to do BAAS, which is Blockchain as a Service. It was also through this opportunity that he saw this new technology.
By 2020-2021, Mr. Mai officially entered the crypto industry, managing secondary positions for some traditional financial industry bosses, mainly in Bitcoin. From that time on, he began to spend a lot of time every day researching new things and looking for Alpha.
And Mr. Mai firmly believes that the Alpha of this cycle is MEMEs, so he personally spends 60% to 70% of his time on MEMEs, and he is also working with bosses from various traditional financial industries.
Becoming addicted to MEMEs stems from a trade that yielded a hundred times profit in just five minutes.
At that time, the market was speculating on Elon Musk's signature, and both Long Yi TROLL and Long Er ZUZALU had taken some positions. So which coin will become Long San? Mr. Mai and his friends felt there might be speculative space in Vitalik's signature, so they bought TCATI (Green Tea), a cat-themed MEME, at around a market cap of 20,000.
About five minutes after buying, this coin suddenly skyrocketed to a market cap of about one to two million, instantly turning a few hundred dollars in position into thirty or forty thousand dollars.
This is actually Mr. Mai's first real exposure to MEMEs. Although he only recouped his initial investment, this trading experience made him feel that 'MEMEs are really fun.'
Then he began to spend more time researching MEMEs, understanding MEMEs, and trading MEMEs, gradually developing his own trading strategy.
Why are strong big player markets more fun?
PVP trading is a typical game where no one helps each other; what everyone is competing for is actually who discovers a hot spot first, or who can create a hot spot, and get the bottom chips, then when they think it is a high point, they cover everyone and walk away with the profits.
In fact, the big player market is a game where retail investors and big players mutually empower each other. In the lifecycle of a MEME, if the big player wants to push the market cap higher, if they want to go on Binance, they need to use their funds to find Callers, to accumulate chips, wash chips, pump, create ads/news, and drive the hot spots.
If a big player is very good at doing these things, it means they are good at storytelling, have a large capital base, and have various relationships with Callers and exchanges. This situation becomes a win-win for both retail investors and big players.
So how do you determine if a market is a big player's market?
Mr. Mai provided a perspective: observe whether there is a deliberate Wash behavior in the wallets, that is, maintaining a price range for the same asset, quickly buying and selling within seconds. The purpose of the big player Wash wallet includes:
Can be marked as a new wallet by tool providers like GMGN
Disperse chips to prepare for a pump
However, with more and more information revealed by tool providers, the tactics of the big players are constantly changing. But this is good news for retail investors because the big players need to collect chips, giving them more time to prepare for a pump, allowing retail investors more time to identify which ones are strong big players.
How do big players operate a MEME on Solana?
Early stage: accumulate in the internal market, launch on the pump
Due to the market's 'anti-big player' sentiment after the capitalization of NEIRO, the big players will initially hide themselves, making MEME a project supposedly started by the community, and in the process, they begin to accumulate chips.
During the accumulation process of the internal market, the biggest enemy of the big players is Bots. There are now many Bots checking the Pump internal market volume; once they detect a new wallet buying (5-10 SOL), they will immediately follow up.
Once enough chips are accumulated, usually over 75%, they will launch on the Pump.
Mid-term: push volume in batches
First wave: launch. Find some Tier 3 and Tier 2 Callers, while coordinating with your market makers, pushing the market cap to the range of 5 million to 20 million, then quickly crash the price.
Second wave: explosive pump. Deploy the funds harvested from the first wave crash, usually all funds, market making, while looking for Tier 1 Callers to shout orders, causing a surge that prevents everyone from getting cheaper chips.
Later stage: go public on exchanges
Whether it can go public or go on Binance actually depends on luck; the big players are also watching their luck. If it goes smoothly on the exchange, the liquidity valve opens, and subsequent operations will align with the secondary market.
The market making after going public is mostly operated by Wintermute.
BAN and AI16Z are two very typical 'big player markets': the big players went through a very long accumulation phase in the early stage, made a big first wave pump, then crashed down, took enough market-making funds, and accumulated chips at the bottom, launching the second wave directly.
How to get into a strong big player market?
There are two strategies:
First, buy after the first wave ends and before the second wave starts.
At this stage, the big players are continuously accumulating at the bottom. If you find traces of their accumulation (mainly by observing wallets), you can follow up and buy.
Second, after the second wave starts, decisively chase.
At this stage, the big player is likely to find Tier 1 Callers to cooperate with the funds accumulated from the first wave crash, quickly pushing up the market cap and seeking to go public. Generally, once the second wave starts, real strong big players rarely allow the coin price to pull back even a little, giving retail investors a chance to enter. So if you observe that the second wave has started and has exceeded the first wave, you can chase high and buy.
Understand MEMEs using the logic of short videos
In May, when I talked about MEMEs with Zepump during #Dialogue with Traders, he mentioned a viewpoint that MEMEs are to VC coins what short videos are to long videos. Mr. Mai also strongly agrees with this logic and illustrated the 'commonalities' between short videos and MEMEs from the perspectives of 'hierarchy of demand' and 'evolution path.'
Let's first talk about the hierarchy of demand.
Why do young people, especially those born after 2000, willingly spend every day scrolling through short videos and MEMEs? Because they satisfy the deepest desires in their hearts:
Short videos satisfy lust and so-called 'laziness.' Young people's time is fragmented, and they have very little entertainment time, so they can only gain very brief pleasure by scrolling through Douyin.
MEMEs satisfy greed. Nowadays, young people generally feel that the threshold for achieving wealth is too high, so they are eager to take a gamble (to get rich quickly).
Now let's talk about the evolution path.
Short videos initially focused on UGC, user-generated content, but later you would find that few people were watching UGC anymore; everyone was watching PGC because the production quality of PGC is better.
In MEMEs, initially, everyone is a very naive CTO, but later they find that the big player market is more fun, as big players can push prices higher because they are essentially strong operators with significant financial power.
Ultimately, short videos and MEMEs are both markets that pay a lot of attention to the economy of attention.
In the super cycle of MEMEs, which coin will become the 'new king'?
Mr. Mai firmly believes that MEMEs have been established as a long-term thing. When we look back in two years, most of the MEMEs in this market today may have disappeared, but those that can persist will definitely be more, and there will certainly be a MEME that is more powerful than SHIB, and this MEME is likely already present in this market.
Which coin is likely to become the 'new king'?
First: $DOGE
The true leader in the MEME track, the 'BTC' of MEMEs. After Trump took office, DOGE is likely to be involved in an ETF.
Second: $PEPE
PEPE's strength lies in its early presence and its logic, which many Chinese people find difficult to understand. In fact, most of the projects that emerged on Ethereum are derivatives of PEPE, which has already become a consensus. It is currently very difficult to find a MEME in this cycle with such a strong consensus as PEPE.
Third: $WIF
Fourth: $POPCAT
$WIF VS $POPCAT, Mr. Mai is more optimistic about the latter. In fact, WIF has a particularly interesting point compared to POPCAT: even though WIF's market cap is double that of POPCAT, their pools are the same.
Now there are fewer people abroad discussing WIF with community and conspiracy group Callers; attention has shifted to POPCAT, which may also indicate a shift in capital.
What Callers should you pay attention to for playing MEMEs well?
Overseas:
Murad @MustStopMurad, Crash @CrashiusClay69, Mitch @idrawline, OverDose @Overdose_AI, Moneylord @moneyl0rd, Ansem @blknoiz06, Spidercrypto @SpiderCrypto0x
Chinese region:
First: Wizard @0xcryptowizard
The Wizard is a Builder; following him feels more stable because he continuously builds, and the projects he builds are all from a very good perspective.
Second: Magnolia @0xmagnolia
Sister Hat has written a lot of practical content, teaching everyone how to find MEMEs and how to win in this game. Moreover, Sister Hat often has a strong ability to catch hot spots, so she can serve as a good reference for where the hot spots might be.
Third: Timo @timotimoqi
Timo is a friend of Mr. Mai in real life; they were originally both investors, so their trading perspectives might be quite similar. The tweet about the eight questions to ask yourself before buying a MEME came from Timo 👉 https://x.com/timotimoqi/status/1847147614963486730
Recently, Timo may have called five or six projects, three of which went up over a hundred times.
Finally, I want to say that Callers have a problem: what might have been good a month ago might not be good a month later. For example, this person POE, everything he posted was particularly good, but after exploding in popularity over a month ago, he started calling various Rug pulls to harvest retail investors.
Although you don't know what really happened behind this, the lesson is: when looking at a Caller, you must look at the overall picture comprehensively. Still, it's similar to short videos; the Caller is just someone who recommends videos, not the one who makes you like them. The power of liking should still be in your hands.
In conclusion
I think the core of playing MEMEs is to find the stage and trading methods within your capabilities. In fact, no matter when you enter the market, you can always find your opportunities in MEMEs, which is the most interesting aspect of MEMEs in this cycle.
