The birth of PumpFun has significantly lowered the threshold for token issuance, and traders no longer need to worry about various contract security issues like being blacklisted or other complexities; they just need to assess the chip structure.
The points criticized about it are, firstly, the shoddy and costless assembly line entrepreneurial schemes, and secondly, the ease of acquiring bottom chips, which can easily create massive selling pressure in the early stages. Both factors lead to a short lifespan for most projects and create a PVP environment, humorously referred to as 'the trenches' in English-speaking circles.
The first wave of brilliance from PumpFun comes from the combination of trending events and Meme coins. The first batch of leading tokens is either easily spreadable various animals or timely hot topics, making players with keen senses the first winners.
Problems follow closely behind. It is actually difficult to determine whether Zhang San's dog or Li Si's cat is cuter, or which meme from the TikTok hot list, second or fifth, is better. 'First is first' has been overturned by later-arriving conspiratorial groups, and in the end, it boils down to competing in terms of funds, volume, and control of chips for pump and dump, gradually diminishing the advantage of retail investors.
The emergence of AI agent-related tokens is reversing all of this. In terms of funding, narrative, and application, this is a rapidly developing track. The situation of homogenized Memes draining each other has been replaced by a scene where various subcategories compete and advance simultaneously.
Debating the level of AI technology in Web3 compared to Web2 is pointless. Otherwise, public chains that issue tokens but remain empty with valuations in the hundreds of millions cannot reconcile their existence. It is also inexplicable why a truly unproven metaverse could explode in popularity in 2021. The objective fact is that in just under three months, several AI-related tokens with market caps in the hundreds of millions and dozens with tens of millions have emerged, and well-known Web2 developers are starting to get involved.
For convenience or to win community favor, most of these projects adopt PumpFun to launch tokens, giving retail investors numerous opportunities to acquire chips at market caps of several hundred K or even lower, which was previously unimaginable. The two leading protocol tokens, Virtuals and AI16Z, have surpassed market caps of 4B and 2B respectively without any top-tier exchanges listing them.
This may be the beginning of a paradigm shift from CEX to DEX. With the wind rising, the giant penguin soars to great heights, and a grassroots storm has already swept across the chain.