The market goes up and down. In July, BTC and ETH, which dominated the market, rebounded quickly after another price drop, completing a new short-term bottom.
In this rebound, we will find that each track in the entire industry has performed well, whether it is the old concept of public chain, L2 or Bitcoin ecology, Memecoin or AI.
However, by comparing the extent of the price rebound of tokens in various tracks, it can be concluded that the tracks with Meme or Memecoin attributes are the strongest. For example, PEPE, WIF, FLOKI and even WEN, the outstanding Meme projects in this cycle, are all rebounding rapidly.
At the same time, Forbes also announced the list of the top 10 cryptocurrencies with a market value of more than $1 billion in the first half of 2024, including WIF, PEPE, ASI, FLOKI, JASMY, AR, CORE, TON, BGB and BONK. Among these tokens, Memecoin occupies 4 lists, and 3 belong to the Solana ecosystem, which reflects the inevitable trend of the ecosystem and Meme complementing each other in this cycle.
In the last cycle of Solana ecosystem, Defi was the most successful, while Memecoin was mostly on BSC or Ethereum. In this round, Solana’s high-speed public chain advantage is the best, and the public chain founding team and key ecological projects are trying Meme, making Meme almost as important as Defi. Or it can be said that Solana’s achievements are almost derived from Meme.
The next question that needs to be considered is that the development of Meme is very volatile. Due to the characteristics of Meme, it will have a negative impact on ecological liquidity and user enthusiasm. For investors, they need to find the next public chain ecosystem that can provide a growth environment for Meme and replicate its experience.
The answer is none other than TON. So how can we find opportunities in the rules of both TON and Meme?
Memecoin is the king of popularity this cycle
The Meme track began to show its prominence in the last cycle, when BSC began to promote high-speed on-chain DEX. On the public chain with fast transaction confirmation speed, the permissionless feature of DEX was fully utilized, and Meme tokens with personal IP or publicly known animal images as the main body of the project continued to appear. These tokens have become the most eye-catching presence in the secondary market with the help of Meme culture and the characteristics of "heating up" with cryptocurrency.
Although the "Zoo" token became famous at this time, after the popularity faded, Meme became the main representative of behaviors such as no owner and no responsibility, easy to run away, huge losses and huge profits.
When the potential of Meme needed to be justified, tokens such as Doge, Shib, and People appeared. Through market rendering, these tokens became projects with "potential" market value management entities, community culture, and strong operations, and completely added a Meme track to the industry.
In the new cycle, Memecoin not only continues these characteristics of the previous period, but also has more mature ideas and operating methods. Let’s take Solana as an example. The Solana ecosystem started in the third quarter of 2023. Unlike the growth in the previous cycle, in 2 years, the Defi infrastructure of the Solana ecosystem has been very complete, and the ecological development goal has obviously changed from the number of projects to the ecological transaction volume and popularity.
At this time, it seemed that the entire ecosystem began to work together on Meme. First, on Solana's DEX, a very complete process of Meme coin issuance and trading, liquidity supply, etc. was spontaneously formed, such as various liquidity sharing platforms, DEX's robot market-making tools, etc. Secondly, Solana's founder and team publicly supported certain Memes, and top projects such as Jupiter implemented the extremely popular national Meme coin airdrop during the Meme craze, and subsequent Meme projects also followed suit.
With the combined effect of Meme's powerful rendering capabilities and Solana's ecosystem popularity, Solana has returned to the top of the industry. Tokens in the ecosystem, especially Meme tokens, have staged legends of tenfold and hundredfold increases, and most projects have extremely high valuations. Now, the expectations of these returns are slowly shifting to the next target in the minds of investors - TON.
TON’s Meme Gene
In the growth experience of the Meme project and ecological integration, Meme has always been used as a thermometer of ecological heat. For example, Solana's popularity and on-chain transaction volume continue to remain high. The main reason is that under the influence of frequent fluctuations in BTC and ETH, Meme tokens can rebound strongly after BTC and ETH stabilize briefly. Among them, WIF is a very good example.
Furthermore, Meme creators are constantly creating new projects following new hot spots, and constantly using the method of "stirring up heat" to keep the token gains in DEX. Almost all Meme projects that join in the very early stage can achieve multiple increases, and "myths" continue to appear, so investors naturally flock to them.
We can also find that the public chain ecosystem and Meme complement each other, and the attention and traffic of the entire ecosystem will be mostly concentrated on a certain Meme in a certain period of time. Therefore, the fame of Memecoin is an achievement jointly created by all roles such as the public chain team, public chain projects, and public chain users.
At this breakthrough point, the performance of Meme on TON may be even more outstanding in the future.
Memecoin features strong community culture and a wide range of users. The trading enthusiasm and liquidity brought by these two factors can quickly create a top-ranked project market value. TON's users based on Telegram have a natural advantage that far exceeds other public chains.
TON's Notcoin achieved success based on the characteristics of Meme. Although Notcoin is a Gamecoin in nature, due to its wide user range and viral popularity, Notcoin has been widely regarded by users as a Memecoin. Subsequently, a large number of tokens imitating Notcoin have appeared.
Or we can say that Memecoin has been integrated into a new form on TON - other types of tokens with strong Meme characteristics. This has also successfully expanded the boundaries of the Meme track on TON to a larger range, which may include cultural Memes, game-type Memes, conceptual Memes and even tool-type Memes.
The TON official is also constantly promoting the development of Meme.
Starting in 2024, TON officials are using TON token rewards to encourage users to trade tokens on applications and use Defi in the form of an open league. After the third open league (season 2), Memecoin accounted for more than 30% of the final list of trading projects. Therefore, the TON Foundation also listed Meme tokens as an important booster category in the rule description.
During the entire Open League, the Foundation has distributed about $40 million worth of TON, and in the final list, Meme tokens accounted for more than 40%. The number of participants in Memecoin and other types of tokens has continued to rise. In the fifth season currently underway, Memecoin accounts for nearly 50%.
On Solana, the rampant growth of Meme is driven by multiple factors, including the popularity of the ecosystem, the technical foundation, and the number of users. The same is true for Meme on TON. Under the leadership of the TON Foundation, Meme will also grow after the development of applications on TON is light enough. In addition, due to the large number of small and medium-sized projects on TON, these Meme projects have also begun to use ecological partners and tool-type and platform-type projects to assist project operations on TON.
Meme track’s target pool on TON
There are already many memes on TON, but if we screen them based on the characteristics of memes that have successful precedents in the market, there are several main ideas that can be used as screening factors.
First, it is related to TON officials and major projects.
About three weeks ago, an application based on the concept of TON founder’s pet was launched. The application will airdrop tokens to users based on the time they joined Telegram. In the past, Solana founder’s pet meme has achieved outstanding results. This time, TON founder’s pet meme seems to lead a new round of meme popularity. Similarly, many official memes of projects are the same, such as Jupiter’s mascot cat-themed Memecoin WEN, which has both high liquidity and price performance after launch.
Second, open up star projects in the league.
After Notcoin went online, its transaction volume in the open league has always been among the best, and few projects can surpass Notcoin. Similarly, in the season competition indicators, those tokens that rank high in growth and transaction volume are all relatively outstanding projects.
For example, in the first open league, which is the test league before the official season, in addition to Defi and Gamefi tokens, JETTON and Fish are typical Meme representatives. JETTON is named after the TON token contract and has certain native advantages in ecological culture. Fish is a token with better Meme design. Since the beginning of the season, the prices of both have performed well.
JETTON has achieved good rankings in all subsequent open league seasons. For this reason, as the season progresses, JETTON's K-line performance also has a clear rotation feature.
JETTON price performance in recent months
Third, the endless emergence of new talents.
In a growing ecosystem, new meme projects have advantages that old projects cannot match, and new projects may quickly grow into season star projects. In other ecosystems, new projects have a tendency to keep moving forward in terms of expectations and community popularity, which confirms the characteristics of "stirring up the heat". For example, recently, various memes have emerged in an endless stream due to the US election, and the price myths continue.
Season 5 Open League Leaderboards
In the TON ecosystem, we can take the top ten projects in the fifth season as an example. Among the 10 projects, Notcoin is the hottest TON project recently, ranking 54th in the cryptocurrency market value. Among the remaining tokens, JETTON, WALL, DFC, HYDRA, and COFE are all star projects that have ranked high in recent open league seasons. The development time of the projects themselves is relatively new. With the attention and support in the league, the recent K-line performance has good data.
From the perspective of price, TONG, which ranks third (previously second), has achieved a three-fold increase during the latest season, and its promotion of on-chain TVL and growth is also relatively good. Compared with the old face JETTON, TONG's community popularity comes from the feeling and understanding of "pain" in Eastern culture. The naming is more in line with the influence of Eastern culture going overseas, and it cleverly takes advantage of the international popularity of Chinese culture. What is even more different from other memes is that TONG is actually issued in the form of IDO, and uses some liquidity management functions of DEX on TON, such as 30% for liquidity, 100,000 TON raised in IDO will form an initial liquidity pool, and 40% will be linearly allocated to the liquidity mining plan in DEX.
For Meme, there are many projects that have achieved excellent results by issuing through IDO and then conducting refined liquidity management. For example, Jupiter's WEN is the first IDO project on Jupiter, but WEN chose full circulation and directly used DEX and CEX to manage liquidity.
Or IQ50, PUMP, etc. that Bakerswap has continuously launched. The allocation rules were determined when the IDO platform was launched, and early liquidity support and later liquidity management were provided.
TONG short-term price performance
There are a large number of Meme projects, and new ones are constantly emerging, which means that their own size cannot directly become tokens such as Doge. However, for Memecoin, popularity is value, attention is value, and all factors that are conducive to increasing user purchasing power may be the best influencing factors.
For the projects participating in the league, all the driving forces in the ecosystem in the short term are gathered together. Therefore, projects such as TONG can maintain the same data as early excellent projects such as JETTON and WALL. If they have a good competition result, they may break the threshold of dissemination in the future and become high-quality memes.
Final Thoughts
The popularity of TON no longer needs to be verified, but for the Meme track, the characteristics of TON will allow the Memes on TON to start again.
Under the clear rules of the Meme track, TON, as a carrier, is a good ecological soil. However, in the past few public chains, the infrastructure of the public chain itself and the explosion of Meme are complementary. Meme needs token issuance, token liquidity supply, wallet tools, etc. On TON, it also needs to comply with Telegram's front end. This is also the reason why Meme cannot be developed in large quantities on TON at present.
TON's technology and development tools still need education and simplification for developers. However, we have seen that TON has a token contract Jetton, DEX STON, Dedust, etc., as well as launchpads such as TonUP and middleware platforms such as LayerPixel that can provide projects with token front-ends and issuance. After simplifying the overall difficulty of token operations, the Meme project can actually go online faster and enter the mature stage of liquidity supply faster, and more clear opportunities will emerge.
So, right now, if you are also looking for memes on TON like you are looking for memes on Solana, then the above methods are definitely feasible. However, you must always keep in mind the characteristics of meme virality and hype. Only with the popularity of TON and the virality of Telegram can you find the right target and the opportunity for you to succeed in one fell swoop.
