Original author: Joyce, Rhythm
Reprinted: Koala, Mars Finance
On the evening of September 5, OKX and Binance launched NEIRO contracts, and the price of NEIRO skyrocketed, with the highest increase of 6 times in two days. In an instant, the two "dogs" with the same market value have now jumped to 150M while one has a market value of 25M. After simply collecting the information of uppercase and lowercase Neiro, we can see the dramatic story of the two "conspiracy groups" behind it, as well as the consensus crisis that is emerging in the meme field.
Vitalik's popularity + "CTO push", Neiro was originally a Nirvana story
Unlike NEIRO, which rose as soon as it opened and reached a market value of 10M in just one hour, Neiro collapsed as soon as it opened and took more than a week to reach 10M. Later, NEIRO's market value rose all the way to 290 million US dollars, but it was soon revealed that 78% of the addresses were used for insider trading, which was the largest insider trading in the meme world, and then it fell all the way.
The "resurrection" of lowercase Nerio came from an accident. When the Neiro token was launched, the initial deployment team transferred 17.1 billion Neiros to Vitalik's address, accounting for 4% of the total. This marketing method is very common in the meme community. In order to increase the attractiveness of tokens, many meme coin project owners or holders will transfer part of the tokens to famous figures in the crypto community or famous caller addresses in the meme community, and then publicize their holdings in the community to attract other traders to buy tokens.
On August 4, the Neiro team “First Neiro on Ethereum” published a tweet promoting themselves, “We are the people’s $Neiro, on the people’s chain, Ethereum. Also fun fact: Vitalik Buterin is currently our largest holder. (4% of the supply, worth about $130,000 as of the time of this post)”
This "prank marketing" tweet did not have much effect on pulling up the price, but on August 5, Vitalik suddenly sold all the meme coins he had received before and exchanged them for 200 ETH, including 44.4 ETH in exchange for 17.1 billion Neiros, which directly caused Neiro to plummet by 60%.
Vitalik did not post this news on his Twitter homepage, but announced it under Neiro’s original official Twitter account @Neiro_Dog (now cancelled). Therefore, Neiro was labeled "Vitalik personally replied to the tweet". This wave of popularity brought Neiro an 800% increase in 4 hours.
Later, Neiro's current CTO team @neiroethcto added a comment under Vitalik's reply, saying that the Neiro team that airdropped the tokens no longer operates the project, and the token deployer abandoned the project a few hours after launching it, and now it has been taken over by the community. But after a wave of increases due to Vitalik's reply, Neiro fell by more than 90% in the following week. From August 13 to August 17, Neiro rose nearly 50 times, while NEIRO fell 44% during the same period, falling to its lowest point, with a market value of 34M.
But not long after the second reset, materials about "Neiro's push" gradually appeared on social media. At that time, many KOLs tweeted that they had not seen such a meme with a well-organized team and cohesive community for a long time.
Neiro has not been listed on CEX yet, and its Twitter posts mainly include local community dynamics and donations made by the CTO team to charitable organizations; NEIRO has been listed on Bybit, and its Twitter posts include cooperation dynamics with various large and small DeFi protocols. In a sense, both of them have strong "community" energy.
The market is growing wildly, and trading platforms act as "national football referees"
However, in this situation, OKX and Binance launched NEIRO contracts last night, and the price of "capital dog" skyrocketed, with the highest increase of 6 times in two days. In an instant, the two dogs, which originally had the same market value, now have a market value of 25M and the other market value has jumped to 150M.
What’s more interesting is that readers who have read the Lvdong Evening News in recent days should have found that two days before the official announcement of the NEIRO contract launch, NEIRO and Neiro kept appearing in the daily token price rise and fall list, with the former rising and the latter falling. Now it seems that many people have already received the news and made arrangements in advance.
Last Thursday, Nerio fell below the oscillating upward space, and NEIRO fell for more than half a month and suddenly rose from 25M to more than 60M in one day. The decline can be understood as a correction. The market maker was not very strong, and the rise was very inexplicable.
After the news of the contract launch came out, many people's first reaction was: the exchange has judged this "meme civil war" and NEIRO has won. I also saw many people in the community discussing this matter, and they were basically confused, helpless, self-deprecating, disappointed and even angry. These emotions were not directed at NEIRO itself, but from concerns about the development trend of the industry.
If we take the money-making effect as the ultimate criterion, would it be biased to identify the CTO and loyal community as the secret of Neiro's success? Is cabal formation necessarily negative? After the inside story was exposed, NEIRO was nearly halved, but then it tripled to a record high. How do you explain this rise?
Trends represent everything. Then I wanted to change the title to something like "A dog named "ねいろ" caused a meme civil war" to talk about the differences between the two, focusing on the development of Neiro and NEIRO. This story is very interesting. There is a coincidence that if the dog owner had sent an English name at the time, there would be no dispute over uppercase and lowercase letters. Behind it is inevitability. Memes are no longer the "fair" way to play. Whether it is internal PVP or cabal-dominated, there will be another NEIRO without this one.
Last week, the Chinese national football team lost 0-7 to Japan, setting a new record for losses in official matches. Someone on Twitter said: "The problem with Chinese football is not the difference between marketization and non-marketization, but the difference in how much discretion referees and managers of a sport have in the absence of supervision. This is a system problem." If you think about it carefully, the NEIRO case is essentially the same.
What exactly are "fundamentals"? Two months ago, I had an in-depth chat with some meme players, wrote a brief meme gameplay, and mentioned topics like conspiracy groups. Everyone cursed the conspiracy group while making money by digging into their address movements. Maybe in the eyes of the exchange, "cabal coins" that have money and pull resources can bring real profits, which is what they see as "community preference."
What is the story of BOME? I have long forgotten the name of the NFT artist. I only remember that it was listed on BN in three days and the market value exceeded 1.5 billion. My colleague made the first 50 times of his entry into the circle in two days by using BOME. NEIRO has been pulling the market two weeks after its launch. Will those who made money during this period also thank cabal? BN changed the listing rules in May, not because it was not until May this year that it was discovered that the concept of vc coins was too fake, fdv was inflated, and it was all a plate, but that it was certain that no one would buy these coins because of the previous stories.
I am not here to defend cabal and exchanges, I just pessimistically feel that this trend seems unstoppable. Now for most ordinary people, meme may be the only chance to "turn over" in this cycle. Just like the meaning of the entire "cryptocurrency circle" in everyone's eyes a few years ago, but when meme also becomes a track, the emergence of "market makers" is inevitable. There is no new story in the cryptocurrency circle. Exchanges do not stand in line, exchanges only look at money. Everyone's concern about NEIRO is that NEIRO's listing on the exchange has put insider trading/cabal group operations that are not in line with industry values on the stage, and perhaps it will be included in the "fundamentals" of a coin later.
The consensus dilemma of meme coins
But if you look deeper, it actually doesn’t matter whether there is a dealer or not. I don’t believe that there was no dealer behind the past few super memes. The rise of memes in this cycle is because of the dealer.
The current market can no longer produce BOME, not only because of the lack of liquidity, but also because of the problem of consensus mechanism. This is what I think is the biggest bottleneck for the future development of meme: its selling point is personalization, but its production is industrialized.
Pumpfun was a turning point. In half a year, meme has shifted from self-created culture to event-driven. This is good, and the essence is to tokenize events, which is a sustainable path. But the difficulty lies in creating consensus, which is the key to the meme part getting rid of PVP.
Now something is happening. First, there is a disagreement between Ethereum and Sol, then there is another disagreement on each chain, and finally the market decides the final leader. During this period, a large amount of liquidity resources have been consumed and wasted, which also gave many people the opportunity to arbitrage and do evil. NEIRO is just the latest example.
I never belittle memes. At the beginning of the year, I was going to write an article titled "Every public chain needs a meme market". The main point was that because memes actually consume the current over-multiplied block space, other VC stories have to be postponed. I still think that memes will be one of the most interesting sectors in crypto in the future. It has a natural consensus-generating ability. This cultural consensus that transcends the mechanism level is essentially the same as "Bitcoin belief", but now the halo of this consensus-generating ability is being eliminated by industrialized platforms. How to solve the dilemma of "multiple coins with the same name" will definitely be the biggest issue and opportunity in the meme field in the future.