There is a recent NFT project called weis on Twitter. Some NFT enthusiasts have regarded it as a “pet” or “decoration”, and even Photoshop it on their own BAYC and Moonbirds, which makes people feel very interesting.
Hence, I also bought 3 of them, and when I bought it, I was thinking: Why should I buy it? Is it because of investment? After a few more rounds of thoughts, I came to the answer: Because it was fun.
At the beginning of the birth of the Meme project, it was absolutely “useless”. It was simply because of imitation, spoofing, and fun before it was gradually accepted and recognized by more people. This is Meme. If you use Meme as the target of hype at the beginning, it must be wrong.
The difference between Meme-type projects and most non-Meme-type projects is that the two have essential differences in their development paths. Centralized NFTs such as BAYC have a clear development roadmap and practical application scenarios. For example, BAYC holders not only can get APE token airdrops and free mint Otherside plots, they will also enter the Otherside metaverse to become game characters.
Similarly, cross-chain projects like Polkadot and Cosmos also have clear roadmaps and application scenarios, which is self-evident. However, Meme-like project was born initially just for fun imitations, with no other purpose, and no practical use.
In the field of blockchain, the originator of the Meme project is Dogecoin, which was born because Marcus mocked the idea of Bitcoin: “What are you good at?”. Hence, he took a few lines of Bitcoin source code, and changed the total supply to 12 million to reduce the mining difficulty, and Dogecoin was created in just a few hours.
However, is there any practical use for Dogecoin? Absolutely not. But over the next 10 years, Dogecoin gradually became a popular crypto-cultural phenomenon in the cryptocurrency space.
This interesting Meme project later attracted many influential people, including Musk, to promote Dogecoin on Twitter. Of course, this does not rule out related interests as Musk himself anyhow holds lots of DOGE.
Although Dogecoin is still “useless” now, its inventor Marcus has quitted the development and management of Dogecoin, and even sold all DOGE in 2015. But it did not bring DOGE to die away, instead the price continued to rise, which its price peak in May 2021, reaching 0.74 USDT, and its market capitalization is still in the top 10.
Speaking of this, I would like to express a personal investment point of view: The essential difference between meme projects and projects with actual roadmaps is that the former is imitation and fun, and has no practical value. Hence, that’s when it slowly got recognition from its group of supporters and gradually formed a unique culture. If we made Meme as the target of hype at the beginning, then it would not have this positive effect for now.
The latter has a clear roadmap and product development process, similar to the process of gradually polishing products and making markets, such as GameFi and SocialFi. In addition, the project’s technology, products, team and funding conditions and delivery capabilities must be examined.
A real Meme project is valuable because of its no value, and it only has value when it is recognized by more and more people, which later becomes a kind of popular culture. Most Meme projects do not have a roadmap, and they don’t even need funding or a strong team. This type of project is not and cannot be used as an investment target. On the contrary, what is “interesting” is the target of “playing”. If you think it is fun, you can mint and play.
With the popularity of the meme culture in the blockchain industry, some “Three Noes” projects (Those projects with no value information on the official website, no roadmap, no team operation, and even no Twitter) are also classified as memes, even if it is not an imitated project.
The birth of Shib in 2021 imitated the essence of Dogecoin’s Meme, while the price of DOGE was detonating.
In fact, the Shib team did not disappoint its early participants. In April 2021, SHIB was first launched on MEXC, and it rose from 0.0000002USDT to 0.000021USDT within a month, with its highest gain of over 2000%. A few months later, SHIB was listed on Binance again, and its price hits a new gain of 0.00008835USDT.
Why use Shib as an example? At the time, Shib was considered a half-meme-type project. In fact, Shib has a very strong marketing team, and the marketing of its token SHIB has accurately grasped the psychology of “many people hope to get a project like DOGE again with a hundred-fold and thousand-fold gain in income”.
Therefore, for holders, DOGE and SHIB still have essential differences. The former is due to its “interesting”, and the latter can be profitable. Hence, before we decide to hold a project’s token or NFT, we have to understand a logic: Am I doing it for fun, or for investment?
What’s interesting is that some well-developed non-Meme projects have gradually become Meme for other reasons, such as Terra’s LUNC and PeopleDAO’s PEOPLE. Shib, which has a certain Meme gene, has become a non-Meme project that is a combination of application scenarios of DEX, NFT, and incubators.
Similarly, with the popularity of NFTs, many Meme-type NFTs such as CrypToadz and Mfers were born later, and this trend has continued unabated.
Note: This article is contributed by members of the MEXC community. The text and pictures of related projects in the article are only used for illustration purposes. At the same time, the author of this article is a holder of weis and a stakeholder. The views in this article do not represent the views of MEXC and M-Ventures, nor do they constitute any investment advice.
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