LFGSwap: The "Wolf of Wall Street" in the DeFi world under meme culture

Source: LFGSwap

In traditional finance, the focus is more on finding the true value of assets based on valuation models, which helps identify undervalued assets. This approach may effectively assist financial investors in discovering potential investment targets and gaining insights from more rational thinking. However, in the crypto world, such valuation models seem somewhat "out of place." For instance, assets like BTC and LTC, which do not pay dividends or generate cash flow, are often labeled as "Ponzi schemes" by outsiders, while traditional investors, represented by Warren Buffett, dismiss crypto assets entirely.

In reality, the value growth in the crypto world relies on consensus rather than valuation. The crypto world represents a brand new ideology that advocates decentralization, gathering a community of like-minded individuals who rely on the most basic supply and demand model, continuously gaining value based on constant supply and increasing demand.

Of course, compared to some "classical" crypto narratives based on technology and applications, emerging crypto factions driven mainly by meme culture seem to have gained more popularity after the explosive rise of Dogecoin in 2020. For the crypto community, memes not only provide entertainment and precise communication but also bring about viral dissemination effects, enhancing community cohesion and creating a "wealth effect." Moreover, the impact of a good meme culture narrative is far superior to that of lengthy articles.

The term "meme" originates from Greek, meaning "an imitated thing." British biologist Richard Dawkins defined it in "The Selfish Gene" as a "unit of cultural transmission," possessing several characteristics: short, easy to understand, and replicable, with messages that can be quickly grasped and received.

Crypto meme culture typically spreads rapidly within a short period, quickly increasing demand for meme tokens while supply remains constant, driving more people to chase meme assets, creating FOMO (fear of missing out), and continuously attracting more "believers" to participate. In fact, meme crypto culture has its own predictive logic and can achieve "instant precise communication."

The Amazing Wealth Effect Generated by Meme Crypto Culture

As the progenitor of meme crypto culture, Dogecoin skyrocketed after going viral on TikTok in July 2020. With further promotion from meme culture enthusiast Elon Musk, Dogecoin's annual increase in 2021 reached 3,500%, and at its peak, the increase was as high as 15,100%. From Dogecoin's own narrative, it was initially explained as a tipping culture, using a "Shiba Inu avatar" as its logo, and after fully leveraging its meme characteristics, it ranked among the top in market capitalization in the cryptocurrency market.

In addition to Dogecoin, ShiB, which was anonymously launched in August 2020, is officially called the "Dogecoin killer" and is a decentralized community experiment. Since the official team does not hold any tokens, 50% of the SHIB tokens were locked in Uniswap as trading liquidity (the official claims to have discarded the private key), while the remaining half was airdropped to Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin, making its issuance mechanism quite fair and free from the suspicion of reselling to the community. The liquidity mining mechanism introduced by the official team also encourages community trading and holding. After gaining widespread attention for its meme model in April 2021, its annual increase exceeded hundreds of thousands of times.

The meme effects of Doge and ShiB are ongoing, and both are being accepted as payment methods by some traditional businesses, such as AMC Theatres, Uber Eats, and fresh food company meatmeCA. The new development narrative gained through meme culture, backed by a strong community scale, allows them to rebound in market conditions to this day (though their high market capitalization makes it difficult to replicate previous performances).

In comparison, other tokens with similar narratives include Dogelon Mars ($ELON), LowB, and many other meme tokens, all of which are highly sought after due to their different meme narrative styles, but only performed strongly in 2021, showcasing significant wealth effects. Of course, amidst the meme craze, there are many pseudo-meme animal coins that can achieve relatively strong increases in the short term but are essentially fleeting (with lifespans of only a few days). Thus, from the last meme market, we cannot help but notice that most meme ecosystems lack the ability to acquire new narrative directions, and their vitality is usually extremely short-lived.

In 2022, the emergence of LFGSwap once again pushed meme crypto culture to a climax. The difference is that LFGSwap's meme narrative is no longer centered around a single token but is a DEX. In comparison, DEXs, as more extensible on-chain tools, have greater vertical narrative value depth compared to single tokens.

From Doge and ShiB to LFGSwap: The Upgrade of Meme Culture Narrative

LFGSwap itself is a DEX natively built on EthereumPoW (ETHW) and CoreDAO, providing on-chain trading services such as DEX trading, yield tools, auction platforms, AMM frameworks, and staking derivatives. Its narrative characteristics are not primarily based on technical means but rather on the resonance it creates among crypto users through its meme culture, as well as the strong community consensus and ecological development momentum it generates.

Thus, LFGSwap captures our attention and serves as a typical ecosystem for our observation and research on meme culture for two main reasons: one is the meme culture that LFGSwap is backed by, and the other is LFGSwap's market performance driven by meme culture.

LFGSwap's Meme Culture Narrative

Many people may find it difficult to guess what "LFG" means from LFGSwap's name. Although it sounds similar to the abbreviation for "Luna Foundation Guard," it has no relation to the Luna ecosystem. In LFGSwap, "LFG" stands for "Let's Fucking Go." While this seemingly "nonsensical" name may appear absurd, many crypto investors have an inexplicable fondness for this phrase.

It resembles crypto slang like TO THE MOON (implying a price surge) and GM (Good Morning), yearning for a form and state of unrestrained freedom, which is also a development attitude of LFGSwap's ecosystem.

LFGSwap also combines with the classic IP of the movie "The Wolf of Wall Street," specifically the character Jordan Belfort (often used in the financial markets of US stocks, futures, and crypto). This frequently reminds us of some classic lines from the movie, portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio as Jordan Belfort: "You can look at me, laugh at me, try to stop me, but you can't stop me," "I made $49 million, and that makes me angry because I'm still $3 million short every week," and "I want you to solve your problems by getting rich!" This signifies a new wealth revolution.

It is worth noting that the real-life counterpart of "The Wolf of Wall Street," Jordan Belfort, is a legendary figure favored by investors and motivational speaker. He has also frequently tweeted LFG in response to projects, continuously igniting excitement within the LFGSwap community.

Moreover, the character of Jordan Belfort combined with crypto meme culture easily evokes memories of the 2021 event where retail investors took down Wall Street financial giants, specifically the incident where retail investors from the Reddit forum WallStreetBets heavily bought GameStop stocks, crushing the short sellers. This image resonates deeply with users in the crypto market and has left a lasting impression. This event also resonated with crypto investors, directly causing Dogecoin to surge 300% in a single day.

Based on the classic image from "The Wolf of Wall Street," LFGSwap launched related IP NFTs. Unlike other AI-generated NFT images, LFGSwap plans to release 10,000 different 3D handcrafted character images on each chain and is set to collaborate with top luxury sunglasses brands to endorse the virtual character image of that brand, integrating with real-world events to increase exposure and user engagement.

LFGSwap's narrative embodies a passionate revolution driven by memes, emerging from within the crypto retail community. The ecological development of LFGSwap is also described as "rural encircling the city," meaning it spontaneously pushes upward from the grassroots level. Therefore, from the perspective of meme culture narrative, LFGSwap is more layered.

LFGSwap's Market Performance

Currently, with the support of organizations like the Wagmi33 Foundation, the previously underestimated EthereumPoW (ETHW) ecosystem has unknowingly reached 100 on-chain applications, covering numerous sectors such as DeFi, GameFi, DEX, and NFTs. This indicates that the ETHW ecosystem still possesses the potential to develop new narrative directions.

LFGSwap was initially natively established on ETHW and is currently the leading DEX on ETHW. At the beginning of the ETHW ecosystem's construction last October, LFGSwap's TVL on ETHW reached $1.86 million, accounting for 52.47% of the TVL on the ETHW chain. From early September to early October last year, 160,000 users completed 1.2 million transactions on LFGSwap.

During the period from September 30 to October 2 last year, LFGSwap conducted its first IDO ($LFG) on the ETHW chain to achieve early ecosystem launch. Although the overall market was sluggish at the time (with Bitcoin prices below $20,000), it raised over $1.3 million in just four days, attracting significant market attention.

However, what can be considered "hardcore" is that on October 6, the LFGSwap team issued an emergency announcement stating that they would fully refund the raised funds to investors due to changes in the macro environment and the temporary alteration of token ownership conditions by early private investors. The team was unwilling to compromise and returned all private and public funds from the community, with 100% of the funds added to liquidity by the team, resulting in the $LFG launch price reaching up to 7 times the IDO pricing. All contributors who participated in the fundraising would receive 777 LFG tokens airdropped, have their contribution addresses included in the whitelist for LFGswap's official NFT sales, and receive the "Wolf of Wall Street NFT" airdrop as promised for users who completed invitation contribution tasks. Subsequently, the team modified the economic model of the LFG token, changing the original public offering to an ecological fund and the private offering to the LFGSwap Exchequer.

Based on this event, LFGSwap's "Let's Fucking Go" meme flavor became even stronger, with community users becoming steadfast consensus holders of the LFGSwap ecosystem, while more and more crypto investors "turned to fans," becoming part of the LFGSwap community.

On February 14, LFGSwap successfully deployed to the CoreDAO chain to achieve multi-chain layout. CoreDAO is an EVM-compatible L1 public chain, and the evolution of the Geth codebase, utilizing improvements made by the BNB Chain, has increased throughput and reduced transaction fees through hard forks. The CoreDAO community was established early on, and has now existed for over two years, with its Twitter account boasting over 1.6 million followers and its Discord channel having over 300,000 members. CoreDAO launched its ecological token $CORE on eight trading platforms, including OKX and Huobi, at the beginning of this year, attracting industry attention and becoming one of the hot topics.

As the first Launchpad project on CoreDAO, LFGSwap's fundraising target was 25,000 $CORE tokens, but it actually raised 402,095 tokens, 16 times the fundraising target, with a maximum secondary listing increase of 2,600%, and subsequently maintained a nearly 60-fold increase during the bear market. LFGSwap is not only the first Launchpad project on CoreDAO but also the largest IDO event on CoreDAO.

LFGSwap's migration brought a large number of native crypto users to CoreDAO and directly completed the cold start on CoreDAO, while the vast community foundation of Core will also drive traffic to LFGSwap. The official media of the BNB Chain, BSC News, also reported: "The addition of LFGSwap provides Core users with a one-stop next-generation blockchain exchange solution."

In fact, we see that the LFGSwap ecosystem is more active on new chains, such as ETHW, CoreDAO, and Arbitrum, where users are the most active and grow the fastest. LFGSwap itself has a large user base, but the $LFG token is of small market capitalization, and adopting a new IDO issuance method is more conducive to generating a "wealth effect." Additionally, LFGSwap has undergone security audits by CertiK and Armors Labs, making it easier to gain the favor and trust of new chain users. In contrast, it is challenging for Uniswap, PancakeSwap, and others to achieve such growth.

We see that having a meme culture capable of resonating with crypto investors is one necessary condition, but it is not sufficient to sustain this meme culture's driving force. A more meme-oriented economic model is also essential. LFGSwap has built a deflationary mechanism ($LFG) that continuously injects momentum into this "Wolf of Wall Street" meme culture. Thus, we observe that from last October to this February, LFGSwap has consistently maintained its heat as a meme ecosystem, while in the broader meme concept ecosystem, few can sustain their heat and maintain consensus.

How to Maintain the Durability of Meme Culture Driving Force?

The total supply of $LFG is 1 billion, and the economic model designed for LFGSwap includes two mechanisms: cross-chain contraction and destruction contraction.

• Cross-Chain Contraction

LFGSwap's economic model adopts a method where the total supply of the original chain decreases accordingly with each new chain deployed, thereby increasing the application scenarios of LFG and accelerating the destruction speed.

For example, the total supply of the $LFG multi-chain ecosystem is fixed at 1 billion tokens, initially deployed entirely on the ETHW chain. When deployed to the new CoreDAO chain, the $LFG mapped to the CoreDAO chain is 500 million, meaning that the total supply of LFG on the original ETHW chain will automatically destroy 500 million. The total supply of LFG on the Arbitrum chain is 300 million, so the total supply of $LFG on the CoreDAO and ETHW chains will correspondingly destroy 300 million, and subsequent multi-chain deployments will follow this destruction method. In the future, LFGSwap's cross-chain ecological layout will include Conflux, Arbitrum, OEC, and others.

This economic model's implementation helps enhance the economic value of $LFG while also increasing the application scenarios and destruction speed of LFG, thereby better supporting LFGSwap's multi-chain ecological layout.

• Destruction Contraction

$LFG also possesses a destruction mechanism, such as unclaimed rewards and LFG Auto Compound yield fees, portions of each sale of LFG and cancellation of staking in LFGSwap, transaction fees, lottery purchases, LFG NFT sales revenue, user withdrawals from game balances, market commissions, and each IDO, among many other scenarios. Additionally, all income from LFGSwap Robbies NFT and NFT series royalties will be used for token buybacks and destruction of $LFG.

Thus, the destruction of $LFG is frequent, with the occurrence of the vast majority of events in the ecosystem accompanied by destruction scenarios. The fixed total supply and extreme deflation will become the best helpers in driving the narrative force of LFGSwap's meme culture.

Meme ecosystems represented by Doge and ShiB do not have a clearly defined destruction and deflation mechanism, and their market performance and meme sentiment are entirely dependent on the market, which does not always work. Therefore, based on this, further driving the narrative tension of the meme ecosystem through deflation is the best choice.

For crypto assets, traditional valuation models seem to be less effective, and since crypto assets cannot identify intrinsic value through traditional valuation, eGirl Capital has proposed a revised model that incorporates the meme culture of the crypto circle.

Price = Value * Deviation Factor * Speculative Premium/Discount (Price = Intrinsic Value * Deviation Factor * Investment Premium/Discount)

Here, Value (intrinsic value) refers to "a standard for measuring asset value," usually obtained by calculating its realizable net asset value, while speculative premium or discount refers to the positive or negative value brought by hype, attention, and other intangible factors. This portion of value may have no basis but could represent all value within the circle. The stronger the meme driving force of the ecosystem, the more pronounced the gains brought by this "Value," even showing exponential growth.

Meme culture emerged in 2020, and although the loose monetary policy at that time drove the purchase of such speculative assets, crypto meme culture seems to have already taken root. After the push from Doge and ShiB, LFGSwap has once again taken up the baton of meme culture's heat.

While two years ago, the event of retail investors taking down financial giants was a low-probability event in traditional finance, under the drive of the LFGSwap ecosystem, the status of long-tail users is expected to achieve significant enhancement. Of course, LFGSwap also provides a reference for the future DeFi world in the further development and evolution of ideology.