The Death of Neiro: Trading Platforms are Becoming the "Referees of the National Football Team" in the Meme Market

Authors: Joyce, Jack, BlockBeats

On the evening of September 5th, OKX and Binance successively launched NEIRO contracts, causing the price of NEIRO to skyrocket, with a maximum increase of 6 times in two days. In an instant, the two "dogs" that originally had equal market values now had one at 25M and the other jumping to 150M. After simply collecting information on both uppercase and lowercase Neiro, we can see the dramatic stories behind the two "conspiracy groups," as well as the emerging consensus crisis in the meme space.

Vitalik's Hype + "CTO Promotion," Neiro Was Originally a Rebirth Story

Unlike the uppercase NEIRO, which opened and surged to a market cap of 10M in just one hour, Neiro collapsed at launch and took over a week to reach 10M. Later, the market cap of NEIRO soared to 290 million dollars, only to be quickly revealed that 78% of it was held by a mouse warehouse address, making it the largest mouse warehouse in the meme world, and then it fell sharply.

The "resurrection" of lowercase Nerio came from an unexpected event. When the Neiro token was launched, the initial deployment team transferred 17.1 billion Neiro to Vitalik's address, accounting for 4% of the total supply. This marketing strategy is quite common in the meme community, where many meme coin projects or holders transfer a portion of their tokens to well-known figures in the crypto community or famous meme community callers, and then promote their holdings in the community to attract other traders to buy the tokens.

On August 4th, the Neiro team "First Neiro on Ethereum" posted a promotional tweet, "We are the people's $Neiro, on the people's chain------Ethereum. And an interesting fact: Vitalik Buterin is currently our largest holder. (4% of the supply, worth about $130,000 at the time of this article's publication)."

The "clickbait marketing" tweet did not have a significant impact, but on August 5th, Vitalik suddenly sold all the meme coins he had received, exchanging them for 200 ETH, including 44.4 ETH from the sale of 17.1 billion Neiro, which directly triggered a 60% drop in Neiro.

Vitalik did not announce this news on his Twitter homepage but rather under the tweet of Neiro's initial official Twitter account @Neiro_Dog (now deactivated), which gave Neiro the label of "personally replied to by Vitalik," resulting in an 800% increase in just 4 hours.

Subsequently, the current CTO team of Neiro @neiroethcto added a comment under Vitalik's reply, stating that the Neiro team that airdropped tokens was no longer operating the project, and the token deployers abandoned the project a few hours after launch, which is now under community management. However, after the surge from being replied to by Vitalik, Neiro fell over 90% in the following week. From August 13th to August 17th, Neiro increased nearly 50 times, while NEIRO dropped 44%, falling sharply from its peak, with a market cap of 34M.

But shortly after the second zeroing, "Neiro promotion" materials gradually appeared on social media, with many KOLs tweeting that they hadn't seen a meme team with such vision and community cohesion in a long time.

Neiro has not yet been listed on any CEX, and its Twitter mainly shares promotional updates from various local communities and donations from the CTO team to charitable organizations; NEIRO has been listed on Bybit, with Twitter updates on collaborations with various DeFi protocols. From a certain perspective, both of their "community" energies are quite strong.

Market's Wild Growth, Trading Platforms Acting as "National Football Team Referees"

However, in this context, last night OKX and Binance successively launched NEIRO contracts, causing the price of the "uppercase dog" to explode, with a maximum increase of 6 times in two days. In an instant, the two dogs that originally had equal market values now had one at 25M and the other jumping to 150M.

Interestingly, readers of the Rhythm Evening Report in recent days may have noticed that in the two days leading up to the official announcement of the NEIRO contract launch, NEIRO and Neiro were constantly appearing on the daily token gainers and losers list, with the former continuously rising and the latter continuously falling. It now seems that many people had already received the news and positioned themselves in advance.

Last Thursday, Nerio broke through the oscillating upward space, while NEIRO, after more than half a month of decline, suddenly surged from 25M to over 60M in a day. The decline can be understood as a correction, but the sudden increase is quite baffling.

After the news of the contract launch came out, many people's first reaction was: the exchanges acted as referees for this "meme civil war," and NEIRO won. Many discussions in the community reflected confusion, helplessness, self-deprecation, disappointment, and even anger, stemming not from NEIRO itself but from concerns about the industry's development trends.

If we take the profit effect as the ultimate standard, would it be biased to regard the vision of the CTO and the loyal community as the success formula for Neiro? Is cabal organizing necessarily negative? After being exposed, NEIRO approached a halving, but then it tripled to reach an all-time high; how do we explain this increase?

Trends represent everything. Then I thought about changing the title to something like "A meme civil war sparked by a dog named 'ねいろ'" to discuss their differences, focusing on the development methods of Neiro and NEIRO. This story is intriguing; the randomness is that if the dog owner had released an English name at that time, there would have been no case sensitivity dispute. The underlying inevitability is that memes are no longer the "fair" game they once were; whether it's involution PvP or cabal-led, there would still be another NEIRO.

Last week, the national football team lost 0-7 to Japan, setting a record for losses in official matches. I saw someone on Twitter say: "The problem with Chinese football is not the difference between marketization and non-marketization, but the extent of discretion that referees and managers have in a sport without supervision. This is a systemic issue." Upon reflection, the NEIRO case is essentially the same.

Exchanges do not take sides; they only care about money. The concerns about NEIRO stem from the fact that the listing of NEIRO brought insider trading/cabal organizing operations that do not align with industry values to the forefront, which may later be included in a coin's "fundamentals."

What exactly is "fundamentals"? Two months ago, I had in-depth discussions with some meme players and briefly wrote about meme gameplay, mentioning topics like conspiracy groups. While everyone criticized the conspiracy groups, they also profited by tracking their address movements. Perhaps in the eyes of exchanges, a "cabal coin" that can pull resources with money is what brings real profits, which is their view of "community preference."

What story does BOME have? I’ve long forgotten the name of that NFT artist; I only remember that it broke 1.5 billion in market cap in three days, and my colleague made his first 50x profit in two days from BOME. After NEIRO was launched for two weeks, it kept surging; will those who made money during that time also thank the cabal? BN changed its listing rules in May, not because they only realized by May this year that VC coin concepts were too fake, FDV was inflated, and all were just schemes, but because by then it was clear that no one would buy those coins due to previous stories.

This is not to defend cabal and exchanges, but rather a pessimistic view that this trend seems unstoppable. For most ordinary people now, memes might be the only "turnaround" opportunity in this cycle. Just like the meaning of the entire "crypto circle" a few years ago, but when memes also become a track, the emergence of "market makers" is also inevitable. There are no new stories in the crypto circle.

The Consensus Dilemma of Meme Coins

But digging deeper, whether there are manipulators or not is actually not very important; I don't believe that the past few super memes had no manipulators. The rise of memes in this cycle is precisely because of manipulators.

The current market can no longer produce BOME, not only due to a lack of liquidity but also because of issues with the consensus mechanism. This is what I believe to be the biggest bottleneck for the future development of memes: its selling point is personalization, but production is industrialized.

Pumpfun is a turning point. In half a year, memes have shifted from self-created culture to event-driven. This is good; it essentially tokenizes events, which is a sustainable path. But the challenge lies in creating consensus, which is key for memes to break free from PvP.

Now, an event occurs, first creating a divergence on Ethereum and Solana, then generating another divergence on each chain, and finally, the market decides the ultimate leader. During this process, there is a significant consumption and waste of liquidity resources, providing many opportunities for arbitrage and wrongdoing; NEIRO is just the latest example.

I have never belittled memes. Earlier this year, I was preparing to write an article titled "Every Public Chain Needs a Meme Market," with the main point being that memes genuinely consume the currently over-allocated block space, while other VC stories must take a back seat. I still believe that memes will be one of the most interesting segments in crypto in the future. They have a natural ability to generate consensus, and this cultural consensus that transcends the mechanism level is essentially the same as "Bitcoin faith," but now this ability to generate consensus is being eroded by industrialized platforms. How to solve the "same name, multiple coins" dilemma will undoubtedly be the biggest topic and opportunity in the meme field in the future.