Preface:

With Trump's historic victory sweeping through the American political landscape, the winds shifted overnight, and Bitcoin reached new all-time highs. However, within the crypto world, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are fundamentally two distinct realms.

Under the banner of Build, the so-called "value coins," which claim to be the cornerstone of the crypto world, are facing unprecedented application dilemmas and FUD. The MEME craze has returned, prompting a reevaluation: in this visibly bullish market, should we once again trust value coins, or is MEME the true future?

Origin at the End of the Green Rush

Small certainties of value discovery, liquidity as a catalyst

Before discussing MEME, it's essential to briefly outline the development history of MEME in the crypto world. From a temporal perspective, it can be simply divided as follows:

From the above historical development, several important trends can be summarized:

1. Liquidity expansion is fundamental: MEME was born in a bull market, where explosive price increases are often accompanied by the expansion of dollar liquidity.

2. Celebrity effect is the best booster: The explosive popularity of image-based MEMEs like Shib or Doge has been aided by celebrity influence, such as Elon Musk.

3. MEME resonates with spiritual appeals: From zoo images, internet memes, to AI MEMEs, they all embody the most communicable zeitgeist of their time, with increasingly rich emotional appeals.

4. Lifespan rapidly shortens: With the rise of meme fair launch platforms like Pump.fun, the issuance of tokens has entered the minute-level, and their lifecycles have entered the hourly level.

The era of Doge's rise coincided with the generation of the 90s, which had essentially entered the smartphone era, where communication through images and emojis began to flourish. By 2020, the generation of the 00s emerged, where internet memes had become basic skills. Compared to the 90s, feelings of frustration and "lying flat" seemed more prevalent, but they were also more anti-authoritarian and anti-elite, favoring absurd and humorous things like PEPE. Entering 2024, AI, as the most cutting-edge and disruptive technology today, still sees the 00s as the main force of this wave. While the 80s generation is still questioning the future of AI, the 00s have already started using AI to make money, quickly embracing the changes alongside the most forward-looking tech leaders of this era.

With the rise of meme fair launch platforms like Pump.fun, 5k-10k MEME tokens are born daily. Statistics from October show that only 1.4% of users earned over $1,000, while over 80% incurred losses.

At this point in time, there is much discussion about the roots of MEME in the market, with cultural, emotional, and communicative aspects providing corresponding footholds and theoretical explanations. However, from any angle, a definitive conclusion is that MEME cannot be measured in terms of utility or practicality; this is a narrow understanding of value itself. In the irreversible trend of currency overproduction, it is the era that has chosen MEME, with blockchain being the best soil for its growth.

MEME is rooted in the spiritual appeals and new value standards of a younger generation. They disdain grand narratives and prefer to find happiness in small certainties, using concrete humor to combat abstract authority. A meme can evoke resonance, and for the younger generation, this is both being seen and a victory in life. This victory has unleashed immense value in the blockchain world, where rationality and ideals are seen as outdated terms. Entertainment and consumption reign supreme; they have no concept of crypto shame or crypto casinos. For them, MEME is a part of daily life, a different form of play.

However, while MEME was created by the younger generation, its transformation into a tradable investment target is largely due to the older generation's capital efforts. For those from the 60s, 70s, and 80s, their most familiar stance is: not understanding does not prevent them from profiting.

The Collapse of Value Coins in Reality

A crash is not terrifying; disproof may lead to a fall.

For most veterans who have experienced multiple cycles in the crypto space, crashes are quite common and not frightening. Even BTC has its downturns, but the loss of faith in value coins/VC coins stems from the fact that they are not merely experiencing fluctuations of crashing and surging, or falling and rising again. For a broader retail investor group, by the time they acquired their tokens, they were already at the peak of the price, watching it slowly descend to sea level, until it fell into the Mariana Trench.

The current situation is that the tokens of value coins have become products, while the real products go unnoticed. There are as many market analyses and discussions about low liquidity, high market cap value coins as there are for MEME. The reasons for this situation are numerous: overvaluation due to bull-bear transitions; token distribution under crypto compliance; imbalanced and unhealthy ecosystem forces, etc.

Essentially, the development of value coins is the result of multiple factors, failing in narrative due to a lack of application, being destroyed in wealth effect due to distribution, and being undermined in ecology by hypocritical elites. For most altcoins, manipulating concepts and minor innovations at the protocol level have become fashionable. New terms like chain abstraction, Layer 2, Layer 3, and intent centers emerge endlessly. However, interaction volumes prove everything; in the absence of actual application scenarios, user demand is neither urgent nor irreplaceable. Thus, project data can only rely on project incentives, such as airdrops and points. If the incentive mechanisms themselves exhibit unfairness or insider trading, it ultimately evolves into what Murad described: tokens become the final product, while the products themselves go unnoticed.

As shown in the figure below, under the mainstream narrative logic of an industry, each participant has different appeals surrounding wealth effects. Unfortunately, none of these appeals revolve around the project's true value, or to put it more harshly: the so-called narrative is merely a cover for profit-seeking, as all narratives can be easily disproven in a short time, while most confirmed ones are Ponzi schemes or nested schemes.

With hundreds of public chains, hundreds of L2s, hundreds of cross-chain bridges, thousands of DeFi projects, and countless narrative concepts, the seemingly flawless logical structure in the maze of concepts cannot withstand the simplest blow from reality. If external liquidity does not broadly overflow, and the background of narrative homogenization competition persists, this situation will only worsen.

The hypocritical elite mentality of many project teams has become the last straw that broke the back of value coins. Many project teams play both sides; they disdain electronic beggars while secretly establishing insider trading. They shout about disruption, revolution, and innovation while wielding sickles, large sickles, and even larger sickles.

You gaze into the abyss, and the abyss gazes back at you, attracting capital and users with grand narrative values, implementing wealth distribution through unfair means. Once the former is disproven, the latter will inevitably plummet. However, the bottom of value coins may be longer than anyone imagines.

The Future of MEME and Value Coins

History will repeat itself, but not simply.

Victories are always written by the victors, and the confirmation of value only holds the greatest consensus at the moment of realization. The main ideology of the crypto world remains tokenization. A token, before it has run its course, does not distinguish between value coins and MEME coins; there is essentially no difference, only reflected in the differences in realization paths.

The advantage of value coins lies in having a complete, followable methodology from cold start to positive price cycle, which comparatively offers a higher certainty of success, but the ceiling is also quite limited. Ultimately, it addresses users' utility needs.

The advantage of MEME coins is that, although they lack a fully replicable realization path (compared to value coins), they have relatively high randomness, but their ceiling is much higher. Moreover, the operation of MEME coins is becoming more capitalized, and their maturity is not inferior to that of value coins. Ultimately, they address the community recognition needs of users.

The original sin of a project is not whether users make money, but whether it has value. In the long run, we need to recognize that the blockchain world is inherently diverse in value. Whether it is FUD against value coins or the adoration of MEME, it does not necessarily represent which of the two forms should survive. These oppositions merely represent the struggle for discourse power among different capitals, not the establishment of reality. For the majority of the market, a simple and straightforward principle is: in a fair environment, projects that can make people money are valuable projects; this is almost the only criterion for judgment.

Thus, regarding the future of value coins and MEME coins, we only need to answer two questions: who can achieve relative fairness, and who has a better risk-reward ratio.

Fairness depends on the improvement of the system; the risk-reward ratio depends on narrative development and liquidity. Both factors jointly determine the future cycle rotation and the future of crypto.

After Trump's inauguration, we can likely clarify the improvement of the institutional environment, but whether this improvement will benefit the current poor industrial form of value coins remains uncertain.

From the perspective of risk-reward ratios, the sustainability of value coin narrative development hinges on whether a large number of new entrants can be added. However, if it cannot deeply integrate with real demands, disproof will still come quickly. The worst part is that this process is difficult to accelerate; blockchain will not become the mainstream of the world overnight. However, in terms of liquidity, value coins seem to have an advantage, as more general investment institutions still tend to inject funds into the value coin track. Yet, without substantial improvements in narrative logic, the insufficient number of retail investors is turning from a joke into reality.

If we look at the future from this perspective, the basic scenario for value coins remains institutional improvement, slow narrative progress, and liquidity overflow. Thus, their most likely state is not to die and go to zero. Much like China's real estate, under the state of overvaluation and collapse, a long period of elimination and adjustment will ensue, during which true value coins will emerge from the sands of time.

For MEME, a flourishing era is approaching, with stronger capital operations and the traffic support of exchanges accelerating the MEME trend. However, for retail investors, this does not necessarily mean making money is easier. As long as the wealth effect continues to exist, the majority of the market will still be willing to believe: this time, I will definitely succeed in PVP.

Letting profits occur in a fair environment is the key to sustainability. Each cycle has different narratives, and countless value coins and MEME coins have perished. The commonality of those that truly remain is not the so-called struggle for orthodox value, but who wins the recognition and support of a broader community of users.

If a final summary is to be made, it must be: there are no eternal universal values in the world; there is no superiority between value coins and MEME coins. Historically, it is always those projects that can continuously gain community recognition and user trust that endure and remain relevant over time; this is the true value.

Money never sleeps, and new stories are on the way. This time, I hope you win!