How to create a successful MEME?

Written by: 1912212.eth, Foresight News

MEME coins have begun to dance again. Yesterday, the prices of PEPE, BONK, FLOKI and other currencies all rose significantly, and WIF even hit a record high. Familiar MEME Quotes Coming Again? Buying MEME is a technical job, but what about building a successful MEME project?

Before answering how to create MEME, we might as well ask a question first: Why is MEME important?

MEME is called "meme" in Chinese. In the world of meme coins, we don't talk about fundamentals, forget about total market capitalization and FDV, and abandon the advanced vocabulary that mainstream VCs talk about.

This is a paradise for ordinary players.

Here, the spirit of entertainment comes first, Xiao Zhao plays slot machines, Xiao Ming plays A-shares, Xiao Wang plays sneakers, Xiao Zhang plays US stocks, Xiao Chen plays mainstream coins, and at this moment, we play MEME, say You may have a chance to win big prizes and have a bright future.

For this reason, MEME continues to thrive in the financial market, especially in the cryptocurrency industry.

Decentralization, community, anti-VC, anti-tradition, fair startup, grassroots, etc. These Web3 vocabulary are naturally specially prepared for MEME players.

In the past few years, well-known MEME coins such as Dogecoin, BONK, PEPE and SHIB have emerged. Every successful MEME does not get out of the circle casually and easily.

So, back to the topic, how do we create a successful MEME?

The total amount should be large and the unit price should be low

MEME is different from public chains, L2 or DeFi, etc. The latter often issue quantities of 1 billion to 10 billion pieces, while MEME total Quantity is calculated in hundreds of billions. Let’s take the top 150 MEMEs by market capitalization as an example, and the statistics are shown in the figure below.

(data as of February 23, 2024)

Behind such a large total amount, It is to capture players' psychological expectations of MEME speculation. Smart project parties will not let MEME tokens be worth a few dollars as soon as they are launched. Smart project owners will use low-price strategies to attract high-risk players and retain small retail investors who don’t have much capital.

We must keep the unit price low so that players can see a large quantity when they buy it. Only by using a small amount to make a big difference will players be more inclined to hold it.

There is another important point, which is to facilitate the "removing zero" action.

Not only in trading, "going to zero" represents a fairly strong bullish indicator. As a project community, it is also easier to ignite community emotions FOMO and spread quickly.

During the bull market, stories of getting rich are often the fastest and most widely spread, and once MEME occupies a position in it, it will receive a crazy influx of bold funds.

Designing pop culture symbols

The brand images of many well-known global brands are often related to globally accepted mascots. For example, Ferrari’s logo is a horse, and Lamborghini’s logo is an ox. , QQ’s logo is a penguin. These globally accepted animal images and logos are vivid, easy to remember and easy to understand, providing huge advantages for widespread brand communication.

If we want to build a successful MEME coin, of course we also need to learn from experience. The mascots of Dogecoin, SHIB and BONK are all dogs, and the specific breed is the Shiba Inu. These animals are based on pop culture, and pictures of their expressions have been widely circulated. In addition, Dogecoin’s tipping culture once made it a very popular tipping token in the United States.

Dog As the oldest MEME coin, the currency has been repeatedly tempered in multiple bull and bear cycles and is still writing legends.

Looking back at the latest PEPE released last year, it was unique in choosing a frog that is widely loved in the Western community as its mascot. Its image is relatively unique, and its large eyes and green skin design make it highly recognizable.

Not only that , this frog has been derived from various emoticons, with a changeable temperament, expressing happiness, anger, surprise and other emotions. Some crypto KOLs also occasionally use the frog picture to reply to comments, which also brings a lot of popularity to its spread.

Therefore, if we are good at using well-known pop culture or mascots, it will play a considerable role in creating MEME.

Let’s see MEME coin did not attract the attention and likes of celebrities as soon as it was born. Dogecoin has only become popular with Musk in recent years due to its cute and interesting symbols and reward culture.

Musk has hundreds of millions of fans in the Twitter community. His huge exposure, as well as favorable factors such as micro-payment rewards on the X platform, have brought him a lot of popularity.

In 2023, the Twitter logo was even replaced by Musk with the Dogecoin avatar, which lasted for three full days. Previously, Musk once proclaimed himself CEO of Dogecoin and posted about Dogecoin’s payment methods and comments on the Twitter community.

Musk Every mention of Dogecoin in a tweet, or even the alliance between one of its companies and Dogecoin, will inject a lot of attention into Dogecoin.

Apart from the rare opportunity of being a great spokesperson, it is also a good choice to choose to take advantage of the celebrity effect.

SHIB, which took off in the last cycle, is now mediocre, but it chose a smart way at the beginning. First, he left a message in Musk's comment area, which successfully caused Musk to post a question and attract attention.

Update later Half of the tokens were transferred to Vitalik. At that time, when the global epidemic was raging, Vitalik chose to donate the tokens to Indian charities, which caused a lot of popularity, so that many people in India began to understand SHIB. After this incident, quite a few MEMEs imitated and transferred coins to Vitalik, but the effect was far less than that of SHIB.

It is worth mentioning that even MEME coin’s Solana ecological protocol nuts will choose to rub Musk’s text comments. Whenever Musk comments on nuts (strange), the price of nuts will skyrocket.

Another influential endorser is Solana co-founder toly. SILLY successfully attracted toly with its cute, fun and silly look. Even at Solana Breakpoint2023, she appeared on the podium wearing a dragon-like costume, which once caused a "silly dragon trend".

Gather more "community consensus"

The increase in cryptocurrency prices is closely related to attention. The more attention there is, the more the audience knows, and the more people will buy, thus pushing the currency price upward.

If we want to create a successful MEME, of course we must understand its essence. It is different from other utility or governance tokens. It completely abandons the old sayings such as narrative and staking, and openly admits that its tokens are "useless". In this case, the value of the token depends entirely on "community consensus."

Community and decentralization are the most fundamental elements in the crypto community. This also means that its viral spread requires community resonance and "spontaneity", but does not require deliberate marketing.

Of course, some marketing is still necessary when the popularity declines.

The "Doge-1" lunar mission funded by DOGE has also caused the price of its tokens to continue to rise. In addition to having high online traffic, SHIB and Dogecoin are also integrated offline. Remarkable. Some theaters, supermarkets, and brands accept its payment, such as luxury goods Gucci, the largest U.S. operator AMC, U.S. video game and entertainment software retail giant GameStop, etc., which undoubtedly adds luster to their own brand exposure.

As a MEME coin, it is not about spending money and doing nothing. Twitter can have a lot of community support by posting pictures frequently. Although BONK is not as diligent as its predecessors in offline brand expansion cooperation, it is also remarkable in the interaction of Solana ecological products, such as combining with other DeFi products, adding liquidity, staking tokens, etc.

PEPE then Will post interesting pictures and even emoticons, comics and other works in the community. Additionally, the frog emoji was promoted through the creation of a PEPE-sponsored art competition.

Whether it is online or offline, whether it is through celebrity halo or hot events, only by gathering more "community consensus" can the MEME currency price have enough fuel to take off.

Try to choose mainstream public chains (Ethereum and Solana) with the most funds and users

From the existing MEME, most MEME projects are on popular public chains, such as Dogecoin, SHIB and PEPE are on Ethereum. With the rise of the upstart public chain SOL, BONK, WIF and SILLY have also become famous.

Due to various reasons, other public chains currently do not have particularly successful MEMEs. The public chain is like a reservoir. Where there is more wealth and users, more funds can flow into MEME. In addition, since MEME-type assets largely rely on the "spillover" of active funds on the chain, relatively early public chains, or except for the top few public chains, almost no MEME-type assets can survive. space.

Take the previous MEME currency FUD on Sui as an example. Although FUD was noticed by Sui official Twitter at the beginning of its launch, the image also chose a dog image with a very high "fault tolerance rate", but even in the Sui currency price Against the background of eye-catching performance and TVL constantly creating new highs, FUD did not achieve the "expected" results, and the currency price continued to fall. In fact, no MEME token in the Sui ecosystem has successfully "broken the circle" so far.

When we Turning my attention to L2, I suddenly found that there were very few MEMEs. The earlier Airdoge gained a certain popularity with its large-scale airdrops, and then disappeared. Other L2s have not yet emerged with high-profile MEMEs.

At the key event nodes where the project team airdrops, releases the mainnet, and announces the token model, if it is arranged properly, it may gain a lot of attention.

Make good use of airdrops to attract market attention

In the absence of other favorable conditions, if we want to make MEME quickly become famous, we will carry out large-scale operations on selected public chains and some currency holders. Airdrop is one of the very effective ways.

A typical airdrop worth mentioning is Solana’s upstart BONK, which had a bumpy start. When the solana ecosystem suffered a heavy blow due to the SBF incident, 60% of the tokens were used for airdrops to ecological users, which was quite generous. As SOL quickly recovered and attracted market attention in the past year, BONK has also been listed on Binance and OKX. Without the aura of celebrities or the blessing of hot events, BONK has carved its own path with extensive airdrops and the ecological recovery of Solana.

Even if it is not MEME projects also often gain great attention through airdrops. Such as Flare, Celestia, Dymention, AltLayer, Wormhole, etc. Some project team tokens have even become golden shovels. As long as you complete the pledge in your wallet, you can get airdrops for new projects.

For example, if we conduct airdrops in the Cosmos ecosystem, we often choose TIA, ATOM and other token pledgers for airdrops, because these users are often more affected and have more currency holders. Relying on the popularity of other project parties, you can quickly gain popularity.

Summary

Now that you have read this, I believe that careful readers already know how to do it, right? If we want to build a successful MEME, we need to consider factors such as token economics design, mascot, airdrop method, and choice of issuance chain. When the time, place and people are favorable, the probability of success will increase.

If you need some small animals as mascots, you might as well consider these. Read their names with me: cotton-bellied frog, Chad's rabbit, Silawa monkey, Utah Wild geese, South African elephant martens, marimba bears...