They won't be the last meme.
By: Kaori
Among the technology and internet assets, the most widely circulated in the market are undoubtedly the investment myths such as Nvidia, Luckin, and Pinduoduo, whose soaring stock prices with huge market values are enough to make those big players in the market retreat.
But from the perspective of ordinary people, the strongest asset this year is still the explosively strong Crypto. In what is recognized as a bear market in 2023, the two meme coins PEPE and ORDI have seen staggering increases of 375,000 times and nearly 20,000 times, shocking the industry.
Meme coin projects are the "wealth code" with the greatest opportunities for ordinary investors in the cryptocurrency field, because there is never a shortage of new things here. Unlike other commercial cryptocurrency projects such as DeFi and web3Game, Meme seems to have no business model, but its business model and PMF (Product Market Fit, a product that matches user needs) are very clear, that is: to provide the masses of cryptocurrency investors with a speculative medium with great imaginative space.
The so-called "providing for the masses of investors" means that the concept of Meme is simple and fresh, and its concept is either strange or conflicting, making it easier to capture the attention of the masses in a sea of information. The so-called "great imaginative space" means that they have no actual business as the gravitational force of the coin price, and only the "consensus" valuation can be sky-high.
Even the most serious cryptocurrency practitioners cannot deny that "speculative profit" is an important, even the primary, driving force in the cryptocurrency world, and the endless stream of meme projects is a response to this type of demand for PMF.
PEPE, the inheritor of meme culture
The success of "dog-themed" meme coins has made the market realize that memes have a unique role in the cryptocurrency field, "preaching" in the community and sharing a certain subculture can generate tremendous power. After a round of bear market, meme coins like Shib and Doge not only survived, but also performed even better than some so-called value investment projects.
If you are a traditional investor, whether it's value investment or short-term trading, when choosing investment targets, you will definitely study all aspects of asset issuance for stability. But meme coins won't give you that time, they rely on emotions and marketing.
PEPE, as a "meme image" that has been popular on the internet for many years, is inspired by the classic meme "Pepe the Frog" from Matt Furie's "Boy's Club" cartoon. It became popular in cultural forums such as Myspace, Gaia Online, and 4chan in 2008, and in 2015, it became one of the most popular viral images on the social platform Tumblr.
Crypto is not lacking in hype about this sad frog, from tokens to NFTs, it has it all. And in 2023, PEPE's value reached its peak.
PEPE's official X account posted its first tweet on April 5th, and PEPE trading started on April 15th. The initial price of PEPE was about 0.000000001 USD, with a total supply of 420.69 trillion.
PEPE claims to be the "most attention-grabbing meme coin in existence. Dogecoin is outdated, it's time for PEPE to dominate." The two numbers "420" and "69" in its supply of 420.69 trillion are also meme numbers with subcultural attributes. It can be said that the popularity of PEPE is inseparable from the cultural groundwork of the "sad frog" expression pack, as well as the wealth imagination brought to this market by many meme coin projects before it.
The early price trend of PEPE was driven by frog-themed memes shared by the founding team and fans on social media. It wasn't until May 6th that Binance launched PEPE in the innovation zone, and then Binance launched PEPE 1-20x U perpetual contract, and PEPE's price reached new highs at that time.
At that time, the market was driven by emotions, with Bitcoin rising 1x from the bottom of the crash, and cryptocurrency players seeing the skyrocketing of AI and chip stocks in the US stock market, longing for a target to release their long-suppressed emotions, coupled with the Binance effect, PEPE's performance in the first half of this year was unparalleled.
In just one month since its establishment at the end of April, PEPE's market value has reached an astonishing 15 billion USD, with a 24-hour trading volume exceeding 17 billion USD at its peak. This trading volume is no less than the spot Bitcoin trading volume on some of the largest centralized exchanges during the same period. In the bear market, the trading volume that can match Bitcoin, PEPE may be the first.
PEPE price trend chart; Source: CoinGecko
ORDI, the dragon head disguised as a meme
Unlike PEPE, which has always placed itself in the meme culture track from the beginning, the dragon head ORDI of the Bitcoin ecosystem chose a more covert path to the throne of wealth effect.
ORDI's story goes back to December 2022. Bitcoin ecosystem developer Casey launched the Ordinals protocol, and the cryptocurrency market began to experiment with assets related to Bitcoin.
On March 8, 2023, an anonymous developer named @domodata launched the BRC-20 Inscription Protocol based on the Ordinals protocol and deployed the experimental token $ORDI. On March 9, ORDI was minted, with a cost of 2-3 USD per mint, and each mint had 1000 ORDI, which means that the unit price of ORDI at that time was 0.003 USD.
And now, ORDI is priced at 54 USD. In nine months, it has risen from 0.003 to 54, nearly 20,000 times.
ORDI 7-day price trend chart; Source: CoinGecko
Looking back now, perhaps ORDI is the most successful experiment in this Bitcoin experiment, but the price wheel of ORDI did not take off at the beginning.
Bitcoin has long been used only for storage and transfer functions, and when people start to build ecosystems and experience applications in it, they will find that compared to the mature DeFi, NFT, and other fields of Ethereum, the Bitcoin ecosystem is still not very friendly to ordinary cryptocurrency users. And at that time, the price of Bitcoin did not give people confidence, except for the steadfast players in the Bitcoin ecosystem, no ordinary investors would believe that inscription projects like ORDI could really take off.
On March 23, UniSat launched the BRC-20 trading market, and the price of ORDI rose to 0.3 USD, then UniSat closed the trading market due to double spending issues. A month later, UniSat reopened the BRC-20 trading market, only open to some users, and the price of ORDI rose to 1 USD.
People gradually realized the future expectations of this new asset issuance method, and for new things, people in the coin circle are always willing to invest time and energy to research and attract funds by consensus on fair launch.
With the successive entry of mainstream trading platforms, the first wave of ORDI's outbreak gradually planted the seeds. On April 27, OKX initiated a vote on whether to support BRC-20, and users received the expectation of BRC-20 being listed on OKX.
On May 8th, ORDI was listed on gate, and the price once broke through 20 USD, reaching a historical high. On that day, BTC chain fees accounted for 43.7% of the miners' total income. However, with the selling pressure and the overall market downturn, the price of ORDI continued to decline to around 7.5 USD. On May 20th, OKX and Huobi listed ORDI, but as BTC fell to 25,000 USD and the market continued to be sluggish, ORDI also fell to 5 USD, followed by a continuous decline in the price of ORDI for more than 4 months.
During this time, there were no particularly significant developments or breakthroughs in the Bitcoin ecosystem, and most people in the market began to have doubts about the Bitcoin inscriptions that had just gained some heat a few months ago. In September, there were issues with withdrawing ORDI from OKX, causing dissatisfaction in the market. It wasn't until October 18th that UniSat released BRC-20-swap, and the price of ORDI began to recover.
After that, the Bitcoin ecosystem exploded, and the narrative and emotions reached unprecedented levels of heat. On November 7th, Binance announced the listing of ORDI, and its price rose from 7.4 USD to 13.5 USD; as the price of BTC rose, the price of ORDI continued to rise to 20 USD. In early December, the price of ORDI rose from 21.7 USD to 32 USD; on December 5th, ORDI broke through 50 USD, reaching a historical high of 54 USD.
In these more than 270 days, the price of ORDI went from 0.003 USD to 54 USD, rightfully earning the title of the first coin of 2023. But during this process, from the initial incomprehension and disregard to becoming the leader in the BTC ecosystem, ORDI faced no shortage of doubts. Even Casey, the founder of the Ordinals protocol, expressed his emotions about BRC-20 during the time when ORDI was listed on Binance.
From PEPE to ORDI, it can be seen that Binance is still the most recognized asset issuance platform in the market. Listing on Binance has become a key factor in whether a token can receive a price pump, and this is also the most welcome marketing method for meme projects. "What I have is not important, where I am is important," just like Dogecoin landing on the moon brought further expectations of price increases for tokens.
Even in the eyes of speculators, Crypto itself is a huge meme, and ordinary people still have opportunities to strike it rich here. Compared to logical investment targets like Nvidia and Pinduoduo, meme coins are still the most explosive wealth opportunities among ordinary people.
In the crypto market, the prerequisite for buying any token is that someone (in the future) wants to buy it from you at a higher price. This is especially true for meme coins, but they rely more on psychological driving factors rather than fundamentals. This is known in economics as the "Castle-in-the-Air Theory," which emphasizes the psychological value of assets and the impact of public psychology on asset prices. It means "investors try to build a castle in the air and consider possible future price increases, rather than estimating their intrinsic value."
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