Original Author: Deep Tide TechFlow
Usually in the eyes of retail investors, VC is the booster of the sickle, and Meme is the big red flag against the sickle.
Memes driven by culture and community often lack excessive primary investment and endorsement from major VCs. The relatively fair and random nature has also made "retail investors" gradually become a carnival of being cut in all directions - it's better to speculate on Meme lottery than to be cut everywhere.
But this carnival has not belonged to VCs for a long time.
VCs with top-notch judgment and vision naturally understand this shift in the wind in the crypto circle. Whether it's anxiety or contemplation, they have to do something to seek a breakthrough in the attention economy.
Recently, Variant co-founder Li Jin has taken action and wrote on her Twitter:
"Born too late to explore the earth; born too early to explore the universe; born at the right time, hosting a meme hackathon."
This event, named Memecoin Hackathon, the organizer on the introduction page is Li Jin, and it is scheduled to be held at the headquarters of Variant Fund in New York on April 20, calling for teams that can build the following:
- New meme coins, especially those seeking to have a positive impact on a broader ecosystem
- Liquidity layers, including Telegram bots, DEX
- Applications using memecoins as a go-to-market strategy
- Applications building utilities around memecoins
Interestingly, the event mentioned a term called "Memefra," which stands for Meme infrastructure. It is clear that VCs also welcome anything that creates conditions for Memes.
Born at the right time, VCs who have always been in the forefront of infrastructure technology, are they really starting to catch up with the Meme wave with a native "retail investor" temperament?
Attention economy, perpetual motion machine of the coin circle
In fact, the VC co-hosting the Meme hackathon is not a sudden impulse, but more of a response to the trend.
VC investment emphasizes value return, and Memes themselves have "attention value."
In an earlier blog post by Li Jin, she keenly realized that Memecoins, NFTs, and tokens are new "attention assets" that can measure the value of attention in real time.
Abundant information leads to attention scarcity, so attention is a scarce resource. However, in the advertising business model dominated by Web2, the value brought by user attention is harvested by the platform, not flowing to the users.
Therefore, cryptocurrencies can be seen as the next generation iteration of the attention economy, with a more efficient market.
Memecoins can measure and capture the value of attention in real time. Users can invest in and own attention assets to express their belief in whether specific memes, media, creators, or networks will receive more attention and interest in the future.
From this perspective, it becomes more reasonable for VCs to favor Meme coins.
After all, successfully investing in products that capture public attention (even if it's a Meme) is quite tempting and persuasive.
While attracting user attention, the emergence of Memes has also taught many crypto projects a lesson in marketing methods and listing pace:
In the traditional model, crypto projects follow the path of "product first, then attention" - first build a product through technology, then build a community around it through marketing, and gradually develop a presence;
In the Meme attention economy, crypto projects can completely go with "attention first, then product" - by launching a project native to a popular memecoin, new applications/infrastructure can mobilize the holders of memecoins, allowing them to experience more utility from their tokens.
These two different development paths clearly show that the era has chosen the latter.
Regardless of the type of crypto project, fundamentally, they are all about attracting attention, getting more people involved and using, and establishing a connection with the tokens.
Driven by the attention economy, the coin circle has gone through many stages, from Bitcoin to Ethereum, from NFTs to Memes, each narrative shift represents a transfer of attention.
Therefore, it's not surprising for VCs to make changes in line with the attention, revolving around attention.
Users educate VCs, and VCs educate users
However, you should know that the crypto market was not always dominated by the frenzy of Meme without a background. It used to follow a traditional and serious venture capital path.
When Ethereum was just born, even Vitalik had to pitch and explain Ethereum to various investors from the East and the West in 2014.
Although many veterans in the crypto circle reminisce about "no one understood Ethereum at the time, and now they regret not investing," even someone as strong as Vitalik, crypto projects have always followed an unchanged process:
First, capture the attention of VCs with strength (or bragging about strength), then move towards the market to seize (or harvest) the attention of users.
In this path, whether it's ICOs or IEOs, VCs have obtained a large amount of low-priced chips in the early rounds, and then sold them based on different unlocking conditions when the project moved to the secondary stage; of course, there are savvy retail investors who followed suit, but there are also a large number of last-minute buyers.
Over time, users have become weary; after being educated through a round, they probably understand how things work.
So, we can increasingly see projects like inscriptions, runes, and Memecoins in the new cycle that VCs are not very involved in, are too late to participate, or disdain to participate. They have broken the traditional venture capital process and the path of attention growth:
First, directly capture the attention of users with explosive growth, then do other things based on the user base.
Users are not afraid of the volatility, but afraid that they won't have a better opportunity to enjoy the volatility than you do. Clearly, Memes have given users a relatively closer channel, even if they may be cut, it's still better than explicitly handing it over to VCs.
So, to some extent, users are also educating VCs, saying, "Hey, grown-ups, times have changed."
It's interesting to see a role reversal in the ecosystem, and this is exactly what makes the coin circle fascinating:
Mutual cutting and hurting, mutual growth.
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