Meme coins are an ideal tool for measuring community value.
Author: JJ Alicea
Translated by: Deep Tide TechFlow
Meme has been a part of human culture since ancient times; they are cultural symbols that transcend generations—ideas that continuously accumulate meaning across different eras. As a focal point of society, memes carry collective influence.
Modern people often view memes as trivial or even ridiculous, primarily because internet memes usually contain humorous elements. However, the reason humor resonates is often because it contains some kernel of truth.
As Richard Dawkins stated: “Memes propagate themselves in the meme pool through a process of imitation, jumping from one brain to another, just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool through sperm or eggs, jumping from one body to another.”
Memes are the basic units of cultural transmission. In ancient societies, religious stories and shared histories were passed down orally, with each storyteller adding their own perspective or embellishment. This process helped solidify the community's beliefs and values, embedding them deeply within the structure of culture. Similarly, modern memes are ideas or cultural fragments that spread from one person to another, often changing with each retelling or reinterpretation. Both forms of transmission rely on repetition, resonance, and the subtle changes that occur as individuals reinterpret and share, allowing the core of an idea to persist and adapt over time.
Thus, memes become tools for modern storytelling, simplifying complex ideas into easily shareable forms, thereby transmitting cultural information.
Community
Memes are the basic units of cultural transmission, while communities are the soil in which these memes accumulate value. In other words, memes are important ideas, and communities are the subjects of these ideas' influence.
Communities typically have the following characteristics:
Shared interests and goals
Communication and interaction
Structure and identity
Knowledge and resource sharing
Collective identity
Communities are often initiated by a small number of individuals dedicated to changing mainstream culture. The open-source software movement was started by a small group of developers, such as the founders of the Linux project, who challenged the dominance of proprietary software, advocating for free access to and modification of code. The punk rock movement originated in New York and London, driven by a passionate group of musicians, artists, and fans who opposed the polished sound of mainstream rock and the consumerism of popular culture. VaccinateCA is a group of tech optimists dedicated to providing the public with information on vaccine availability to address government shortcomings in logistics.
These communities were initially very localized, composed of a few steadfast believers who shared a common vision and faith in the malleability of the world. Ultimately, they have had a profound impact across various fields, including technology, finance, culture, art, entertainment, and healthcare.
The Linux operating system saves businesses and governments over $60 billion annually in licensing fees, supporting over 90% of internet infrastructure, while the Android system, based on the Linux kernel, powers about 70% of smartphones worldwide. Punk rock became the soundtrack for political and social movements in Eastern Europe (such as the Solidarity movement in Poland) and Latin America. Punk enthusiasts and bands promoted magazines focused on music, politics, and alternative lifestyles, becoming grassroots precursors to modern blogs and independent digital journalism. VaccinateCA provided reliable information on over 1,000 vaccination sites, while Google offered only 127 options, significantly improving vaccine distribution efficiency.
This is a grassroots, bottom-up, community-driven way of creating value.
Meme
The use of gold can be traced back to ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, and parts of Eastern Europe. By 4000 BC, people valued gold for its unique beauty, rarity, and malleability, crafting it into jewelry, ceremonial items, and symbols of status. At the same time, copper, silver, and bronze were also widely used to make tools and ornaments. So, what makes gold so special?
Unlike other metals, gold does not tarnish or corrode, giving it enduring qualities that symbolize permanence and stability. The durability of gold means it can withstand change, obsolescence, and competition, thus expected to continue existing in the future. Gold has become a meme with lasting influence because its significance and uniqueness resonate with humanity.
Gold is one of the largest classes of assets globally, but it has no practical utility—no production use, no cash flow, and no business model. Its value derives solely from our collective recognition of it. The practicality of gold itself is limited, but its value comes from its beauty, rarity, and symbolic meaning in human culture. Gold does not have practical uses like crude oil, nor does it represent valuable ownership like Apple stock. However, as more people recognize the value of gold, it has not only become a means of storing value but may even become a global reserve currency, potentially replacing another cultural symbol—the US dollar.
Some might argue that Bitcoin (BTC) is the original "meme coin" in the digital world—something that initially seemed worthless but has now become an important asset for value storage in the global economy.
Bitcoin has not only revolutionized the financial sector but has also sparked a cultural movement. Through decentralized technology, Bitcoin enables peer-to-peer value exchange, granting people financial autonomy and facilitating the rise of a global grassroots community bound by shared beliefs.
Bitcoin emerged shortly after the 2008 financial crisis, a crucial timing. It tapped into people's distrust of traditional financial systems, creating a new narrative of decentralized value. People buy Bitcoin not because it has cash flow, but because of its unique value proposition: it is a store of value, a belief in future returns, and most importantly, it symbolizes a new financial ecosystem free from corporate or individual control. Bitcoin is a trustless asset that can support a decentralized economy.
Holders of Bitcoin feel they are part of something larger—they are members of a community, not just investors. If in doubt, one can search for "Apple tattoos" or "Uber tattoos" and compare them with "Bitcoin tattoos."
The Value of Community
The power and value of communities are often underestimated by outsiders, just as they initially misunderstood Bitcoin. In traditional finance, professionals typically rely on methodologies taught at institutions like Wharton—such as discounted cash flow, comparative analysis, cash flow, and EBITDA. Consequently, companies build their metrics and reports around these frameworks. This narrow perspective is precisely why many initially misunderstood the value of GameStop and why crypto assets and meme coins like Bitcoin are still not fully understood by the traditional financial world.
Today, there is immense value embedded in the communities created by various "companies." Here, "companies" can refer to anything—startups, publicly traded companies, crypto protocols, influencers, an idea, or even a subreddit. Over time, the criteria for evaluating companies will not be limited to their profits but will also include the value created and accumulated by their communities—both internal and external (e.g., Reddit and GameStop).
Over 86% of internet users trust Reddit and its communities more than advertisements when learning about new products and brands. Adults under 45 trust news on social media platforms more than traditional news networks, with 63% of Gen Z and millennials trusting influencers over brands. The average Gen Z member spends 8.5 hours online daily, with 55% using smartphones for over 5 hours each day, while Americans send an average of 94 text messages daily.
TikTok's book community has driven bestseller sales in publishing, with some books seeing sales increases of up to 1,000% after community recommendations. The Reddit r/WallStreetBets community pushed GameStop's stock price from under $20 to over $300 in just a few days. Bud Light's sales dropped 26% after a collaboration, AB InBev's stock fell 20%, resulting in a market value loss of $26 billion, all driven by its conservative community.
The importance of community is difficult to measure using traditional financial assessment frameworks because their influence is unpredictable. Communities are dynamic, often evolving and changing, and cannot be simply described by investment prospectuses or financial models.
Financial institutions often overlook the enduring power of communities, viewing them as anomalies and underestimating their influence.
We believe that as the degree of connectivity accelerates and online interactions continue, communities will evolve and exert greater influence. The proliferation of digital platforms has made it easier than ever for individuals to find and connect with like-minded groups, breaking down the geographical and social barriers that once limited community formation.
Meme Coins: A New Vehicle for Community Ownership
Meme coins are an ideal tool for measuring community value. They are a tokenized embodiment of culture.
Meme coins are similar to social networks, with their value derived from the communities they gather. However, they bring about a fundamental change in the way value is distributed and controlled. Unlike platforms such as Instagram or Facebook, where the value created by user activities (like content creation, interaction, and data) is owned by the platform and its shareholders, meme coins disrupt this model by enabling users to become creators and owners of network value.
Bonk was distributed to users through airdrops, quickly becoming the preferred meme coin of the Solana community. The initial recipients were those who persisted and continued to contribute to the existing community, protocols, and core infrastructure after the collapse of FTX. Bonk became a tokenized symbol of resilience in adversity, with enthusiasm spreading among the initial recipients and the broader community, enhancing Bonk's value and creating wealth within the ecosystem. This wealth remained in the community, driving projects like Bonkbot, which created significant value for Solana, product users, and the Bonk token.
This is a grassroots, community-driven value creation from the bottom up, with no external investors, only human capitalists creating value for the community.
As we digitize more assets around the world, more memes can be monetized, manufactured, and spontaneously created—the concept of "meme" is expanded to encompass anything of social significance, transforming irrevocable smart contracts into tools for community monetization.
Future Outlook
The future will share many similarities with the past. Technology will continue to evolve, cities will keep expanding, and culture will adjust according to the tools and media of the times, but machines will not dominate cultural creation. The creation, dissemination, and persistence of culture cannot be outsourced to large data matrices. While machines may generate products similar to memes—these products are algorithmically optimized snapshots of familiar ideas, designed to capture fleeting attention—they will lack the profound resonance and transformative power of true memes.
Throughout history, culture has been the result of collective effort, and memes are its smallest units of transmission, carrying the thoughts and values of the times. Memes are not merely fragments of media; they are carriers of shared meaning. The reason memes thrive is not that they are created, but that they are accepted and spread by people. They do not emerge from isolated creation but rather from shared understanding, humor, and emotion.
On Losaida Avenue in Manhattan, there is a small Puerto Rican restaurant called Rinconcito. They do not have reservations, reward programs, point systems, or electronic loyalty cards. They do not ask for your email to send advertisements, nor do they have any contact information. You won’t find them on TikTok chasing the latest dietary trends, nor will you see them patenting their sauces for mass sale.
What they operate is culture. Food prepared by honest people at fair prices—this has been the case for decades. In every community, there is a clear resonance that this is how things should be. This is its secret ingredient—culture for sale.
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