From DOGE to PEPE, the journey of creative equality in Memecoins

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In the wild world of cryptocurrency, nothing is more dramatic than meme coins—they are born from jokes but can skyrocket a thousandfold in a week; they tout "fair launches" while leaving countless retail investors in tears. In April 2023, PEPE coin swept the market with its "no pre-sale, no pre-mining" fair stance, with 93.1% of tokens directly injected into the liquidity pool and permanently destroyed. This almost paranoid transparency attracted 400,000 holders in just two weeks. However, few noticed that behind this seemingly perfect fair model lies the cruelest truth of the meme coin industry: when the technical barriers are smoothed out by no-code platforms, and when "decentralization" becomes a marketing buzzword, what kind of "equality" are we truly pursuing?

From the Joke of Dogecoin to the Myth of "Fair Launch": The Genesis Code of Memes

In 2013, to mock the frenzy of cryptocurrency speculation, programmers Jackson Palmer and Billy Markus created Dogecoin using a Japanese Shiba Inu meme. No one expected this "joke coin" to spread like a virus in the Reddit community, where users tipped meme creators, crowdfunded for the Jamaican bobsled team's Olympic expenses, and initiated the absurd "send Dogecoin to the moon" campaign. This completely spontaneous community behavior unexpectedly birthed the purest fair model in crypto history: no white paper, no team allocation, and 100 billion tokens generated solely through mining, allowing everyone to participate from the same starting line. A decade later, Dogecoin's market cap stabilized at around $10 billion, and people finally understood that the "equality" of meme coins has never been in the code but in the hands of users who stayed up late sharing memes.

However, capital quickly rewrote this idealistic experiment. In 2021, "Dogecoin father" Elon Musk jokingly referred to himself as the "father of Dogecoin" on SNL, causing the coin's price to plummet by 34% that day, trapping countless retail investors who had bought in at high prices. This darkly humorous twist revealed the fatal contradiction of meme coins: they survive on community sentiment but are easily manipulated by celebrity effects and capital control. Take Bonk coin in 2023, for example; it claimed to distribute half of its 500 trillion tokens to contributors in the Solana ecosystem, attempting to replicate Dogecoin's decentralized gene. However, the definition of "contributors" was vague, and a large number of tokens ultimately flowed into early institutional wallets, with a significant price fluctuation of 70% on the first day of launch.

Joint Curve and Liquidity Traps: Inequality Wrapped in Algorithms

No-code platforms like pump.fun have simplified token creation to "done in three minutes," making meme coin issuance seem to head towards democratization. However, hidden in the "joint curve pricing model" prompt that pops up before clicking the "create" button is a mathematical trap that most people do not understand. This algorithm links price to circulation, superficially creating a fair mechanism of "buy orders pushing prices up naturally," but in reality, it generates new inequalities. Data from a certain cat-themed meme coin's "fair launch" in 2023 indicated that the top 100 traders who rushed in averaged a profit of 300%, while subsequent participants faced a loss rate as high as 82%.

Comparison of Memecoin Launch Models and Their Impact on Equality

More covert manipulations occur within liquidity pools. The 2022 Squid Game token crash is still fresh in everyone's memory, where developers paired the token with Ethereum and withdrew all liquidity when the price surged, rendering the tokens in retail investors' hands worthless code. This "rug pull" scam has become standard procedure in the meme coin field: first, attract funds with a promise of "100% liquidity locked," then artificially inflate prices with fake community hype, and finally, delete social media accounts one night and run away with the funds. Data from CertiK, a blockchain security company, shows that in 2023, over 1,200 meme coin projects "pulled the rug," with an average lifespan of just 4.7 days and a total amount involved reaching $4.3 billion.

The Ideal and Reality of DAO Governance: When Community Voting Becomes a "Whale Game"

In the face of numerous scams, DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) were once seen as a path to redemption for meme coins. The NeoPepe project white paper promised "community votes decide every decision, with no privileges for developers." However, when the community voted on whether to burn 50% of the tokens, early "whales" holding 30% of the tokens united to veto the proposal, rendering the 12,000 votes from ordinary holders meaningless. This "seemingly decentralized, but actually centralized" governance dilemma is rampant in the meme coin space. The "community burn plan" of Shiba Inu (SHIB) appeared democratic, but in practice, 90% of the burn volume came from ordinary retail investors, while early whale wallets remained untouched.

The irreconcilable contradictions within meme coin communities have led to this governance failure. On one hand, they rely on the "decentralized" label to attract believers; on the other hand, without a core team to guide the project, it can easily fall into chaos. In 2023, a well-known frog-themed meme coin community had disagreements over whether to list on centralized exchanges, leading supporters and opponents to insult each other on Discord. As a result, seven core developers resigned together, and the project stagnated. Cryptocurrency researcher Laura Shin once said: meme coin communities are like wild parties; when the music stops, no one knows who will clean up the mess.

The Regulatory Gray Area: When "Non-Security" Status Becomes a Fraud Shield

The U.S. SEC classified meme coins as "non-securities" intending to give innovation some breathing room, but this was exploited by scammers as a shield. In 2023, TRUMP coin leveraged political hype to inflate its price, and the SEC found it difficult to classify it as a security, leading to over $80 million in losses for 12,000 investors. Regulatory loopholes have spawned more covert manipulation tactics. One team created ten similar meme coins, deliberately allowed nine to fail, and when investors trusted the tenth, they absconded with the funds under the guise of "cross-chain migration" or "contract upgrades."

Ironically, some projects have used regulatory loopholes to actively conduct marketing. A so-called "compliant meme coin" launched in early 2024 prominently stated in its white paper that "this project does not meet the SEC's definition of securities," but sneakily added in the disclaimer that "no returns are guaranteed." Ordinary investors find it challenging to recognize the real risks behind this "compliance packaging + high-risk hint" rhetoric. Former SEC commissioner Hester Peirce warned, "Saying meme coins are not securities does not mean they are safe investments; they may be a hundred times more dangerous than securities."

A Survival Guide for Adventurers: How to Protect Yourself in the Meme Coin Frenzy

Despite the numerous risks, meme coins have drawn countless people into this frenzy. If you must participate, remember these hard-earned lessons: do not trust the promises of "anonymous teams," as 92% of exit scams conceal their identities; carefully check liquidity lock proofs, ensuring that the fund pool is managed by a third-party platform and not controlled by the project team; and be wary of sudden surges from "dark horses." After all, 87% of meme coins that surged over 1000% in 2023 revealed their true nature within 72 hours.

Real opportunities often hide in quiet corners. Dogecoin has shown over ten years that the value of meme coins has never been in price curves but in the cultural significance continuously created by the community. PEPE traders communicate with memes on Twitter, and the SHIB community spontaneously engages in charitable activities. In such moments, these seemingly meaningless actions may be the closest meme coins come to the ideal of "equality." This equality is not the absolute fairness of code but a shared joke and belief among a group of people who temporarily forget the greed and fraud of the crypto world, purely enjoying this digital carnival.

Always remember: when the music stops, the first to leave is never you.

Common Warning Signs of Unfair Memecoin Launches

The Democratic Revolution of Memecoin 2.0: Reconstructing the Creative Ecosystem

While PEPE's liquidity destruction mechanism is still regarded as a fair model, the crypto market has quietly undergone a new evolution. In 2025, the DJ.DOG project incubated by HashKey will transform Memecoin from a "tool for a few speculators" into a "platform for the majority to create." This team, which won the Solana hackathon in Hangzhou, perfectly addresses the long-standing issue of creative democratization in the industry through a combination of "top institutional endorsements + community operation genes + technical competition validation."

The Identity Leap from Trader to Creator

The traditional Memecoin market has an invisible glass ceiling, where 99% of participants can only engage in passive trading, while the rights to create are tightly held by a few with Cabal community identities, technical skills, and knowledge of regulatory gray areas. The DJ.DOG team has experience operating a community of 3 million users and discovered that ordinary users have three fears about issuing tokens: the psychological burden of being labeled a scammer, the technical barrier due to a lack of smart contract development skills, and the community threshold created by a 2-3 hour information gap with first-line players.

This shackling must be broken. Their upcoming "everyone participates" feature builds a unique solution: trustless team formation on the Solana chain, where the system automatically matches 3-5 users with different skills (such as designers and community operators) through smart contracts. All members must provide unrelated clean wallet addresses to ensure a decentralized creative process. Additionally, there is an innovative data feature cloning technology that extracts 15 characteristics from successful tokens like PEPE and DOGE under similar narratives (such as initial liquidity ratios, trading frequency in the first 24 hours, and the activity level of associated social accounts) when inputting a "Musk tweet" theme, generating optimized token parameters with one click. What originally took seasoned developers three days of work is now compressed to five minutes.

The Business Logic Behind Technical Equality

The full-stack tool matrix built by DJ.DOG supports this democratized creation. Their self-developed aggregation engine can achieve a transaction speed of 0.5 seconds, three times faster than the industry average. This speed advantage is due to the team's meticulous optimization of high-performance public chains during the Solana hackathon. After integrating the real-time tweet stream from Grok, owned by Musk, the narrative recognition speed is two minutes faster than traditional tools. When Musk publishes content related to "Dogecoin to the moon," DJ.DOG users can complete the entire process from token minting, liquidity injection to social dissemination within 120 seconds, turning speed advantages into creative opportunities.

Their regulatory compliance strategy is also noteworthy. The team clearly positions the product as a "chain-based entertainment tool," embedding a disclaimer of "no investment commitment" in the smart contract, and hiding developer addresses through the trustless team formation mechanism. This design aligns with the SEC's 2025 guidelines for classifying Memecoin as non-securities and alleviates users' legal concerns. The team emphasized in their hackathon acceptance speech, "We are not building financial products, but a digital creation space that allows ordinary people to participate."

The Essential Differences from Traditional Paradigms

Dogecoin is a community-driven model, PEPE is a fair launch mechanism, and DJ.DOG innovates by extending "fairness" from the issuance phase to the entire lifecycle. In contrast, traditional meme coins lose their fairness after token distribution, while DJ.DOG continuously achieves fairness through three mechanisms.

Creation Phase: Data feature cloning technology eliminates technical barriers, enabling non-technical users to replicate the on-chain genes of successful tokens.

Propagation Phase: Early decentralized propagation relies on mandatory social tasks (such as Twitter retweets and community discussions) to ensure effectiveness.

Trading Phase: The 15,000+ smart money tracking system allows retail investors to have the same level of information transparency as institutions.

The core definition of Memecoin 2.0 is the transformation from "purely speculative targets" to "creation tools + social platforms," and this evolution is echoed by beta user feedback, which states that issuing tokens used to feel like walking a tightrope, but now it feels like playing a sandbox game.

Potential Challenges and Critical Thinking

However, the democratization of tools does not necessarily achieve creative equality. While DJ.DOG's AI narrative analysis feature lowers the technical threshold, access to the Grok API is controlled by paid institutions, which may create a new "data privilege class." Randomly paired creative teams may face conflicts in profit distribution and decision-making consensus, which remain unverified uncertainties. These contradictions highlight the essence of Memecoin evolution: fairness is not a static endpoint but a dynamic process of ongoing negotiation between technology and humanity.

If ordinary users can create their own meme coins on their phones in five minutes, and the creative profits can be automatically distributed to each propagation node through smart contracts, then Memecoin may indeed be undergoing a paradigm shift from "a few people creating bubbles" to "a digital cultural experiment involving the majority." The example of DJ.DOG indicates that technological innovation can change not only the issuance method of meme coins but also reshape their social value foundation.

In Conclusion

The Memecoin market is a highly dynamic and rapidly evolving field within the cryptocurrency ecosystem, characterized by continuous innovation in launch mechanisms and governance models. The inherent tension between the ideals of decentralization and fairness and the practical needs of securing initial funding and long-term sustainability may drive the development of more complex hybrid models in the future.

As the market matures, even if it does not lead to all meme coins being classified as securities, the increasing regulatory scrutiny may promote greater transparency, accountability, and a reduction in fraudulent activities, which could indirectly help create a fairer environment for participants. The journey toward achieving true equality in the meme coin space remains an ongoing evolutionary process shaped by technological advancements, community dynamics, and regulatory developments.

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