This year's cryptocurrency world has an unavoidable concept, which is "meme coins." In the past week, the price of $RAVE has continuously risen, peaking at about 40 times its value from a week ago. Now, the market capitalization of $RAVE has reached the 41st position in the market.

From the recent $SIREN and $STO to even earlier $PIPPIN, $RIVER, $BEAT, $MYX, etc. No matter how bleak the market is, although "meme coins" represent an asymmetric information game between retail players and whales, there are always players who diligently analyze and attempt to capture the logic behind "meme coins" and find a winning strategy in the pursuit of volatility.

Even in the Chinese community, a complete "meme coinology" has gradually emerged.

What is a "meme coin"?

If the definition of "meme coin" is simply and crudely "rises fast, rises steep," then "meme coinology" would not exist. The essence of retail players engaging with "meme coins" is a direct game with whales, tearing off a piece of flesh from the control of the whales.

Based on this essence, KOL Crypto Skanda (@thecryptoskanda) has provided a detailed definition of "meme coins," clarifying the foundation of "meme coinology":

- The spot control rate is basically above 96%

- There are Binance contracts; whether there is spot trading is less important

- Usually through over-the-counter financing, violently pulling and smashing prices in a short time frame, gathering massive liquidity and counter orders

- Whales profit by triggering long and short liquidations, taking fees from the counterparty, ultimately completing the spot dumping, walking through the entire harvesting process

How to identify a "meme coin"?

On this question, different players have provided excellent reference ideas from various angles.

Abnormalities in open contract volume can be reflected from multiple angles, first and foremost is "data being manipulated." @Arya_web3 discovered on April 11 that the 24-hour open contract volume data for $RAVE on that day was $60 million for Binance, $60 million for Bitget, $60 million for BingX, $26 million for OKX, and $26 million for Bybit. Based on this data and the overall open contract volume data from various exchanges, she speculated that there was an abnormality in the data of BingX and Bitget, suggesting the possibility of manipulation of open contract volume data.

Moreover, on that day, the 24-hour trading volume of $RAVE on contracts was $6.9 billion, with a contract holding of $300 million; the whale raised the price by 10 times from the bottom but had no significant liquidation orders, deepening the possibility of manipulated contract data. She also mentioned that by observing where liquidation contracts concentrated on which exchanges, it can serve as a basis for judging whether the open contract volume data is manipulated on certain exchanges.

@thecryptoskanda summarized and supplemented the above observations:

- The lower the median proportion of open contract volume on Binance, the higher the degree of manipulation by whales

- A high ratio of contract trading volume/open contract volume indicates a higher likelihood of manipulated open contract volume data

- This means that all strategies that purely monitor contract trading volume or open contract volume are inappropriate, because it is likely that the whale is deliberately stopping the manipulation of open contract volume data to lure retail investors in

You might say that this is identifying a "meme coin" based on data that has already occurred or is happening; is there a way to analyze it before a "meme coin" starts?

No. In the words of @thecryptoskanda:

"A meme coin is not because it meets certain indicators that it becomes a meme coin. Rather, it is a meme coin in the first place, and that’s why it exhibits those indicators. Meme coins never reason with the market; they are only related to one thing—are there whales?"

How to judge if a "meme coin" is about to collapse

The first angle is the "divergence between price and open contract volume" proposed by @wuk_Bitcoin, which can be used to judge whether a "meme coin" is nearing collapse. @wuk_Bitcoin stated that when the price rises but the open contract volume consistently declines, it is a sign of an impending collapse.

"The main force clears all long positions at high levels, then supports the price to continue finding counterparties, allowing retail investors or electronic trading to come in and arbitrage; once there are counterparties, they can secretly add short positions. Once the short positions are set, they will withdraw the support price orders and smash down the price, adding shorts while doing so, until it finally collapses completely."

He also emphasized that data should be observed at an hourly level; otherwise, lower levels cannot determine the intentions of the main force.

This angle also has certain flaws because, as mentioned earlier, "data can be manipulated." However, if the observation time level of open contract volume is narrowed down, it introduces another angle, "mass liquidations and drastic decreases in open contract volume lead to whales exiting the market."

This angle was proposed by @CryptoRounder and supplemented by @thecryptoskanda:

"At a certain price point, a large number of liquidations triggered a drastic decrease in open contract volume; when the counterparty for short positions disappears, whales lose their willingness to maintain high prices and begin to fall, representing a more precise signal of a top."

Although the above two angles emphasize "how to escape before a meme coin collapses," this is already the most rational decision retail players can make in the severely asymmetric information game of "meme coins"—finding the point at which the whales decide to abandon the market and designing trades around this point. After all, before a "meme coin" collapses, whales can repeatedly trigger both long and short liquidations, and when whales truly exit and no longer protect the price, the downward trend of the "meme coin" will be irreversible.

Conclusion

Although many experts strive to find stable paths for profits from "meme coins" and we have seen many sharp perspectives, we must always remember that the reason "meme coins" can be called meme coins is that their control rate is as high as 95% or even more.

While we can discover traces of manipulation by whales from various dimensions, and even achieve victories in the "meme coin" game through data analysis, the situation of each "meme coin" is difficult to generalize through analysis and replicate in every game.

The whales behind "meme coins" are the ones holding the script; they can confuse retail players by manipulating data and can also profit by various means from retail players.

According to @Arya_web3's speculation, the cost for whales to manipulate open contract volume data is not high. Based on a 24-hour contract trading volume of $6.9 billion, calculated at a fee rate of 0.005%, the 24-hour cost is only $350,000.

If the core point of trading "meme coins" is "to anticipate the actions of the whales," this difficulty is akin to betting against the next scene of a script held by a person. Such difficulty is like opening the heavenly eye, and can be considered "non-human level."

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