Lately it’s become more and more common to read that memes unlike fundamental projects are based on a honest story without foundation, all for the sake of retail traders.
I find this nonsense very funny. Memes are 99.99% of the time a deliberate and well planned rug within a day and 99.9% of the time a rug within a couple of hours.
Memes are a 100% lottery that will not leave you with -90% of your deposit in the moment, like Starknet and other fundamentals but will take everything. To be more precise, it will not take away your money itself, but the team, which with a probability of about 99.9% will rug the project very quickly. Because for memes, the long term is nothing more than survival of the fittest.
Memes are insanely complicated. There are professional startup teams with experience, money, understanding of narrative and hamster behaviour, strong partners and influencers with a percentage of supply to sell on their own subscribers.
But successful memes are always based on brutal manipulation and/or huge amounts of money
To launch a billion dollar meme, the team needs total control of the supply, powerful shillers, and most importantly, millions / tens of millions of dollars for marketing. Well, and of course the team’s desire to build a long term story and tag into billion dollar profits instead of the tens / hundreds of thousands of dollars that scammers are content with, serially rugging you.
Memes are 0 honesty and transparency
You can analyse the movement of tokens, but still have no idea if the team is telling the truth about their distribution. You can watch those tokens lie dormant for days, weeks or months, but one day they could be completely depleted to zero. And with memes reaching hundreds of millions in cap, this happens regularly.
So where does the narrative that memes are fair come from?
Firstly, it is profitable for someone to push this idea to the masses. Secondly, fundemental projects discredited yourself.
But in reality it’s all marketing
The investment amount + famous funds bundle is just a great way of cheap or even free marketing. Thanks to your favourite infleuncers and yourselves, who believe that funds do not make money from you, but help you to make money.
At the same time, it is often impossible to verify whether an investment really exists. In the case of Tier 1 funds, of course, but when we are talking about no-name projects that have raised tens of millions in Tier 3-5. I would advise you to first think about the very fact of the investor existence. You can always hide behind an NDA.
Besides, no one is obliged to give you anything. If you spend your time and money on activities in any protocols – it is your decision alone. There are plenty of ways for teams to take a big amount of tokens by inventing whatever criteria they want. There are even more ways to shave off honest sybils. And many projects have confirmed this.
Fundamental has not discredited itself
The fact that someone gave bad airdop is quite expected and logical. That the tokens of these projects roll away is even more expected and logical. I didn’t think twice and all my tokens from VC-backed projects were sold immediately.
The fact that someone bought back a conditional Starknet is their problem. I still don’t understand why people think the FDV of a $30 billion blockchain without users is so low. It seems to me that even the current $3.5bn for Starknet is excessive. But sooner or later the Fomo flight to the moon will start, because when a project has money and the ability to hire a good market maker, you can expect anything from the timeline.
The fact that blockchain tokens are not growing is also normal. They should not grow in a bear market. They are just tools, nothing more. Furthermore, the tokens of many blockchains are absolutely useless. Their job is to induce fear or greed at the right time.
The main problem with fundamentals is overvaluation. Especially in a market that appeared to be bullish, but in fact remained bearish.
From autumn 2023 to spring 2024 the market was aggressively growing and causing FOMO. The backed by plate next to the name of a completely random project became the main marketing narrative. And if there was an 8-9 digit investment amount, even the supposedly smartinfluencers turned off their brains and put their money into any no-name project with an initial cap of hundreds of millions of dollars.
Memes are alts. And many of them are backed by funds. At the very least, huge amounts of non-retail money are poured into promoting the most successful ones when market sentiment allows.
Here’s how to compare JUP and STRK?
Both Wormhole and Starknet came out with a big marketcap, but there were nuances behind it. In terms of Wormhole, it’s a regular bridge. Sort of a useful infrastructure story, also with a big old investor. But there are a billion bridges already, and they can’t be valued in billions or tens of billions outside the bubble.
In less than half a year, the listing price has fallen 10 times. Despite the fact that the project has a colossal amount of money.
Starknet is blockchain. What does blockchain need? Community, nice packaging, simplicity, user-friendly interfaces, eye-catching wallets, green candle marketing and the availability of memes casino. Supported, for example, by an ecosystem of dough for rendering pretty graphs of infleuncers running slow rugs and shilling dozens and hundreds of tokens in their tweets.
It’s all there in Solana, but not in Starknet.
Solana is beautiful, Starknet is not. Solana is salesy, Starknet is not. Solana is comfortable, Starknet is not. Solana has a real community that participates in every movement in the network, goes away to cry when the token goes down, but then pays back and comes back to tinker. Starknet, on the other hand, has only sybils.
And the numbers bear this out. Solana’s TVL is almost $5 billion, while Starknet’s is less than $250 million. Daily trading volume on Solana’s network, which has fallen significantly in recent weeks, is $700 million and Starknet’s is $8 million. But it wasn’t falling, it just wasn’t there.
Can you feel the difference?
Even if Starknet turns on the meme casino and starts drawing profits on NFT collections / memes, attracting a lot of hamsters – liquidity will definitely come there, but it will not stay for long. Because it is ugly, uncomfortable and there is no native community in love with the project. There are only those who react locally to the token price and dream of breaking even.
At the same time in Solana, in my opinion, any new successful narrative will give users a chance to stay: it’s beautiful, convenient, fast, cheap, and also the native favourite blockchain, the same one that rose from the ashes.
Memes are alts, just with a lower entry threshold and without drawing on the knee another random roadmap for a future project without users. In fact, crypto users don’t really care what the project is. The main thing is to present it nicely. But that works best in a bull market.
And it is almost impossible to sell a project or its share for equity in web3. Nobody waits for decades for a profit. It is common to launch tokens to make a quick profit. And 99.9% of crypto projects make money just by manipulating tokens.
So memes = fundamentals = marketing only.
Crypto doesn’t need technology. It just needs marketing. And the more outrageous, fraudulent and cynical it is, the more you will fall for it.
One of my main conclusions is that the market has changed. But what has changed is not the cyclicality or the rules of the game. The main change is that the current bearish cycle is being driven by narratives that appeal to those crypto users who didn’t get hammered by the market crash but stayed in crypto.
For them the big uncles have come up with a whole bunch of gambles that will allow you to kiss your dept goodbye completely and make a lot of money for the clever founders and influencers. These include the NFT and the widespread use of memes.
If in the previous cycle there was only DeFi, which was in its infancy at the time, there is now a huge choice: some still jerk retro, some tap, some focus on pyramid restaking, some play to earns, some look for gems under invest and some spin roulette with instant results (memes).
Memes today are like the NFT in 2021-2022
The scheme is absolutely identical: projects bring money to expensive English-language influencers, other infleuncers see the hype and write about the same for free, in 99% of cases buy for themselves and sell together to their subscribers, founders carry away bags of stables.
Next, the task of both founders and influencers is to repeat the same thing XX times over and over again.
So essentially meta-gambling is what keeps people in the market and makes the bear market not so boring and featureless. It’s because of the NFT and the memes for 2022 to 2024 that a much larger percentage of market participants stayed in the market instead of moving on to their day jobs outside of crypto.
But there is no new liquidity in the market yet. But it will probably come soon. And before that, I hope the market will shake up a bit more and give us new local lows where we can buy more.
And then the Alt Season will begin
And all those who have been broadcasting that there will be no more big new alt seasons will quickly forget their predictions. All those alts that will be taken from you at the lottery will fly away by the dozen percents. Those who held their positions – will start selling them at break-even or microscopic plus. And then – to re-enter at 5-10 times more expensive on the fomo.
Because markets have always worked this way and will always work this way. Human psychology doesn’t change.
It’s just that people try to tell you that memes are fair and VC-backed technologies are a scam. In reality, both are designed to take your money. But it’s much easier and cheaper to manipulate memes. And the participants in the meme market are gamblers, who in 99.9999% of cases are looking for instant profit and are ready to lose everything in a second, but they will not go into ‘technology’ and wait for weeks, months, years. They want results now, even if it’s zero.
That’s why memes are a fast game that ends in a rug 999,995 times out of a million. And tech alts are a long game. Stories about quick X’s in a bear market don’t work here. And it makes no sense to spend money on big marketing projects in such circumstances.
No matter how many times the token of your favourite project, which the team is still actively working on, falls, in a real bull market it has every chance of renewing ATN, and dozens of times.
Solana at $500? BNB at $3000? Even STRK at $20? Easy. But not now, but after half of it sells at the lows and the other half breaks even after x5-10 from the lows.