History of Memecoins
In this lesson we will explain the history of memes, how they came about, why they are relevant and how they play a crucial role in today’s internet culture and economy.
Memes have permeated almost every aspect of humanity’s social interactions. What started out as funny and silly pictures shared “for the lulz” on niche and obscure image boards have gradually made their way into the mainstream, influencing how companies handle marketing and even how governments address sensitive geopolitical issues.
Key takeaways
- Memes have evolved from silly amusing internet jokes to widespread and mainstream means of communication.
- Memecoins capitalize on the hype and potential virality of memes to maximize their marketing and reach a wider audience
Key Phrases
- Memecoin: a cryptocurrency protocol that bases its identity on a joke or a meme.
- Maximalists: used as a term to describe people who believe solely (or mostly) in one single protocol.
- “Rug pull”: A term for when a group of malicious developers create a project with the intention of abandoning it quickly, and running away with the profits. To have the rug pulled from under you.
- “To the moon”: a term used to convey sentiment that a token or a project will grow exponentially.
A brief history of memes
To better understand how we meme’d ourselves into multibillion dollar assets, let’s first get a better understanding of what memes are and where they come from.
Meme:
1 : an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from one person to another in a culture
2 : an amusing or interesting picture, video, etc., that is spread widely through the Internet
Memes have certainly come a long way in the last 20 years. Being an edgy teenager in the mid 2000s I was a bit too present in the forums and image boards where proto-memes were brewing their murky origins. Places like 4chan and ytmnd were breeding grounds for “OC,” or original content, and the young internet had a ravenous appetite for it.
You see, memes thrive on repetition, but they tend to have rather short lives. Rarely, you’ll find memes that are funny and relatable enough to remain relevant for months or years, most of the time the jokes get old fast. This means everyone is always looking for new, original content. During this time, the internet was the wild west and memes were a gold rush.
So back then, these images weren’t even called memes just “macros.” These proto-memes consisted mostly of pictures of cats with bold captioning or “reaction images” which were meant to convey some sort of emotion in response to something. The former, also called “lolcats”, are hardly remembered nowadays other than as relics–humor of a bygone era. However, reaction images still persist as a memetic trope to this day, most notably via gifs we use to communicate every day.
Memes have slowly undergone a transformation from just silly, disposable images meant to entice a quick laugh, to more universal and relatable methods of conveying a message. They have proven to be incredibly powerful at scaling quickly and reaching millions. Hitching onto the potential virality that new memes possess, ‘memecoins’ have emerged as projects that intend to capitalize on the hype and humor in the space, all racing against each other for the opportunity to be the next to go “to the moon.”
The birth of Memecoins
The purpose of this introduction is to hammer in that memes are nothing less than running inside jokes. Whether or not jokes will still be funny and relevant in a few months or years is unknown (although some topics seem to be eternal). Memecoins are, despite what some of their fanatics will say, primarily jokes. They don’t intend to actually solve scaling or security issues, instead they focus more on community outreach. To illustrate, let’s take a look at the OG memecoin, Dogecoin.
The original memecoin, Dogecoin, is a fork of a fork of Litecoin. Mainly created with the sole purpose of poking fun at Bitcoin and Bitcoin maximalists. It arose in 2013 with the intention to mock how evangelical people were becoming about their chosen tokens. To counter that Dogecoin became a silly light-hearted token whose very existence was just to be humorous. This illustrates an important point, as opposed to protocols like Bitcoin and Ethereum, memecoins don’t set out with a problem-solving mindset, rather they attempt to maximize growth purely on hype.
During May 2021, Dogecoin saw a significant surge in price as it found its greatest hype man: Elon Musk. Shortly after announcing that Tesla would suspend accepting Bitcoin as payment for vehicles, Musk ramped up his support for Doge, asking users to become part of the Dogecoin development team and hinting that it may be accepted as payment soon.
This triggered some backlash from the community, many (including some Bitcoin Core devs) argued that there was no active development being done on Doge and that it was a dead project with many known vulnerabilities. Nevertheless, the unwavering endorsement by the richest person in the history of the world would cause the coin to increase tenfold in the span of about one month. This established a precedent, there was blood in the water.
