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October 21, 2023
BTC will break $32K soon？Vitalik is heading for AI | Web3 News
BTC price hits 2-month high amid bet Bitcoin will break $32K ‘soon’
Bitcoin（ $29,691） tapped $30,000 into the Oct. 20 Wall Street open as analysts directed attention to the weekly close.
In an optimistic longer-timeframe view, trading team Stockmoney Lizards predicted that resistance immediately above $30,000 would soon crack.
Updating a chart fractal comparing BTC/USD in 2023 to its 2020 breakout, analysts argued that the time for significant upside is now. An approval of the United States’ first Bitcoin spot price exchange-traded fund (ETF) would form the clinching factor.
“31/32k will break soon,” part of accompanying commentary read.
“P.S.: Many of you will once more say: ‘But 2020 was after halving, here we are before’ — answer: doesn’t matter. This year mass adoption / ETF approval will be THE driver.”
Ethereum Cofounder Vitalik Buterin Confirms Plans for AI
Ethereum cofounder Vitalik Buterin has shared new revelations that show a possible integration with artificial intelligence (AI) in the mid- to long term. Responding to community members in an ask-me-anything (AMA) session hosted on the decentralized social protocol Warpcast, Buterin said AI remains one of the thoughts that has filled his mind for the past two weeks.
While Vitalik Buterin was not detailed about the specific things he thought about, he said he is considering the ways in which the Ethereum community could productively engage on AI-related issues. Some of the issues he highlighted include X-risk, a concept that showcases how humanity can be harmed on a massive global scale.
In recent times, proponents have been citing how possible Blockchain technology can coexist with AI. Drawing on the revolutionary technology underpinning both concepts, a combination of AI and blockchain has been tipped as a futuristic solution to some of the world’s biggest challenges to date.
While there are a number of crypto projects exploring AI solutions to date, Buterin’s assertion of the concept lends another perspective, considering the role he plays in the broader digital currency ecosystem. The possible timeline of any potential engagement was not revealed, and from his actions, we might expect a detailed blog post in this regard in the future.
‘Magic: The Gathering’ creator’s crypto game lands on Epic Game Store
“Magic: The Gathering” creator Richard Garfield has helped design a blockchain game, and it is launching on the Epic Game Store.
The Dungeons & Dragons-style fantasy card game Garfield created became a massive hit, fostering an ecosystem of players who for years actively bought, sold and traded the game’s physical cards. Garfield is now hoping his digital card game “Brawlers” will also capture gamers’ imaginations.
The player-vs-player game was co-designed by Garfield and developed by fledgling web3 gaming firm Tyranno Studios, which focuses on creating titles on the WAX blockchain.
“Just like traditional physical card games, Brawlers allows people to purchase card sets and use them to play with others, simultaneously retaining full ownership and control over their assets to easily trade or exchange them,” Garfield said in a statement. “This opens up many new opportunities for developers to build successful web3 games with living and breathing economies where each player is a full-fledged participant and avoids all the pitfalls of exploitative microtransactions.”
Refik Anadol NFT collab with Brazilian tribe yields $3.9 million in a week
Cutting-edge artist Refik Anadol’s latest digital art collection dubbed “Winds of Yawanawa” may be the one lone bright spot in an otherwise dim NFT market.
The project, a collection of “data paintings,” has generated $3.9 million (2,493 ether) in sales over the past week, according to OpenSea data. The eruption of interest in Winds of Yawanawa, a collaboration between the Brazilian indigenous community Yawanawa and Anadol, comes amid a broader NFT market downturn that has seen trading volumes plummet by more than 90% since a bull run bolstered by excitement for mostly low-resolution picture-for-profile NFT collections like Bored Ape Yacht Club and CryptoPunks.
One popular NFT watcher took to X to highlight both the success of Winds of Yawanawa and how large of a portion of overall trading the collection accounted for in a day’s worth of trading.
“Winds of Yawanawa did 451 ETH of volume on OpenSea yesterday, about 25% of the total ETH volume on OpenSea,” posted @punk9059, director of research at Proof Collective, an organization that supports blockchain-powered art. “What’s striking is partially how much [Winds of Yawanawa] is doing, but also how little else is trading.”
Magic Eden’s Tokenized Collections Program Debuts with 100 Physically-Backed Pokémon Cards
Last week, the renowned cross-chain NFT platform, Magic Eden, introduced its groundbreaking Tokenized Collections Program in collaboration with Collector Crypt, a pioneer in bringing physical collectibles to the Web3 space. The program’s inaugural drop, featuring 100 graded Pokémon cards, is set to launch today, Wednesday, October 18, exclusively on the Magic Eden Launchpad.
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October 20, 2023
Bitcoin (BTC) Soars Toward $30K, Solana (SOL) Skyrockets 13% Daily (Market Watch)
After a few days of trading sideways, bitcoin went on the offensive hard in the past 12 hours or so and shot up to nearly $30,000.
The altcoins have also turned green, with SOL, BCH, XRP, XLM, and MNT skyrocketing by up to 12%.
BTC Eyes $30K
The start of the business week was quite positive for the primary cryptocurrency, which pumped to $28,000 after a boring weekend. Monday saw another mindblowing price surge when a fake report in regards to the SEC approving a spot BTC ETF pushed the asset north by around two grand to a multi-month peak of just under $30,000.
However, the subsequent rebuttal of the report resulted in a similar price drop that erased all gains. The bulls tried to drive the cryptocurrency north in the following days but to almost no success. That changed in the past day or so, though.
BTC shot up to $29,400 late on Thursday before soaring even more to its current price point of $29,800. Being so close to the $30,000 milestone means that its market cap has increased to over $580 billion.
Its dominance over the altcoins, which has been on a steady rise in the past week or so, is now up to 51.7%.
SOL Steals the Show
The altcoins have also followed BTC’s upward trajectory. Ethereum has gained about 4% on the day and sits above $1,600. BNB, Cardano, Dogecoin, Tron, Toncoin, Polygon, Polkadot, and Litecoin have soared by similar percentages.
Ripple is up by 7% now following the latest positive developments in the company’s legal case against the SEC.
Solana, though, has stolen the show from the larger-cap landscape with a massive 13% daily surge. Consequently, SOL sits at a multi-week high at $27.
More impressive gains come from the likes of Bitcoin Cash, Avalanche, XLM, MNT, and OP. Bitcoin SV and Stacks have skyrocketed the most from the mid-cap alts, by 30% and 20%, respectively.
The total crypto market cap has added over $40 billion daily and sits well above $1.2 trillion on CMC.
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October 19, 2023
The Sandbox Hires Ex-PlayStation, Apple Exec to Drive Game's Creator Economy
Nicola Sebastiani, who previously worked at Ubisoft and PlayStation, is joining The Sandbox to lead its creator economy push.
Nicola Sebastiani (left) and The Sandbox co-founder Sebastien Borget. Image: The Sandbox
Voxel-style NFT gaming platform The Sandbox has hired game industry veteran Nicola Sebastiani to be its chief content officer and help develop the crypto-forward company’s creator economy, the firm announced Tuesday.
Sebastiani has worked in the gaming industry for years, from a role on Ubisoft’s mobile team to co-founding the Apple Arcade subscription service for the App Store, and ultimately leading PlayStation’s mobile strategy over the last two years. Now he has moved into the Web3 world with The Sandbox.
“I think that we are at a historical shift in gaming,” Sebastiani told Decrypt in an interview. “We are fully entering the creator economy.”
Sebastiani believes that user-generated content, or UGC, is a gaming trend that will continue to gain popularity. And while The Sandbox primarily offers mini-games and gaming experiences within its broader platform, Sebastiani said that he wants players to feel free to use the platform however they like, whether it’s for socializing or experimentation.
“I really think of us as a social platform,” Sebastiani said of The Sandbox.
In addition to the game’s creator economy, Sebastiani will also oversee game publishing, internal game production, and the development of The Sandbox tools Game Maker and VoxEdit at the company.
Compared to rival platforms in the broader gaming industry like Roblox, Fortnite, and Minecraft, The Sandbox requires some knowledge and use of crypto and NFTs to fully experience. Users can connect their crypto wallets, purchase in-game items with its SAND token, and buy virtual land NFTs to build on and play within.
“I think it’s critical to The Sandbox as far as ownership, as far as giving creators and players leverage on their achievements, what they build,” Sebastiani said of the platform’s crypto elements.
A major step toward empowering creators is giving them the ability to publish and potentially monetize their own experiences. Sandbox players will finally be able to build and self-publish their experiences by the end of this year, according to the company.
The Sandbox, which has seen roughly 4.5 million registered crypto wallets, takes a 5% platform fee which Sebastiani said “is reinvested in the community” via different methods such as the company’s Game Makers Fund.
By comparison, Epic Games currently takes 12% of creator revenue, Roblox takes 30%, and rival NFT-powered platform Decentraland takes 2.5% of creator revenue.
The Sandbox saw approximately 3,840 unique active wallets engage with the platform in the past month, generating a total of $2.26 million in total volume traded according to data from crypto analytics firm DappRadar. Decentraland saw about 2,770 unique wallets generating roughly $19,880.
Overall, crypto-powered game platforms remain much smaller than industry titans like Roblox, which boasts over 200 million monthly active players. Epic’s Fortnite sees similar numbers, with about 230 million monthly active users as the platform increasingly shifts toward emphasizing its user-generated content.
The Sandbox and other crypto-powered metaverse platforms may have to continue to appeal to creators to stay competitive as the creator economy evolves. Goldman Sachs predicted earlier this year that the $250 billion creator economy will continue to grow, and could swell to become a $480 billion industry within the next three years.
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October 17, 2023
Hamas-Israeli conflict triggered a rise in interest in crypto assets; Ferrari and Taylor Swift accept Bitcoin payments; Can AI interpret dreams come true? | XWORLD Daily
Israel attack could spark interest in gold, cryptocurrencies and safe-haven assets
The Israel-Hamas conflict is a long-running, deep-rooted dispute between Israel and the Palestinian Hamas group, primarily centered in the Gaza Strip.
The ongoing geopolitical conflicts in the Middle East, particularly between Israel and Hamas, have inadvertently highlighted some potential positive impacts on cryptocurrencies. First, rising geopolitical tensions may fuel interest in digital assets as safe-haven investments.
Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are increasingly viewed as “digital gold” due to their limited supply and decentralization, making them an attractive option for investors seeking refuge in uncertain times.
As traditional safe-haven assets such as gold and the U.S. dollar face challenges, cryptocurrencies may emerge as alternative stores of value.
Second, the conflict highlights the utility of cryptocurrencies in facilitating cross-border transactions and providing financial services to individuals affected by political unrest.
In regions with strict capital controls or unstable financial systems, cryptocurrencies can provide a means to preserve wealth and conduct international trade outside of the traditional banking system.
The conflict underscores the need for borderless and censorship-resistant financial instruments, reinforcing the role of cryptocurrencies in financial inclusion and resilience in areas of geopolitical tension.
The conflict in the Middle East indirectly demonstrates how cryptocurrencies can facilitate global investment and financial empowerment in crisis-affected regions.
SkyBridge Capital founder: The Federal Reserve system has fundamentally collapsed, and Bitcoin’s market value may reach $15 trillion
Anthony Scaramucci, founder of Skybridge Capital, said in an interview that although the Fed is performing well, the system in which the Fed operates is fundamentally broken. He cited concerns about the devaluation of fiat currencies and said the U.S. government was spending more than it was taking in.
He explained that this situation is dangerous because the borrowed money must be repaid with more dollars, which could lead to a severe economic recession. Therefore, he concluded that the Fed would eventually find itself in trouble due to a system breakdown.
As a solution, he proposed an alternative, an immutable asset with clear scarcity that is essentially a transparent transaction ledger. He pointed out that no asset has such characteristics except Bitcoin, which he believes is evolving into a store of value that may be more valuable than gold.
He predicted that in the event of a collapse of the U.S. financial system, Bitcoin’s market capitalization would reach $15 trillion.
Bloomberg TV to launch SBF documentary on October 26
Bloomberg Television will launch the documentary “RUIN: Money, Ego and Deception at FTX” on FTX founder SBF and the trading platform at 7:00 on October 26, Beijing time.
Buy Taylor Swift Movie Tickets with Bitcoin, Dogecoin, and SHIB
People can now use cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin, Ethereum, Dogecoin, and Shiba Inu (SHIB) to purchase tickets to the long-awaited movie Taylor Swift: Journey Through Time, which releases today Premiering in theaters around the world.
The film, which has already grossed a staggering $100 million in pre-sales ahead of its premiere, chronicles Swift’s ongoing, record-breaking global tour and is expected to generate more than $5 billion worth of economic activity in North America alone.
The film’s cryptocurrency tie-in is provided by cryptocurrency payments provider BitPay, which formed a partnership with theater chain AMC early last year. Moviegoers can now simply visit AMC via the chain’s website or mobile app and select BitPay as the payment method at checkout. In addition to BTC, ETH, DOGE, and SHIB, users can purchase tickets using other cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, and XRP.
New tattoo machine can imprint NFTs on arms, allowing artists to collect royalties
Tattoo robots capable of delivering computer-generated ink to humans have been around for years, but a new device goes a step further by offering designs that are also stored on the blockchain, allowing creators to collect royalties.
An Austin-based company called Blackdot launched a device of the same name and counts NFT pioneer Tyler Hobbs as one of its backers.
“When I started to understand what the Blackout device was capable of, the level of precision and detail it achieved was amazing,” Hobbs said. “It seemed like a natural fit, this fusion of the digital and the human, bringing the human and the machine together in some way, which is really a great passion of mine for art, so the opportunity to work with Blackdot came to me. It’s really exciting.”
Blackdot plans to offer custom designs from a number of different artists who will create the tattoos, which the recipient will also own as NFTs.
A mockup of a tattoo device offering NFT ink: Image: Blackdot.
The Museum of Modern Art’s first permanent collection of AI + blockchain artwork
New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) has acquired “Unsupervised,” a generative artwork that uses artificial intelligence to create visual designs inspired by the museum’s archives, for its permanent collection.
The piece was created by Turkish digital artist Refik Anadol for MoMA last year. To do this, Anadol built a complex machine learning model designed to absorb more than 200 years of artworks from the museum’s catalog and then output an ever-changing series of audiovisual effects that reinterpret, alter and reinterpret these original works. repeat.
Changes in light, movement, acoustics and even weather constantly alter the look and sound of the work. The work is currently on display in MoMA’s lobby through October 29, after being extended to draw crowds to sit and watch the changing landscape.
Refik Anadol：Unsupervised
Huang Licheng bought 8 Winds of Yawanawa, and the NFT floor price rose by more than 70% in 24 hours
According to information on the chain, Huang Licheng’s address purchased a total of 8 art NFT Winds of Yawanawa on October 16, spending a total of 117.77 ETH. Blur data shows that the floor price of the NFT is currently 14.49 ETH, with a 24-hour increase of 70.67%.
The Winds of Yawanawa is an NFT series launched by the famous Turkish-American new media artist Refik Anadol in collaboration with the Yawanawá community, the indigenous people of the Brazilian Amazon forest.
OpenAI stated in its core values update that it is fully committed to building general artificial intelligence
Recently, OpenAI quietly changed its “core values” list to include artificial general intelligence (AGI), which was not explicitly listed before, and ranked it at the top, showing its strong pursuit of AGI. Previously, OpenAI’s recruitment page listed six core values for its employees to follow, namely boldness, thoughtfulness, humility, emphasis on impact, teamwork and focus on growth. However, these values have now been replaced with five new values, with “AGI focus” being the first.
The official website of OpenAI writes: We are committed to building safe and beneficial AGI, which will have a huge positive impact on the future of mankind. Anything that does not meet this goal is not considered. The remaining four values are fierce and tenacious, scale, creating things that users love, and teamwork.
“SpongeBob did 9/11”, Elmo holding a knife: artificial intelligence art becomes popular
Generative AI makes it easier for ordinary people to create art and other content. It also makes it easier to create something truly wild and controversial, like an AI-generated image of SpongeBob SquarePants or Nintendo’s Kirby flying a jetliner into the World Trade Center.
Social media platforms have been flooded with images of stickers purportedly created using Facebook’s AI-powered sticker generator. These include images of Elmo brandishing a knife, Mickey Mouse in a toilet, Wario and Luigi from the Super Mario series holding rifles, and even scantily clad Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau image.
Neurotech startup Prophetic hopes to use neuroscience and AI to interpret dreams
Prophetic AI is developing “Halo,” a non-invasive neural device to stabilize and induce lucid dreams. Source: Prophetic AI
The content of our dreams can reveal a lot about ourselves, what is going on in our lives, and our subconscious concerns. To tap into these insights, Prophetic is developing a “non-invasive” neural device to induce and stabilize lucid dreams, in which dreamers are aware that they are dreaming.
“If you look at the history of prophets, whether it’s Abraham, Muhammad or Buddha, they all received prophetic wisdom from dreams,” said Prophetic co-founder Eric Wollberg. “The goal here is to make anyone a prophet and give people access to prophetic knowledge, wisdom and interface.”
“We believe that lucid dreaming is a particle accelerator of consciousness: a state that allows objective observation of the neural basis of self-awareness, (meta)cognition and sensory perception,” Prophetic said.
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August 1, 2023
Pepecoin and the Rise of the Meme-Backed Currency
Memes, Dreams, and Get-Rich-Quick Schemes
Introduction
It’s hard to have missed epic saga of Pepecoin over the past two months, and along with it, a resurgence of memecoin hype. Indeed, on May 5, Pepecoin broke through the stunning $1B market cap to become a Top 50 cryptocurrency [1]. In many respects, Pepecoin’s rise calls to mind the famously stunning rise of Dogecoin and Shiba Inu, two of the most famous memecoins in history. In fact, Pepecoin itself even pays homage to the long tradition of memecoins it descends from, writing that it will “make memecoins great again” [2]. So what makes a memecoin “great”? And why do they exist (and even thrive) in the crypto ecosystem, in spite of their evident lack of utility?
Know Your Memecoins
Memecoins have always been a crypto novelty and oddity. Their most characteristic trait is in fact their own self-professed lack of any utility, something they wear around with a semi-sarcastic sense of pride. Even though almost anyone can create a memecoin today just with a few clicks of a button, not all memecoins are created equal. After all, a lot more people hold Dogecoin than say, “HarryPotterObamaSonicInu” (this is an actual real coin on CoinMarketCap) [3].
Indeed, the most successful memecoins never come from humble backgrounds: they are warriors. These are memes that have fought in ferocious battles on the turbulent seas of Internet meme culture, where any cultural sensation or anything that grabs people’s attention, ranging from Elon Musk references (Tweelon), sex jokes (CumRocket), literal poop (PooCoin), GPT-references (PepeGPT) can all be turned into memecoins [4].
In these epic battles, only those memes that have proven their demonstrated approachability, relatability, persistence can survive. For those that do, they are rewarded with boundless glory, with glamour from the crowds, homage from the powerful, and a memecoin that will wear through even the toughest of crypto storms. And amidst all of this, perhaps Pepe does actually stand a chance of surviving, prevailing, and thriving.
Pepe the Meme Royalty
The Original Pepe meme of “Feels Good Man.” Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepe_the_Frog
Pepecoin was born with a silver spoon in its mouth, as the meme of Pepe belongs (along with Doge) to a class of Internet meme royalty. Born in 2008 out of the hand of cartoonist Matt Furie, the green frog with a bulging green eyes was depicted literally urinating (pee-pee-ing) while commenting “feels good man” [5]. And since then, Pepe has taken off in all shapes and forms, including a sad version, a smirk version, and so many more [6].
Since its inception, the Pepe meme and the corresponding image of an ugly frog has had a distinctly counterculture and subversive connotation, in particular when contrasted with the much more sanguine Doge meme. While most usage of Pepe is very benign, this ugly frog also has a distinctly “ugly side.” On 4chan and other more fringe social media platforms, the frog meme is often twisted and modified to take darker turns and sometimes embody extremist political symbols. And gradually, variants of the Pepe family of memes became staples on alt-right groups and other darker, more subversive corners of the Internet [7]. Thus, the Pepe meme exists in a massive duality: on the one hand, it exists in the mainstream as a benign counterculture image of an ugly frog with a happy or sad or smirky expression on its face. On the other, this counterculture symbol has been coopted for extremist political movements that actively cause societal instability.
This duality is what has made Pepecoin so controversial, and why it landed Coinbase in hot water after Coinbase accused the Pepe meme of being “co-opted as an alt-right hate symbol,” before later being forced to apologize and acknowledge that most mainstream uses of Pepe are non-bigoted [8]. But in the context of memecoins, they thrive on controversy and continued media attention. After all, it is precisely Pepe’s status as a longstanding meme royalty and one of the undisputed hallmarks of Internet meme culture that underwrites the value proposition for Pepecoin, and explains its eye-watering ascent to a $1 billion market cap, with a $1.87 billion trading volume at its peak.
Pepecoin Price, CoinMarketCap. Data as of May 24: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/pepe/
In this respect of leveraging its power as an undisputed Internet meme royalty to underwrite its value as a cryptocurrency, Pepecoin greatly resembles Dogecoin. And one could argue that there is a kernel of truth in the Pepecoin slogan of “make memecoins great again” and its self-proclamation of being fueled solely by “pure memetic power.” After all, as Pepe is such an important meme royalty, it is certainly conceivable that Pepecoin could stick around for quite some time, just like Dogecoin [9].
Pumps, Dumps, and the Power of FOMO
Memecoins such as Dogecoin and Pepecoin, along with their self-processed lack of any utility, are of course ripe targets for pump and dump schemes and regulations. And in many cases, “shilling shitcoins” is a favorite pastime for the rich.
One need to look no further to see how Elon Musk has been instrumental in shaping the fortunes of Dogecoin to see the influence of how key opinion leaders can send prices soaring to the moon [10]. After simply Tweeting “Doge” and writing that “Dogecoin is the people’s crypto”, Dogecoin prices soared 40%, and in the massive bull run of 2021, Dogecoin did a phenomenal 147.6x price increase in just over five months.
Elon Musk calling Dogecoin “the people’s crypto”. Source.
Arguably, this ability to be pump and dumped at will by key opinion leaders is in-baked into the economic logic of memecoins. As mentioned before, memecoins monetize and gain according to how much attention and cultural capital the underlying meme (or cultural phenomenon) is able to accrue and sustain over a long period of time. Key opinion leaders such as Musk have by definition the power to single-handedly create and sustain cultural phenomenon, and thereby allow these cultural derivatives (i.e. memecoins) to gain immensely in value, and in turn, kickstart a cycle of fear-of-missing-out (FOMO) for retail investors, who want to hop aboard the get-rich-quick crypto ride.
This same logic that applies to Pepecoin’s rapid ascent over the past month or so. Although there isn’t a clear single celebrity pushing Pepecoin on Twitter (as in the case of Musk and Dogecoin), from on-chain data it seems as if there have been some outsized winners with the Pepecoin hype. For example, a wallet labelled blackrock3.eth bought $244 worth of Pepecoin on April 21, and sold all of them on May 5 at its peak for $2.63 million [11].
And of course, with a pump inevitably comes a dump. Today (May 25th), exactly 20 days from its peak, Pepecoin is down 70% from its all-time-high [12]. As the attention of the memecoin inevitably dissipates and the frenzy of FOMO subsides, the price (a function of this attention) naturally also decreases. But that’s simply the virtue or characteristic of memecoins. For a memecoin, Pepecoin’s -70% can already be considered tame and “benign.” At least Pepecoin hasn’t mimicked the fate of the “Squid Game token,” a memecoin which rode on the wave of the Netflix TV show “Squid Game’s” massive success in 2021. The “Squid Game token” jumped from 1 cent to $2856 in a week, before plummeting to zero after its creators essentially ran away with the money earned and did a classic “rug pull” [13]
But this volatility coming from memecoins, who self-profess that their only value comes from their memetic power, one really shouldn’t be surprised — after all, they literally say “useless” on the label.
From the Pepecoin Website
Memechains and the Question of Utility
But what does the future of memecoins look like? Will they ever only really be objects of pure speculative bubbles? The answer actually is a bit more complicated than a simple yes or no. Memecoins by design are backed up by the potency of their underlying meme. The problem is that you can never really quantitatively measure the economic value of a meme. These, after all, are simply free JPEGs widely accessible and distributed on the Internet, and as such, obviously generate no monetary value. After all, why pay for a meme I can see, copy, and create for free?
But just because a meme does not have a price tag on it does not mean that it lacks intrinsic value. If Pepe the meme did not have any value, why would people continue to use it to this day, as a symbol for resistance, counterculture, and digital identity? This is the paradox at the center of all art, but particularly digital mementos that can be freely copy-pasted: no one doubts that they are valuable, yet there is no way to measure that value.
Memecoins, to some extent, may in fact be one way out of this problem. If a meme is a some “unquantifiable value,” a memecoin is in essence a “quantifiable un-value.” The two therefore fit together hand-in-glove, and attaches some quantifiable representation to the value of the meme behind the coin. Therefore, even if much of the memecoin mania is fuelled by speculation, I don’t expect the memecoins of mainstream memes such as Pepe and Doge to ever go to zero, so long as the memes themselves still exist.
Nevertheless, there has been a frenzy in memecoin communities to add on so-called “utility” to these originally supposedly “useless” coins. This notably includes the Dogecoin community’s Dogechain, a smart-contract executing PoS built using Polygon Edge where gas fees can be paid in Dogecoin [14], as well as the Shiba Inu community’s Shibarium, a L2 scaling solution that recently just announced its public beta [15]. Most of these “added utility functions” are centered around the classic playbook of getting a chain in order to nominally “have utility.” But the crypto industry is already strewn with the corpses of failed chains, and today there are already too many L1 and L2 chains that are able to match and surpass the proposed functionality of something like Dogechain and Shibarium. The central problem of building a chain to inject so-called “utility” into these tokens is this: why should I use Shibarium and Dogechain to execute smart contracts, over say Arbitrum, Optimism, or Polygon?
Any satisfactory answer to these questions must go back to where memecoins started from in the first place — the original meme underwriting the whole memecoin, such as Doge in the case of Dogecoin, or Pepe in the case of Pepecoin. In fact, if any of these memecoin powered memechains do succeed, they likely will be some sort of a meme-focused chain, where the design of the chain leverages and magnifies the iconographic power of the meme, which in turn adds value to the memechain. Viewed through this lens, one could argue that a memechain’s long-run potential is in becoming a special sort of appchain, one that specializes in operating the underlying meme.
In the long-run, the successful operation of a memechain would likely be more similar to the operation of a successful NFT community, such as BAYC, Azuki, Nouns or Doodles, rather than the operation of an actual L1 or L2 chain like Ethereum, Arbitrum or Polygon. The focus needs to be on the underlying asset backing the memecoin in the first place — the meme — rather than the functionality of the chain itself.
This convergence and triangulation between memes, coins, and tech is arguably the most innovative and inspiring aspect of memecoins. If Pepecoin, Dogechain, and Shibarium are able to innovate out a novel governance structure that perpetuates the longevity of the underlying meme, they will undoubtedly leave a significant mark on the cultural legacy of web3. And then, perhaps, we will truly be able to “make memes great again.”
Pepecoin making memes great again. Source.
References
[1] https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/currencies/what-is-pepecoin-pepe-memecoins-dogecoin-shiba-inu-crypto-news-2023-5
[2] See Pepecoin’s Website: https://www.pepe.vip/
[3] https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/article/9-funniest-memecoin-names
[4] What are Memecoins: https://www.pcmag.com/how-to/what-is-a-meme-coin-how-do-they-work
[5] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/pepe-the-frog
[6] Derivative memes of Pepe the Frog: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/pepe-the-frog/children
[7] https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-pepe-the-frog-became-a-nazi-trump-supporter-and-alt-right-symbol
[8] https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoniopequenoiv/2023/05/11/coinbase-apologizes-for-tying-meme-token-pepecoin-to-racist-symbols/?sh=37957e942419
[9] https://www.forbes.com/advisor/investing/cryptocurrency/what-is-dogecoin/
[10] Elon Musk and Dogecoin: https://coincodex.com/article/21927/elon-musk-dogecoin/
[11] See https://coinmarketcap.com/headlines/news/blackrock-labeled-wallet-nets-2-4m-from-pepe/. Note that while some have speculated this wallet may belong to BlackRock fund, there is no concrete evidence suggesting this to be the case.
[12] Data from CoinMarketCap, as of May 25: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/pepe/
[13] About the Squid Game Token Collapse: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-59129466
[14] About Dogechain: https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/article/what-is-dogechain-the-smart-contract-platform-for-doge
[15] About Shibarium: https://blog.shibaswap.com/introduction-to-shibarium/
[16] See the importance of community building in NFT circles such as NounsDAO: https://review.stanfordblockchain.xyz/p/nouns-dao-and-the-philosophy-of-governance
Note: An earlier version of this article incorrectly suggested that BlackRock was an institutional holder of Pepecoin based on on-chain data. The Stanford Blockchain Review regrets this error.
Edited by XWORLD: Pioneering Web3 Games & Apps Store.
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