What are memecoins and are they worth paying attention to? Or maybe it’s time to create your own memecoin and earn a lot of money? Read about all this in a new article on our blog.
Internet memes have not been seen by someone who has never used the Internet — this is an axiom of modern life. Funny pictures, animations or videos, which are extremely quickly gaining popularity among users and spread through the network with the speed of a viral disease, have long become an integral part of the virtual world. Sometimes one apt meme is able to most accurately describe a difficult situation from real life and convey the entire palette of emotions of the person who uses this meme with just one look. It is not surprising that memes enjoy unprecedented popularity among users. Therefore, it is not at all surprising that there are enthusiasts looking for ways to turn a meme into a profit.
From the history of memecoins
Copyrighting a meme is, of course, possible, but it’s pointless: if people like an image or video, they don’t care about its ownership: such content spreads uncontrollably. So, to make money from memes, you should look for other methods, and the best for today may be the creation of a memecoin, a token that has a recognizable name and image. The first memecoin appeared back in 2013 as a humorous version of Bitcoin. Dogecoin, whose iconic image is the once-popular Internet meme of a yellow Shiba Inu dog, still exists today and trades at $0.16 at the time of writing.
Exactly how many memecoins have appeared over the past 10 years is not known for sure, but we can confidently assume that there were an extremely large number of them. Some went unnoticed, even though they were based on popular memes. Others flew “to the moon”, such as PEPE, which is based on the Pepe the Frog meme. In just two weeks of its existence, the token entered the top 100 cryptocurrencies by market price, and the capitalization already exceeds $490 million.
A common feature of all memkoyhns, without exception, is the absence of their own value. Their price is always extremely speculative and depends only on such external factors as popularity, recognition, hype around the token and the skill of the trader selling it. All this makes memecoins not risky and not attractive for potential investors. But at the same time, this does not mean that memtokens do not make money. On the contrary, it is much easier and more realistic to do it here.
Technical features
Although there is a “coin” part of the general name, these assets are not technically cryptocurrencies. As we know, a cryptocurrency must be based on its own decentralized network to ensure liquidity. These are the so-called blockchains of the first layer (L1): Bitcoin for BTC, Ethereum for ETH or Binance Smart Chain for BNB. The development of technologies gave birth to the concept of the second (L2) layer — decentralized networks and protocols that work on top of L1, using their resources and capacities to achieve their own goals.
This feature makes L2 completely dependent on parent networks, with which they constantly interact and pay for transactions. Therefore, modern solutions are looking for ways to separate resources and build cross-platform networks, where several technologies cooperate at the same time.
So the vast majority of memecoins today are tokens produced on second-level (or higher) blockchains, with no inherent value other than a link to a fun and recognizable picture or video from the internet. At the same time, they should not be underestimated, since the authors of smart contracts for memecoins almost always include in the development some interesting and useful features that distinguish memecoin from others. For example:
- Dogecoin ($DOGE), created in the Litecoin fork, has no emission limit, and a block is recorded here once per minute (in Bitcoin it is once every 10 minutes). In this way, you can mine DOGE anytime and as much as you want, and the speed of transaction processing here is many times higher;
- Shiba Inu ($SHIB), which came out as a meme on the DOGE mememcoin, has an emission limit of 1 quadrillion tokens and even faster speed and lower transaction fees than its canine predecessor. By the beginning of 2024, the market capitalization amounted to more than $6 billion;
- Pepe ($PEPE) is famous for having increased in value 4,000 times in its first year of existence and brought one of the first investors $1 million against an investment of $250;
- Tamadoge ($TAMA) is developing a “play and earn” ecosystem and is required to buy pets. The token is deflationary and 5% of the amount spent is burned every time players buy something from the store. However, without a token, access to the entire ecosystem is impossible, so everyone who wants to play with animals is simply obliged to have TAMA;
- Monacoin ($MONA) is very popular in Japan and uses a payment network that facilitates P2P transactions. One block is built in 90 seconds and requires less power than in most other networks that use the proof of work algorithm;
- ArbDoge AI ($AIDOGE) attracts investors with the chance to win Arbitrun ($ARB) coins. Each token buyer receives a Lucky Drop ticket, which allows you to participate in the draw; the larger purchase amount is proportional to the chance of winning. The idea is good, but the cost of 1 AIDOGE does not inspire hope for future profit and is $0.000000000689388.
- Explain this Bob ($BOB) interacts with OpenAI artificial intelligence and is needed to simply explain user posts in X. Not everything is fully understood about this token, but some believe that memecoin has a good future;
- Floki Inu ($FLOKI) is an ERC-20 multichain token known for the ability to pay for physical goods. And on the FlockuFi decentralized exchange, users can exchange their memecoins for many real cryptocurrencies.
So, as you can see, memecoins are not only jokes, but also interesting ideas brought to life by developers. And although there is no real benefit from this, these differences contribute to the popularization of tokens among users. However, nothing affects the value of memecoin more than one guy`s personal brand.
The trail of Elon Musk
The name of the outrageous businessman is inextricably linked with many memecoins, including Dogecoin. He is even called the ambassador of the token with a funny dog, which Musk has repeatedly mentioned in the last ten years. Similarly with many other memecoins: if Musk mentions their name, mostly in a post in X, the rate will skyrocket. Currently, it is futile to look for a more effective influencer. For example, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s mention of AquqGoats memecoin increased the value of the token by only 300%, but the matter did not go further. The popularity of Shiba Inu in 2020 was added by the mention of Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin, but before that, Elon Musk also distinguished himself here.
Does this mean that without a mention from the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, the fate of memecoin will be unsuccessful? Not at all, although it is actually a powerful boost. In fact, the trail of Elon Musk clearly demonstrates the above: memecoins do not have their own value, but depend on the situational popularity of their prototype – the Internet meme, on the basis of which the smart contract was created. And this gives us a key insight into how memecoins can and should be earned in 2024.
Development of own memecoin
Ironically, for a memecoin ITO with BeFund, the most you need is some social media hype around some witty meme. Developing a smart contract is not difficult for our specialists, so your order will be completed extremely quickly. And this is of key importance, because the popularity of memecoin is extremely volatile. In this case, time is against us and quick decisions should be made while the topic remains “hot”.
Remember that the psychology of memecoins revolves around humor — that is, light and mostly positive emotions. Therefore, you should not choose for development sharp social topics, images or videos that can traumatize the minds of users.
It should also not be forgotten that the topic of memecoins has always been and will remain speculative, so there will always be various tricks. One of them is “mimicry”, that is, masking tokens as well-known and popular projects. You can easily verify this for yourself: visit any crypto exchange and search for, say, $PEPE. As long as this memecoin is at its peak, you will definitely find several coins with the same name at once. This is not prohibited, because the main thing that distinguishes tokens on any exchange is the ID – a unique identification number. Each seller can specify the name for the listing arbitrarily. Therefore, a little vigilance will easily show you where the real Pepe is, and where her numerous clones are.
We are always ready to help bring your ideas related to blockchain technology to life. Stay with BeFund, invest, dream and earn!
