How to create a successful MEME?

To build a successful MEME, you need to consider factors such as token economics design, mascot, airdrop method, and the chain you choose to issue on.

MEME coins are starting to dance again. Yesterday, the prices of PEPE, BONK, FLOKI and other coins all rose significantly, and WIF even hit a record high. Familiar MEME Quotes Coming Again? Buying MEME is a technical job, but what about building a successful MEME project?

Before answering how to create MEME, first we might as well ask a question: Why is MEME important?

MEME is called "meme" in Chinese. In the world of meme coins, we don't talk about fundamentals, forget about total market capitalization and FDV, and abandon the advanced vocabulary that mainstream VCs talk about.

This is a paradise for ordinary players.

Here, the spirit of entertainment comes first, Xiao Zhao plays slot machines, Xiao Ming plays A-shares, Xiao Wang plays sneakers, Xiao Zhang plays US stocks, Xiao Chen plays mainstream coins, and at this moment, we play MEME, maybe we have a chance to win a big prize. And thus have a better future.

It is for this reason that MEME continues to thrive in the financial market, especially in the cryptocurrency industry.

Decentralization, community, anti-VC, anti-tradition, fair startup, grassroots, etc. These Web3 vocabulary are naturally specially prepared for MEME players.

Over the past few years, more well-known MEME coins such as Dogecoin, BONK, PEPE, and SHIB have emerged. Every successful MEME does not get out of the circle casually and easily.

So, back to the topic, how do we create a successful MEME?

The total quantity should be large and the unit price should be low.

MEME is different from public chains, L2 or DeFi, etc. The latter are often issued in quantities of 1 billion to 10 billion, while the total amount of MEME is calculated in hundreds of trillions. Let’s take the top 150 MEMEs by market capitalization as an example, and the statistics are shown in the figure below.

(Data as of February 23, 2024)

The reason behind such a large total volume is to capture players’ psychological expectations of MEME speculation. Smart project parties will not let MEME tokens be worth a few dollars as soon as they are launched. Smart project owners will use low-price strategies to attract high-risk players and retain small retail investors who don’t have much capital.

We must keep the unit price low so that players can see a large quantity when they buy it. Only by using a small amount to make a big difference will players be more inclined to hold it.

There is another important point, which is to facilitate the “remove to zero” action.

Not only in trading, "going to zero" represents a fairly strong bullish indicator. As a project community, it is also easier to ignite community sentiment FOMO and spread quickly.

During a bull market, stories of getting rich are often the fastest and most widely spread, and once MEME takes a position in it, it will receive a crazy influx of bold funds.

Design pop culture symbols

The brand images of many well-known global brands are often related to universal mascots. For example, Ferrari's logo is a horse, Lamborghini's logo is a cow, and QQ's logo is a penguin. These globally accepted animal images and logos are vivid, easy to remember and easy to understand, providing huge advantages for widespread brand communication.

If we want to build a successful MEME coin, of course we also need to learn from experience. The mascots of Dogecoin, SHIB and BONK are all dogs, and the specific breed is the Shiba Inu. These animals are based on pop culture, and pictures of their expressions have been widely circulated. In addition, Dogecoin’s tipping culture once made it a very popular tipping token in the United States.

As the oldest MEME coin, Dogecoin has been repeatedly tempered in multiple bull and bear cycles and is still writing legends.

Looking back at the latest PEPE released last year, it was unique in choosing a frog that is widely loved in the Western community as its mascot. Its image is relatively unique, and its large eyes and green skin design make it highly recognizable.

Not only that, the frog has been derived from various emoticons, with a changeable temperament, expressing happiness, anger, surprise and other emotions. Some crypto KOLs also occasionally use the frog picture to reply to comments, which also brings a lot of popularity to its spread.

Therefore, if we are good at using well-known pop culture or mascots, it will play a considerable role in creating MEME.

We see that MEME coin did not attract the attention and likes of celebrities as soon as it was born. Dogecoin has only become popular with Musk in recent years due to its cute and interesting symbols and reward culture.

Musk has hundreds of millions of fans in the Twitter community. His huge exposure, as well as favorable factors such as micro-payment rewards on the X platform, have brought him a lot of popularity.

In 2023, the Twitter logo was even replaced by Musk with the Dogecoin avatar, which lasted for three full days. Previously, Musk once proclaimed himself CEO of Dogecoin and posted about Dogecoin’s payment methods and comments on the Twitter community.

Every mention of Musk’s tweets, or even the association of his companies with Dogecoin, injects a lot of attention into Dogecoin.

Putting aside the rare opportunity of a great spokesperson, it is also a good choice to choose to take advantage of the celebrity effect.

SHIB, which took off in the last cycle, is now mediocre, but it chose a smart way at the beginning. First, he left a message in Musk's comment area, which successfully caused Musk to post a question and attract attention.

Later, half of the tokens were transferred to Vitalik. At that time, when the global epidemic was raging, Vitalik chose to donate the tokens to Indian charities, which caused a lot of popularity, so that many people in India began to understand SHIB. After this incident, quite a few MEMEs imitated and transferred coins to Vitalik, but the effect was far less than that of SHIB.

It is worth mentioning that even MEME coin’s Solana ecological protocol nuts will choose to read Musk’s text comments. Whenever Musk comments on nuts (strange), the price of nuts will skyrocket.