How to Build a Successful MEME?

MEME coins are making a comeback, with coins like PEPE, BONK, FLOKI showing significant price surges yesterday, and WIF even hitting an all-time high. Is the familiar MEME market returning? Buying MEME needs technical skills, but how about creating a successful MEME project?

Before answering how to build a MEME, let’s first ask a question: why are MEMEs important?

In the world of meme coins, we don’t talk about fundamentals, forget about total market value and FDV, and abandon the fancy vocabulary that mainstream VCs often talk about.

Here, it’s a paradise for ordinary players.

Here, entertainment is paramount. Bob plays slot machines, Jack plays stocks, Jason plays sneakers, Tony plays US stocks, Alice plays mainstream coins, and at this moment, we play MEME. Perhaps there’s a chance to win a big prize and usher in a bright future.

It is also because of this that MEME remains popular in the financial market, especially in the cryptocurrency industry.

Web3 terms including decentralization, community, anti-venture capital, anti-traditional, fair launch, and grassroots are naturally prepared for MEME players.

Over the past few years, relatively well-known MEME coins such as Dogecoin, BONK, PEPE, and SHIB have emerged. Every successful MEME doesn’t just go viral easily.

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

Focus on Large Supply and Low Price

MEME is different from public chains, L2, or DeFi. The latter often has a supply ranging from 1 billion to 100 billion, while MEME’s total supply is calculated in hundreds of billions or trillions. Let’s take the top 150 MEMEs by market cap as an example and analyze the chart below.

(Data as of February 23, 2024)

Behind such a large total supply is the capturing of players’ expectations of MEME speculation. Smart project teams won’t price MEME tokens at several dollars as soon as they go live. They’ll use a low-price strategy to attract players with high-risk preference and retain small retail investors with limited funds.

We must keep the price low so that players see a larger quantity when they buy, which encourages them to hold for a greater chance of winning big.

Another key point is to facilitate “removal of zeros” action. Not only does “removal of zeros” indicate strong bullish indicators in trading, but it also ignites community FOMO emotions and spreads rapidly.

During bull markets, stories of getting rich spreads the fastest and widest. Once MEME occupies a position in them, it will attract crazy influxes of bold funds.

Designing Popular Culture Symbols

Many globally recognized brands often associate their brand images with universally recognizable mascots. For example, Ferrari’s logo is a horse, Lamborghini’s logo is a bull, and QQ’s logo is a penguin. These globally recognized animal images and logos are memorable, easy to remember, and easy to understand, providing significant advantages for brand dissemination.

To build a successful MEME coin, we must also learn from experience. The mascots of Dogecoin, SHIB, and BONK are all dogs, specifically Shiba Inu dogs. These animals, based on popular culture, have widely spread their facial expressions through images. Additionally, Dogecoin’s culture of tipping once made it a very popular tipping token in the United States.

Dogecoin, as the oldest MEME coin, has been repeatedly tested in multiple bull and bear cycles and continues to write its legend. Looking back at last year’s newcomer PEPE, it stands out by choosing the frog, a beloved mascot in Western communities, as its mascot. Its unique design with large eyes and green skin gives it high recognition.

Moreover, this frog has been transformed into various emoji packs, showing diverse emotions such as happiness, anger, and surprise. Some crypto KOLs occasionally use this frog image for comment replies, bringing considerable attention to it.

Therefore, leveraging well-known popular culture or mascots can have a significant impact on creating MEMEs.

We see that MEME coins do not immediately attract celebrity attention and affection upon their inception. Dogecoin gained favor with Musk only in recent years due to its cute and funny symbols and tipping culture.

Musk has hundreds of millions of followers on Twitter, and under immense exposure and favorable factors such as micro-payment tipping on the X platform, it has brought a lot of heat to Dogecoin.

In 2023, the Twitter logo was even replaced with the Dogecoin logo by Musk, lasting for a full three days. Previously, Musk even self-proclaimed himself as Dogecoin CEO and shared payment methods related to Dogecoin and comments on the platform.

Every mention by Musk, or even partnerships between his companies and Dogecoin, injects a lot of attention into Dogecoin.

Aside from the opportunity of endorsement from a legendary figure, hitching a ride on the celebrity effect is also a good choice. Although SHIB, which took off in the previous cycle, is now performing mediocrely, it made a smart move at the beginning. It started by commenting in Musk’s section, successfully prompting Musk to inquire and attract attention.

Subsequently, it even transferred half of its tokens to Vitalik. At the time, as the global pandemic raged, Vitalik chose to donate the tokens to Indian charitable organizations, causing quite a stir, to the point where many Indians began to learn about SHIB. After this incident, many MEMEs rushed to imitate by sending tokens to Vitalik, but the effect was far from that of SHIB.

It is worth mentioning that even the MEME coin nuts in the Solana ecosystem would choose to hitch a ride on Musk’s text comments. Every time Musk comments “nuts,” it would cause a surge in the price of the nuts coin.

Another influential figure in endorsements is Solana co-founder Toly. SILLY successfully attracted Toly with its cute and funny appearance. Even at Solana Breakpoint2023, wearing dragon-themed clothing on the stage, it once sparked a “silly dragon craze.”

Building More “Community Consensus”

The price performance of cryptocurrencies is closely related to attention. The more attention a cryptocurrency receives, the more people understand it, and the more buyers there are, thereby driving the price upward.

To build a successful MEME, of course, we need to understand its essence. It is different from other utility or governance tokens. It completely abandons narratives, staking, and other traditional concepts, openly admitting that its token is “useless.” In this case, the value of the token depends entirely on “community consensus.”

Community and decentralization are the most original concepts in the crypto community. This also means that its viral spread requires resonance and “spontaneity” in the community, rather than deliberate marketing.

Of course, some marketing is still necessary when the hype declines.

The “Doge-1” lunar mission sponsored by DOGE has also contributed to the continuous rise in the token price, while SHIB and Dogecoin, in addition to having high traffic online, also have noteworthy offline integrations. Some cinemas, supermarkets, and brands accept their payments, such as luxury brand Gucci, the largest U.S. operator AMC, and the U.S. retail giant GameStop. This undoubtedly enhances their brand exposure.

As a MEME coin, it’s not a matter of sitting back and doing nothing, relying solely on frequent tweets to gain a lot of community support. Although BONK is not as aggressive as its predecessors in expanding brand partnerships offline, it has notable interactions within the Solana ecosystem, such as collaborating with other DeFi products, adding liquidity, staking tokens, and so on.

PEPE, on the other hand, publishes interesting images, memes, and even comics and artworks in the community. In addition, it promotes frog emoticons through art competitions sponsored by PEPE.

Whether online or offline, whether through celebrity endorsements or hot events, building more “community consensus” is what gives MEME coin prices enough force to boom.

Focusing on Chains with the Most Funds and Users (Ethereum and Solana)

Looking at existing MEME projects, most of them are on popular chains such as Ethereum, where coins like Dogecoin, SHIB, and PEPE thrive. With the rise of the newcomer SOL, projects like BONK, WIF, and SILLY have also gained fame.

For various reasons, other chains have not seen particularly successful MEME projects. Public chains are like reservoirs; where there is wealth and users, there will be more funds flowing into MEME projects. Moreover, MEME-type assets rely heavily on the “spillover” of active funds on the chain. Therefore, apart from the top few chains, there is almost no space for MEME assets to survive on relatively early-stage chains.

Take the example of FUD, a MEME coin on Sui. Despite being promoted by the Sui team at launch and choosing a dog image with high tolerance for errors, FUD did not achieve the “expected” results, even as the price of Sui performed well and TVL continued to reach new highs. So far, there has not been a single successful MEME token in the Sui ecosystem.

When we shift our focus to layer 2 (L2), we suddenly find that MEME projects are few and far between. Earlier projects like Airdoge gained some popularity through wide-ranging airdrops but then disappeared. Other L2 solutions have also failed to produce highly recognizable MEME projects.

At key events such as project airdrops, mainnet launches, and token model announcements, strategic planning could garner significant attention.

Utilize Airdrops to Attract Market Attention

In the absence of other favorable conditions, conducting large-scale airdrops to selected chains and holding users is one of the most effective ways to quickly raise awareness for a MEME project.

A notable example of an airdrop is BONK on Solana, which initially faced some challenges but generously allocated 60% of its tokens to airdrop to users within the Solana ecosystem during a difficult period for Solana due to the SBF incident. As SOL quickly recovered over the past year and attracted market attention, BONK also gained listings on exchanges like Binance and OKX. BONK forged its own path without the endorsement of celebrities or hot events, relying on widespread airdrops and the recovery of the Solana ecosystem.

Even non-MEME projects often gain significant attention through airdrops. For example, projects like Flare, Celestia, Dymention, AltLayer, and Wormhole. Some project tokens have become golden shovels, with users receiving new project airdrops simply by staking tokens in their wallets.

For example, if conducting an airdrop within the Cosmos ecosystem, it’s often wise to target holders of tokens like TIA and ATOM, as these users are more numerous and hold more coins. Leveraging the visibility of other project teams can quickly raise awareness.

Conclusion

If you’ve made it this far, you probably already know what to do. To build a successful MEME, factors such as token economics, mascots, airdrop methods, and chain selection need to be carefully considered. With favorable conditions, the probability of success increases.

If you need some small animals as mascots, consider these options: the Cotton-bellied Frog, the Cottontail Rabbit, the Silvery Marmoset, the Utah Goose, the South African Elephant Shrew, the Marimba Bear, etc.

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