⚡Metrics for Memecoin Buyers

Meditations on Memes & Metrics for Success

In this article, we’ll discuss:

• Factors that ignited the success of memecoins in the last year, and why this trend had such durability

• The most important metrics to measure meme success, and tools to capitalize

• Meme principles and the biggest traps to avoid when trading them

The Meteoric Rise of Memes

The doge that inspired it all

This is Kabosu, a pup who appeared in a blog post with her owner Atsuko in 2010. She had just wanted to share some cute pictures of her pets on the internet. The meme began to grow in popularity after it was used on Reddit in October 2010 in a post of a corgi titled "LMBO LOOK @ THIS FUKKEN DOGE."

The image, the comic sans text, and the word doge all converged to create what most people know as the Doge meme.

“As Gawker’s Adrian Chen argued, the doge meme is a prime example of what makes internet culture so awesome: it’s nonsensical, illogical, inexplicable, and yet totally hilarious and addictive. There’s an order within doge’s illogic. One linguist argued that, contrary to the general trends of the internet, doge allows for the expression of complex philosophical ideas. “It’s a meme of contemplation rather than action,” io9’s Annalee Newitz wrote.”

— The Verge, December 2013

It’s hard to believe Dogecoin is more than a decade old. Dogecoin was the first instance of the tokenization / financialization of a meme (or at least the first to gain traction). The community was unstoppable - they even helped the Jamaican Bobsled team raise $30,000 to go to the Winter Olympics. When Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer created Dogecoin as a joke, the initial price was $0.0002993.

On April 2nd, 2019, Elon Musk got involved.

While this initial tweet didn’t have much impact on the price of Doge, Elon continued to post about the coin, and Dogecoin began to catch fire across social media.

Dogecoin’s epic run in the spring of 2021 saw a market cap of over $89B…

The big runup

If you weren’t around for this runup, it was insane. It was as if the entire world had gotten in on the fun, with Elon leading the charge.

…Until May 8th, 2021. Elon was set to appear on SNL, and everyone & their brother was anticipating a Dogecoin shill, their bags depending on it.

The shill never came. That day, May 8th, was the pico top of Dogecoin. In the next 24 hours, the market cap of Dogecoin was nearly cut in half. Within two weeks, amidst other bad news, a comedown from a blow off top, and a liquidation cascade, even Bitcoin had drawn down 50%.

There were many factors that contributed to the top of the market in May of 2021, but Dogecoin was smack dab in the middle of it. This may be the best example we have of the attention economy dominating the 21st century. It’s the perfect culmination of attention, the influence of social media, and Internet money.