Meme-o-Mania
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This week, this tweet from Stats caught my eye:
The new wave of major memecoins are now bigger than the biggest Ethereum collectibles were at their combined peak during the last bullrun, when CryptoPunks, Bored Apes, Azuki, etc. were seeing all-time highs in trading activity.
To be sure, what's similar here is the allure of high returns. NFTs were the playground for degens in 2021, while memecoins have decidedly taken up that mantle this cycle.
What's different, though, is accessibility.
For instance, if you were just getting excited about NFTs in 2021, you couldn't just go easily drop $20 on a CryptoPunk. There are only 10,000, right, and as unique collectibles they're indivisible unless you do some NFTfi wrap-and-shard magic. This dynamic helped the 'Punks floor price rocket past 100 ETH at one point! But most folks don't have that much crypto to spend on anything.
On the flip side, memecoins are fungible. Anyone any time can drop as little as $1 (or much more, or even less, etc.) on WIF, POPCAT, MOG, and so forth to get a divisible bag and start playing along in the memes casino.
Plus, most memecoin action these days is taking place on chains like Solana and Base where transaction fees are drastically cheaper than those that we saw around NFTs in 2021, particularly during periods of network congestion.
All that said, the biggest memecoins "flipping" the biggest NFTs isn't so surprising when you consider the lower barrier to entry that memecoins enjoy—more people can easily pile into a fungible token than the reigning 10k PFP collections.
To be sure, the future of NFTs has never been brighter, as their use cases are branching out in all directions, and low-cost mints are very accessible. My main point here is that the cryptoeconomy's culture vertical now has two major asset classes, NFTs and memecoins, while in 2021 it just had one.
The lines are blurring here as well. DN-404 tokens have accompanying fungible and non-fungible assets. Zora recently launched ERC-20z tokens, which can evolve from NFTs to ERC-20s on command. And I've also seen more memecoin projects starting to deploy their own NFT PFP collections too.
Both of these asset types can be approached and used in different ways, of course, but ultimately they're both community-driven and can be complementary. I'll be watching the collective experiments that take place at these crossroads closely in the years ahead, and you should too!
📰 General news
🎨 Cryptoart & music
- A Lost Robbie resold for 210 ETH via SuperRare
- Jack Butcher and Visualize Value released Tradeoffs (#1) via Mint, receiving nearly 150k mints in 24 hours
- Raoul Pal collected XCOPY's Last Selfie
🏆 Digital collectibles
- CryptoPunks neared a $100k floor for the first time in months
- Forgotten Runes Wizard's Cult unveiled a new website
- McDonald's announced the details of its Doodles coffee collab
🎮 Decentralized gaming
- Duper announced its Beginner's Tournament event
- Fableborne, a free mobile multiplayer game, is coming to Ronin
- Fren Pet donated $FP to the upcoming dGEN1 airdrop
- Lumiterra launched its 2nd closed beta test on Ronin
- Parallel kicked off mobile testing for its TCG
- Pirate Nation unveiled the details of $PIRATE Staking 2.0
- Supersize won the gaming track of the Solana Radar Hackathon
- Wayfinder, the omnichain AI protocol that will underpin Parallel Colony, added Solana support
🪙 Memes & NFTfi
- ArtRun, a trading platform for Zora artcoins, added new features
- Blur is considering a fee switch proposal
- Drakula, a video app for Base memes, introduced videocoins
- Mintify, an orderbook protocol, is coming to Shape
- Relay added support for ApeChain bridging
- The Pond, an NFT collection by the $FWOG memecoin team, saw multiple +250 SOL sales this week
- Zerebro, an AI memecoin project, launched a PFP collection
📱 Onchain social
- Lens introduced its social network L2
- Untitled, a new crypto social network, launched
🌐 Virtual worlds
Mantle kickstarts Season 1 of Methamorphosis. Building on the success of their Liquid Staking Token, mETH, Mantle LSP announces plans for a new Liquid Restaking Token, cmETH, along with a governance token, COOK. With Methamorphosis, participants can now farm Powder for future COOK tokens and position themselves early for upcoming cmETH release.
- 🤖 Web4: We Are AGI - Jeffy Yu
- 🐵 The BAYC of Onchain Agents - YB
- 🎨 Notes on the Cryptoart Market - archisman.eth
- 🌐 Computation in the Expanded Field - maltefr
- 📱 Building My Art Career on the Purple App - Yon