There’s a new trending meta on the onchain frontier: scenecoins.
According to Li Jin’s recent Taxonomy of memecoins, scenecoins are “community-first memecoins” that “launch as a Schelling point for distributed communities with shared values and missions.”
A through-line in the surge in these bottom-up, grassroots coins? New onchain stacks that make coordinating in crypto easier than ever.
For example, a huge pillar here is Warpcast, Farcaster’s leading app and the current darling of the crypto social scene.
Thanks to its in-built wallet support and composability with other resources like Zora NFT mints, Warpcast has become fertile ground and home base for a new wave of community-driven memecoins like $DEGEN (/degen), $HIGHER (/higher), and $ENJOY (/enjoy).
Another rising pillar for scenecoins is Party, a platform + protocol combo for streamlined onchain groups. The $HIGHER community used Party to coordinate their token’s launch transparently.
Of course, without top-down organization, scenecoins all start out embryonically—i.e. as blank slates—and then they gain further focus via churning “hive mind” community engagement. Now, we see:
- The $DEGEN mission = rewarding great Farcaster content.
- The $HIGHER mission = creating an optimistic lifestyle brand.
- The $ENJOY mission = curating enjoyable onchain media.
Each of these missions has an undercurrent of proliferation, similar to how the engine of the Nouns is the flywheel created by backing Nounish projects, from esports teams to short films.
And just like how NFT drops on Zora has become a go-to proliferation avenue for Nouns media, so too has Zora become the minting platform of choice for culture-making in today’s scenecoin communities.
This is for numerous reasons—Zora’s very easy to use, it offers creator rewards and flexibility, and its Farcaster-friendly. But even more so, Zora’s leaning into scenecoins lately and becoming a hub for them in its own right.
Indeed, the Zora team recently activated ERC-20 minting, paving the way for creators to sell their NFTs for non-ETH tokens, e.g. memecoins. This new feature, in combination with mint-friendly Warpcast, has led to a boom of scenecoin-themed NFT drops in recent days as these communities continue to bloom out toward the horizon.
All that said, amid the cryptoeconomy’s ongoing memecoin mania, new onchain stacks like Warpcast, Party, and Zora are redefining how asset creation and community proliferation works. Together, they can channel the energy of memecoins toward the development of scenecoins, focusing them toward productive ends.
Looking ahead, the lasting success of scenecoins will heavily depend on community engagement and bottom-up governance. How these projects navigate and innovate around decentralized decision-making will be a key thread to watch going forward.
Also, beyond speculation, the long-term value of scenecoins will depend on their adoption and utility within and outside their communities. Pay attention to the integrations and the partnerships to come and the possibility of scenecoins evolving into full-blown product lines.
Can this new niche of tokens maintain momentum and engagement for years to come? And what models will ensure their growth and sustainability without sacrificing community values?
The answers to these questions remain to be seen, but the potential for scenecoins to reshape how new communities can be built from the ground up is already apparent. Keep your eyes on this space accordingly!