Meme Beef

Any views expressed in the below are the personal views of the author and should not form the basis for making investment decisions, nor be construed as a recommendation or advice to engage in investment transactions.

Gm team – Paul again. I’m excited to be writing to you on this cold Tuesday morning to discuss what has been an incredibly eventful trailing-168 hours, which has been capped off by everyones favorite chain (Solana) becoming everyones least favorite chain, as outages have prevented anyone from doing anything on Sol for hours (Base SZN here we come?).

With massive airdrops, shifting narratives, memecoin drama, and more, we’ve got a lot to cover, so let’s dive in…

Jupuary: January 31st 2024 – Feb 1st, 2024

The long-awaited Jupuary turned out to be an absolute dud and really just marked the near-term top for Solana memecoins (probably should have known to fade CT when the consensus was overwhelmingly bullish). What was supposed to be a multi-week influx of capital into the Solana meme market, turned into a ~24 hour intense pump for a very small handful of coins which all eventually died (not surprised). We saw the revival of meme themes like GME/AMC/Stonks, and a variety of memes like WEN that consensus felt would pump (me included), and ended up doing nothing. Aside from how terrible most people are at trading Solana meme coins, the large majority of devs have been scamming or dumping tokens soon after creation, leaving very few remaining market opportunities.

Most notably, a degenerate uprising started to form against Jupiter leadership when it was “uncovered” that they were essentially selling tokens for personal gain, seemingly under the guise of providing the best possible experience for end users.

On one hand – I think that founders deserve to make money when they spend years building a product that thousands of people enjoy using. On the other hand – they assumed that everyone read their docs, which feels silly to assume if you as a longtime crypto entrepreneur truly know the “users” in this space.

Either way, I think it’s fair to say that JUP was overall underwhelming, and I’m hopeful that other upcoming SOL ecosystem airdrops are better executed, if the blockchain ever turns back on.

WIF vs WIF

This was one of the weirder beefs I’ve seen on twitter in a long time.

Tl;dr – Issa claimed that they invented the dogwifhat meme, and launched a clone of the coin on ETH in an attempt to capture the wealth they thought was rightfully theirs. Ansem was not having it, nor were his army of degenerate lunatics. Chaos ensued.

People seemed to care very little about the origin of the meme, and instead cared far more about which perspective of the meme was funnier, which is a good lesson when assessing memecoin viability generally. How many times over the past year have you seen a GME coin? Or a PEPE Coin? What makes this most recent version explode while the others died on impact?

Timing is everything with memecoins, and thats what Issa and co did not realize. Nobody cares who invented the meme – they only care who popularized it.

Over Saturation Is A Psyop (To An Extent)

A common theme I’m seeing on twitter lately, and really the overall consensus is saying, that most farming opportunities are oversaturated. If there is one thing you take away from this newsletter, I hope it is that you realize you should never blindly trust what you read on twitter, and to try thinking logically.

The basis for this over-saturation claim has largely been “look at all the twitter threads written about how to farm X Y or Z protocol – all of the alpha is gone.”

My response to that is pretty simple, and it’s built on a cliche (and cliches wouldn’t be cliches if they weren’t largely true): you can bring a horse to water, but you can’t make them drink.

I cannot tell you how many times I have walked a friend through a farming opportunity, showed them the optimal strategy, and regularly encouraged them to engage to earn “free money.” And yet – they sit on their hands.

This is not just a phenomenon amongst my friends – this is human nature. People are busy, people are lazy, and people love to look for excuses as to why something is not worth their time. This is why I personally feel strongly that it is worthwhile to continue farming the protocols which everyone else deems oversaturated – I think you’ll end up pleasantly surprised.

NFT Kingmaker Narrative

A theme that Wilson briefly touched on in the last newsletter, which I am incredibly bullish on as well, is the concept of DeFi protocols airdropping their tokens to notable NFT collections with strong holder bases. With this in mind, I want to take it a step further.

I think something to look for and treat as a “template” when assessing viability of a new mint, is whether or not the NFT is being dropped by a protocol directly. We saw this sort of success with Oh Otties by AltLayer and are now seeing it with Pikenians by Pike Finance in full transparency, I own some Pikenians. We’re even seeing free claims from protocols like Polyhedra:

There will be many more NFT projects launched by protocols over the next year+, and with airdrop farming being the king meta this cycle, these are collections I would probably not overlook.

Conclusion

That is all for this week folks. I am expecting the next 168 hours to be as eventful, if not more eventful than the last, and I am optimistic that Solana will be turned back on at some point soon (please 🥺?) so we can exit at a loss and bridge to the next meta.

I’m sure we’ll have plenty to unpack next week – until next time,

Paul