Let’s talk about the memecoin cycle. Forget utility, forget long-term vision, forget even coherent narratives. This cycle, in its purest form, wasn’t about any of that.

It was about one thing: being early.

The Spark: ETF Hype and Solana’s Comeback

The spark wasn’t just generic market momentum. It was more specific. Late 2023: Bitcoin ETF filings hinted at institutional money entering crypto. Solana, after FTX, staged a defiant comeback. That was the ignition – renewed legitimacy and a recovery story.

Traditional altcoins felt stale. Many carried bear market baggage. VC-backed projects, with roadmaps and whitepapers, often had valuations that felt… engineered, more exit strategy than excitement.

Memecoins offered something different: raw, unfiltered, fun. Anti-VC coin. No whitepaper, often no website. Just a meme, a ticker, a launch. The allure was in the simplicity, the risk. Memecoins became the ultimate “beta play” on steroids, precisely because traditional alts felt so… predictable.

If BTC could 2x on ETF hype, and SOL was rising from the ashes, maybe a dog coin with no purpose could 100x. That’s the spark: ETF optimism, SOL’s comeback, weariness with VC alts.

BONK: The First Taste of “Early”

Then came BONK.

BONK wasn’t sophisticated, not profoundly meme-able. But it was first to catch this energy. People saw movement, saw gains, and a basic understanding formed: something is happening. This is different. This is fast.

Initially, “early” wasn’t the conscious goal. More like, “This is volatile, maybe a small bet.” But BONK’s run, explosive then predictably volatile, started to define the game, subconsciously.

The Meta Shift: Absurdity Emerges from a Limited Meme Pool

The meta shifted. The crypto brain processed it: “Memecoins are a game. The game is finding the next BONK, but better.”

“Better” wasn’t tech or teams. “Better” amplified virality. How? At this early stage, with the memecoin meta still nascent, the options for differentiation were surprisingly limited. There weren’t endless sophisticated strategies or complex narratives to choose from. In fact, the very pool of readily available, internet-native memes was relatively small. You weren’t choosing from thousands of options; you were picking from a handful that resonated on a gut level.

And in that limited selection, what stood out? Absurdity.

“Better,” in this context, became synonymous with “more absurd.” Because in a still-undeveloped memecoin landscape, absurdity was a potent signal. It was attention-grabbing. It was inherently shareable. And crucially, in a market still figuring out what a “good” memecoin even was, humor and immediate, visceral laughter became a powerful selection mechanism.

Enter Dogwifhat (WIF).

“Wif hat.” Misspelled, pointless Shiba Inu in a hat. Peak internet absurdity. And in that, for many, the immediate reaction was laughter. It was just funny. And in that humor, in that absurdity, there was a signal:

“This is new. This is fresh. This is… early?”

The game clarified, intuitively. Not just finding a memecoin, but the one that goes viral before it’s viral. Capturing the zeitgeist, the internet joke, the fleeting absurdity. And in those early days, in that limited meme pool, the coins that made people laugh the loudest, the most absurdly, were the ones that naturally rose to the top.

To find that coin, you had to be early.

Memescope: Optimizing for Speed and… Manipulation

The meta iterated fast. “Early” wasn’t just post-launch timing. Too late. True “early” was pre-launch. Before the masses, the hype, the pump.

Tools like Photon and “memescope” emerged. The game became tactical. Traders lived on memescope – Photon’s tab for new memecoin listings. The meta: memescope all day, refresh, snipe launches, be the first buyer. Pure “early” optimization – speed, reflexes, hours staring at a screen.

“Memescope meta” was still presented as somewhat democratized – anyone with the tools and time could theoretically play. But beneath the surface, a darker dynamic was emerging: the rise of “insiders” who were actively manufacturing memecoins and manipulating the very metrics that memescope traders relied on.

These weren’t always organic, grassroots movements. Increasingly, memecoins were being strategically engineered for profit. These insiders would:

• Create memecoins out of thin air: Often with no real community or organic momentum to begin with.
• Manipulate metrics: They’d artificially inflate on-chain data, create fake social media buzz, and game the systems that ranked “trending” coins to appear more popular than they actually were.
• Target trader resources directly: Knowing that memescope and similar tools were becoming the central nervous system of memecoin trading, they specifically designed their manipulations to exploit these platforms.
• Hire market makers: To create the illusion of genuine trading volume right from the start, making newly launched coins look immediately active and desirable on charts.
• Team up with KOLs (Key Opinion Leaders): Paying influencers to shill their manufactured coins, creating a veneer of social proof and driving initial FOMO.
• Deploy “reply guy” Twitter armies: Creating networks of bot or paid accounts whose sole purpose was to spam replies to large crypto accounts, flooding the information space with mentions of their tokens and creating a false sense of organic buzz.

The memescope traders truly felt as though they were winning the game of “being early” despite being one step behind the crowd truly capturing the most value.

These two key aspects of the memecoin game – absurdity becoming the driver of viral adoption, and insiders recognizing the “early” game and manufacturing exit liquidity – were now poised to reach their final boss stages.

Fartcoin: The Quest for Mass Attention and Peak Absurdity

For those actively trying to create the “next WIF” – the next memecoin to achieve escape velocity – a crucial realization dawned: to get the masses to buy your memecoin, you needed to capture their fleeting attention. And in the memecoin arena, attention wasn’t won through complex narratives or technological promises. It was seized through sheer, undeniable spectacle. The pursuit of “early” now fully embraced this understanding: it wasn’t just about speed or even absurdity in isolation; it was about strategically engineering peak absurdity as the ultimate attention-grabbing mechanism.

This is where Fartcoin entered the stage.

Fartcoin. Think about it from the perspective of a memecoin creator aiming for mass adoption. What could be a more surefire way to grab attention than launching a token called “Fartcoin”? It wasn’t merely absurd; it was universally, instantly absurd. The very name was a guaranteed conversation starter, a clickbait headline waiting to happen. It was seemingly designed, with laser precision, to manufacture the kind of sensational news that would cut through the internet noise: “Look at this idiotic thing people are throwing money at!”

Fartcoin became the ultimate experiment in attention economics within the memecoin world. It wasn’t just another token launch; it was a deliberate, almost cynical, attempt to weaponize absurdity for mass attention. It served as a stark, and perhaps hilarious, proof of concept: in the memecoin game, especially when aiming for true “escape velocity” and mainstream adoption, peak absurdity wasn’t just a desirable trait – it was the core marketing strategy, distilled to its purest and most provocative form.

Can there be a more absurd meme than Fartcoin?

The Insider Game and the Trump Ceiling

Then, building on the manipulative tactics already seen in the memescope era, a more fundamental realization was taking hold: the era of purely absurd animal meme coins, while initially explosive, was becoming unsustainable. The market was getting smarter.

The meta needed a new angle, a veneer of legitimacy. This is when we saw the rise of “substance” memes – coins with narratives that, while still memetic at their core, could be justified with a thin layer of plausible deniability. Enter the AI coin meta. Suddenly, buying a memecoin wasn’t just about a dog with a hat; it was about “investing” in the future of artificial intelligence! This provided a reason to buy, however flimsy, beyond pure absurdity.

But beneath this shift in thematic dressing, the core mechanics of the game, and the role of the insiders, remained. The alpha was still information asymmetry. These insider groups simply adapted, leveraging their early access to information in this new meta. They knew about AI coin launches before anyone else, and they continued to exploit that advantage.

This evolution culminated in the celebrity memecoin meta. The insiders realized that the ultimate way to engineer viral launches and guarantee exit liquidity was to partner with prominent figures – celebrities. These celebrities, often with massive reach but limited crypto understanding, became the front for these insider operations. And crucially, these insiders, still operating in the shadows, would often present themselves as simply “better traders,” subtly (or not so subtly) implying that their outsized gains were due to skill, not information advantage, further fueling the frustration of average participants who were increasingly locked out of the “early” game.

The “Insider Game,” in its most cynical and transparent form, was now fully revealed, encompassing:

• Be the launcher. Create the coin, control the narrative, seed hype with maximum absurdity OR a veneer of substance to engineer virality. Ultimate early, ultimate control of virality.
• Be an insider. Find launchers of absurdly viral OR plausibly substantive coins, get into the coins early before it had reached the rest of crypto twitter. Information asymmetry on viral/substantive potential is the edge.
• Be an influencer. Build a following, use it as early entry for absurdly viral OR plausibly substantive coins, then… you know. Amplify the chosen narrative, drive the headlines, secure exit liquidity.

After this shift towards engineering viral absurdity and controlling launch narratives became prominent, and after Fartcoin had demonstrated the raw power of peak absurdity, came TRUMP coin.

TRUMP. Biggest meme on the planet? Suddenly, even engineered absurdity felt less relevant. How do you out-absurd Trump in terms of headline potential? Unlikely.

Step into the shoes of a memecoin trader at the moment TRUMP launched. Anyone paying attention could see it was an insider launch. Eighty percent of the token supply transparently locked for insiders. On-chain data screamed of token snipers and pre-launch access. It should’ve have mattered. But it didn’t matter. This was Trump. The elected President of the United States. The memecoin of all memecoins. The celebrity coin to end all celebrity coins. Of course you bought it. This felt like a new paradigm. The insider game was obvious, but for Trump, it was irrelevant. This was too big to ignore.

Then, the launch of MELANIA.

And it was like the air was sucked out of the room. Everyone in the club suddenly got sober. The insider game, so blatant with TRUMP, was now utterly, inescapably exposed with Melania. The mechanics were identical, the cash grab even more transparent. The difference? With TRUMP, the meme magnitude had briefly overridden the cynicism. With Melania, there was nothing left to override.

The insider game that had been revealed all along, but while people had chosen not to care before, now, with Melania, they really cared. The emperor had no clothes. The cycle was broken.

TRUMP coin became the ultimate case study in another way as well: the clearest possible example of the insider game reaching its apex. It wasn’t just a meme; it was a political and cultural force, launched with an aura of insider access and pre-ordained success.

Can there be a bigger, more transparent insider game than Trump and Melania coins?

Echoes of 2021: The NFT Cycle of “Early”

And this whole memecoin cycle… it echoes something familiar, doesn’t it? Go back to 2021, and the NFT craze.

The spark then? ETH’s rise, fueled by the DeFi summer. NFTs emerged as the “beta play” on ETH, the riskier, higher-upside bet.

The meta quickly coalesced around PFP projects. “Community” became the buzzword, but really, the game was about finding the next Bored Ape, the project that would explode in value and cultural cachet.

And just like with memecoins, people realized: the game is being early. But in NFTs, “early” meant grinding for whitelists. Discord grinding, Twitter engagement, endless tasks – whitelist grinding became the NFT equivalent of constantly refreshing memescope, a relentless pursuit of pre-launch access.

The optimization for “early” escalated. People realized the earliest you could be was the creator. And soon, celebrities jumped in.

You had Steph Curry and Jimmy Fallon flexing seven-figure JPEGs, and Logan Paul blatantly scamming his audience. Who the hell was next? It felt like the NFT space, too, had reached a kind of celebrity-driven peak, a point of meta exhaustion.

And speaking of cycles turning… NELK, who seemed to mark a certain peak of celebrity NFT hype in 2021, just launched their own memecoin, Fullsend. If that isn’t a sign, what is?

The parallels are striking. Different asset class, same underlying game: the relentless, ultimately self-consuming pursuit of “early.” At a certain point, there’s no possible place for the game to evolve; you need to reset the game entirely.

The Twilight Zone and the Inevitable Reset

And in the wake of the memecoin cycle, and echoing the tail end of the NFT craze, we see coins like LIBRA launch, with people seemingly throwing their entire portfolios in, desperately hoping to recapture the magic of the TRUMP trade. It’s a classic sign of what George Soros called the “twilight zone” in market cycles. As Soros observed, this is the phase where “people continue to play the game although they no longer believe in it.” The underlying belief in the magic of “early” is eroding, but the ingrained habit of chasing memecoin pumps persists.

Soros warned that “eventually a crossover or tipping point is reached, when the trend turns down and the bias is reversed, which leads to a catastrophic downward acceleration (8), commonly known as the crash.”

So, you have to ask yourself: are there any iterations of this meta left? Any more levels to this game?

Can there be a more absurd meme than Fartcoin?

Can there be a bigger, more transparent insider game than Trump and Melania coins?

Probably not. Not in this cycle, anyway.

The memecoin cycle, defined by the relentless “early” pursuit, likely has run its course. Fueled by hype, absurdity, “early” promise. But like all hype cycles, it’s inherently self-consuming. The “early” quest undermined itself as mechanics became clear, illusion faded.

But the human “be early” impulse remains. Baked into crypto psychology.

This memecoin cycle might be over, but the desire remains. The game will likely return, maybe with new rules, new absurdity, new players eager to be… you guessed it… early.

Stay safe out there friends.

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