Looking at the Meme Coin Phenomenon in the Crypto Circle through KTC in "All In"

"All In" is a film that exposes telecom fraud, featuring elements from the cryptocurrency space, such as "币Coin" and KOTAB Coin. With the film's release, KOTAB Coin was quickly issued in the crypto market. Currently, there are trading pairs of KOTAB Coin on multiple blockchains, primarily concentrated on Ethereum, BSC, and Base chains. Among them, Uniswap v2 on the Ethereum chain has the largest liquidity. The price of KOTAB Coin skyrocketed after the film's preview on August 5, increasing by over 3000 times within two days. However, it began to decline less than 24 hours later, and by August 19, it had almost dropped back to its issuance price.

Kota coin and similar tokens are commonly referred to as Meme coins. The term Meme originated from Richard Dawkins' 1976 book "The Selfish Gene," where it is defined as a cultural entity that can spread continuously at the level of human thought. The Oxford Dictionary explains it as "a basic unit of culture that is transmitted non-genetically." For most people, a common form of Meme is humorous images that satirize current events online, such as meme templates. These meme templates carry interesting information, are easy to replicate and spread, and ultimately form a cultural consensus.

The most famous case of the combination of memes and cryptocurrency is Dogecoin. In 2013, Jackson Palmer combined the Doge meme with cryptocurrency to satirize the crypto hype and created Dogecoin. Software engineer Billy Markus forked Bitcoin's code, creating 1 billion Dogecoins and launching it. Dogecoin quickly rose through Reddit, with tipping bots providing its initial use case. In December 2020, Musk began posting about Dogecoin on social media, causing its price to surge. In early May 2021, Dogecoin peaked at $0.74.

Dogecoin successfully captured the attention of the crypto world, leading to the emergence of many Meme coins based on Dogecoin from 2013 to 2017. Most of these Meme coins were created through secondary creation based on specific cultural or media materials and promoted through social media. As they developed, Meme coins began to choose grander narratives as their foundation. From 2017 to 2020, some Meme coins raised funds through ICOs, such as BAT(Basic Attention Token).

In May 2021, Shib was listed on exchanges and quickly became popular. The founder of Shib, Ryoshi, also transferred half of the initial total supply to Ethereum founder Vitalik. With the explosive growth of Dogecoin and Shib, "animal-themed" Meme coins became mainstream.

In the bear market, the Meme coin market still experienced small-scale surges. ArbDoge AI combines AI and Doge, using the "mining" concept to attract user participation. Pepe became the biggest dark horse, with significant growth in trading volume and the number of holders. The BRC-20 standard of the Bitcoin ecosystem also brought a new wave of Meme coins, but the excitement quickly faded.

The "meme" behind the current Meme coin has long departed from its original meaning. A meme can be any story, or even no story at all. Unlike conventional Web3 projects, the price growth of Meme coins mainly stems from investors' FOMO emotions.

The new generation of popular Meme coins usually does not take the time to build an active community or formulate future plans. Most are backed by centralized teams collaborating with stakeholders to create market hotspots. Speculators are no longer focused on the cultural connotation behind Meme coins; the wealth myth of early participants is more appealing.

Taking BALD on the Base chain as an example, its price surged significantly in a short period, attracting market attention. However, after the price reached its peak, the project team quickly withdrew liquidity, leading to a price crash. As Meme project teams typically operate anonymously, it is easy to cut ties with the project, taking the funds without bearing any responsibility.

The development of Meme coins is increasingly leaning towards "short, flat, and fast". Although the market is not lacking in stories and fertile ground for development, in the current market environment where stablecoins are flooding out, cautious investment may be a wiser choice.