Preface:

With Trump’s historic victory sweeping through U.S. politics and shifting the tide overnight, Bitcoin has reached a new all-time high. However, within the crypto world, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies fundamentally represent two distinct realms.

Under the banner of “Build,” so-called “Value Coins,” touted as the cornerstone of the crypto world, are facing unprecedented challenges in adoption and waves of FUD. Meanwhile, the MEME craze has returned with full force, prompting a renewed question:

In the visible bull market ahead, should we place our trust once again in Value Coins, or is MEME truly the future?

Rising From The Slightest Breeze

The value discovery of small certainties, amplified by liquidity.

Before diving into a discussion about MEME, it’s necessary to briefly review the history of MEME in the crypto world. From a chronological perspective, it can roughly be divided as follows:

From the development history outlined above, several important trends can be summarized:

1. Liquidity Expansion as the Foundation: MEMEs are born in bull markets, with price surges often coinciding with the expansion of dollar liquidity.
2. Celebrity Effect as a Key Driver: The explosive popularity of image-based MEMEs like Shib or Doge is often aided by celebrity endorsements, such as Elon Musk.
3. Resonance with Spiritual Aspirations: From zoo images and internet memes to AI-based MEMEs, these tokens reflect the most viral spirit of their time, embodying increasingly rich emotional appeals.
4. Shortened Lifecycles: With platforms like Pump.fun facilitating fair MEME token launches, the token creation process has shortened to minutes, and lifecycles have dwindled to mere hours.

During Doge’s rise, the era of the 1990s generation coincided with the smartphone era, popularizing image and emoji-based communication;

By 2020, the 2000s generation took center stage. For them, meme culture was second nature. Unlike the 90s generation, they were more disillusioned, more laid-back, and more anti-authoritarian. They gravitated toward absurd humor, such as PEPE.

By 2024, AI emerged as the most disruptive technology, with the 2000s generation leading this wave. While the 80s generation questioned AI’s future, the 2000s were already profiting from it, aligning themselves with visionary tech leaders and embracing rapid change.

With platforms like Pump.fun, 5,000–10,000 MEME tokens are created daily. October statistics reveal that only 1.4% of users earned over $1,000, while over 80% incurred losses.

At this moment, the roots of MEME are widely discussed, drawing from culture, generational emotions, and viral dynamics. However, one conclusion stands clear:

MEME cannot be measured by utility or practicality—this is a narrow view of value. In the irreversible trend of monetary expansion, MEME was chosen by the times, with blockchain as its ideal medium.

MEME is rooted in the younger generation’s spiritual needs and their new value standards. They dismiss grand narratives of value and instead find joy in small certainties, using humor to confront authority. A meme evokes a shared resonance; for the younger generation, this recognition represents a life victory. In the blockchain world, this resonance has immense value. Rationality and ideals are relics; for them, entertainment and consumption reign supreme. Concepts like “crypto shame” or “crypto gambling” don’t exist in their worldview. MEME is part of their daily lives—a different kind of game.

That said, while MEME was created by the young generation, its transformation into an investment asset is thanks to older capitalists. For the 60s, 70s, and 80s generations, their approach is simple: they may not understand it, but that doesn’t stop them from reaping profits.

Value Coins Collapse Under the Test of Reality

A Market Crash Is Not Fearsome, But Disproving A Narrative Can Be Crippling

For most seasoned veterans who have experienced multiple crypto cycles, market crashes are common and not particularly alarming. Even BTC has faced sharp declines. However, the loss of faith in Value Coins/VC Coins stems not from typical market volatility but from a devastating pattern: for the majority of retail investors, by the time they acquire tokens, prices are already at their peak, akin to standing atop Mount Everest, only to watch them plummet past sea level and eventually sink into the Mariana Trench.

Currently, Value Coin tokens have become the “product,” while the real products see no traction. Discussions around low-circulation, high-market-cap Value Coins are as prevalent as those about MEMEs. Several factors contribute to this situation: inflated valuations from bull-to-bear transitions, allocation imbalances due to crypto compliance measures, and unhealthy ecosystem dynamics.

At its core, the decline of Value Coins results from a combination of factors: narratively, they falter due to a lack of practical applications; economically, they fail due to inequitable distribution; ecologically, they degrade under the influence of hypocritical elites. For many altcoins, flashy concepts and superficial protocol-level innovations have become trendy. Terms like “chain abstraction,” “Layer 2,” “Layer 3,” and “intent-centric design” emerge one after another, yet user interactions reveal the truth: without real-world applications, users’ needs are neither essential nor irreplaceable.

As a result, project metrics often rely on incentives like airdrops and rewards. However, if these mechanisms are riddled with unfair practices or insider trading, the token itself becomes the final product, as Murad once said, while the actual product garners no attention.

Take, for example, a Value Coin aligned with mainstream industry narratives. Each participant has wealth-driven motives, yet none of these motives are genuinely tied to the project’s intrinsic value. To put it bluntly: the so-called “narrative” is often just a fig leaf for profiteering. Most narratives are easily debunked within a short time, leaving behind nothing but empty promises, circular schemes, or outright Ponzi structures.

Hundreds of public chains, hundreds of Layer 2s, hundreds of cross-chain bridges, thousands of DeFi projects, and countless narrative concepts—within this maze of ideas, what seems like a flawless logical structure collapses at the slightest touch of reality. If external liquidity doesn’t widely overflow, and without the backdrop of homogeneous narrative competition, the situation worsens even further.

The hypocritical elite mentality among many project teams has become the final straw that broke the back of Value Coins. Many of these teams play both sides: they scorn “digital beggars” while secretly setting up insider trading schemes, preaching disruption, revolution, and innovation, but holding in their hands scythes—small, big, and even larger ones.

When you gaze into the abyss, the abyss also gazes back at you. Using grand narratives to attract capital and users, and employing unfair methods for wealth distribution, once the former is disproven, the latter will inevitably fall into the abyss. However, the bottom for Value Coins may be even longer and more drawn out than anyone imagines.

The Future of MEME and Value Coins

History Repeats, But Does Not Simply Repeat

Victory is always written by the victors, and value is only truly recognized when it is realized. The core idea of the crypto world remains tokenization. A token, before it takes off, does not distinguish between being a Value Coin or a MEME Coin; essentially, there is no significant difference, only the variation in their realization paths.

The advantage of Value Coins lies in their ability to go from cold start to a positive price cycle, with a complete and followable methodology for implementation. In comparison, the certainty of success is relatively higher, but the potential upside is limited. In the end, they solve users’ utility needs.

The advantage of MEME Coins is that, although they lack a fully replicable realization path (compared to Value Coins), they have greater randomness but a much higher potential. Additionally, MEME Coins are now more capitalized, and their maturity is no worse than that of Value Coins. Ultimately, they address users’ sense of community belonging.

The original sin of a project is not whether it has value, but whether its users make money. In the long run, we must recognize that the blockchain world is inherently diverse in value. FUD against Value Coins or hype for MEMEs does not necessarily mean that one should survive over the other. These opposing views simply represent a battle for capital influence, not reality. For most of the market, the simplest truth is that in a fair environment, projects that allow people to make money are valuable—this is almost the only criterion.

Thus, the future of Value Coins and MEME Coins can be answered by two questions: Who can achieve relative fairness? And who offers a better risk-reward ratio?

Fairness depends on the perfection of the system; risk-reward ratio depends on narrative development and liquidity. Together, they will determine the future cycle and the future of crypto.

After Trump’s rise to power, we can likely predict an improvement in the institutional environment, but whether this improvement will help reverse the current poor state of Value Coins is still unknown. From the risk-reward perspective, the future of Value Coins depends on whether new entrants increase in large numbers. However, if they cannot deeply align with real-world needs, disproval will come quickly. The worst part is that this process cannot be accelerated—blockchain won’t become the mainstream overnight. But in terms of liquidity, Value Coins seem to have an advantage, as investment institutions still tend to inject funds into this sector. However, without substantial improvements in the narrative logic, the reality of “not enough retail investors to be exploited” is shifting from a joke to reality.

If we look at the future from this angle, the basic scenario for Value Coins remains institutional improvement, slow narrative progress, and liquidity overflow. The most likely state for them isn’t failure and zeroing out. Like China’s real estate, after a high valuation crash, a long period of elimination and adjustment will occur. The eventual “survival of the fittest” will give rise to the truly valuable Value Coins.

For MEMEs, a flourishing era is approaching. Stronger capital operations and exchange traffic are accelerating the trend, but for retail investors, it doesn’t necessarily mean making money will be easier. As long as the wealth effect continues, most in the market will still believe: “This time, I will definitely succeed in PVP.”

To make money in a fair environment is to ensure sustainability. Every cycle has a different narrative. Countless Value Coins and MEME Coins will die off, but the commonality of the ones that remain is not the fight for “authentic value,” but who can win the recognition and support of a broader community of users.

To conclude: There is no such thing as eternal universal value in the world. Value Coins and MEME Coins are not inherently superior or inferior to one another. Historically, it is always those projects that can continuously gain community recognition and user trust that will endure and stay fresh over time. This is the true value.

Money never sleeps, and new stories are still unfolding. This time, I hope you win!

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