Author: Matti, Zee Prime Capital

Translation: zhouzhou, BlockBeats

Editor's Note: The rise of meme coins today showcases the wealth effect and innovative opportunities within crypto culture. Although meme coins are still in the early stages of pursuing short-term gains, they provide reference value for future cultural finance and cultural coins. The article suggests building a crowdfunding platform for meme coins, allowing tokens to be linked not only to memes but also to lifestyle products, fashion brands, DeSci, and other cultural projects, harnessing the power of capital formation. In the future, cultural coins will become vehicles for value creation and distribution.

The following is the main content:

In the narrative of meme coins, humor and optimism coexist, but their logic can be misleading, often interpreting the world through a zero-sum game mindset and borrowing some uncomfortable Marxist viewpoints that emphasize power and wealth redistribution while neglecting true value creation.

"There is no need to create value, just to get a share." This mentality is widely accepted, and airdrops seem to have become a form of "welfare." The more free resources one acquires, the stronger the desire becomes. However, opportunities are not obtained out of thin air; they are earned through effort. The jealousy over seed round investment opportunities is the very foundation that rationalizes meme coins. However, market access is one thing, while obtaining seed round investment opportunities relies on an individual's social capital. Moreover, many overlook survivor bias—most seed round investments actually result in losses.

In the current crypto market, investors, project parties, and users have become accustomed to trading tokens with no real value through "meme premiums." This natural evolution of market paradigms has led to a more straightforward phenomenon: "Since that's the case, let's just issue tokens that clearly have no value." This assumption suggests that there is no real creative intent in the crypto space, but that is not the case—"You are not a lottery ticket."

Meme coins are essentially just a social game of ups and downs, and there is nothing wrong with that. They can be seen as a new type of lottery, vaguely associated with the spirit of the times. However, the rationalization logic behind meme coins is unsettling: resist those "evil capitalists" who exploit our gains! Even without value, we have the right to acquire wealth! We have the right to outperform the market!

However, there is a fundamental difference between wanting to make money and demanding to make money. The narrative of meme coins caters to this hollow desire, ultimately filling the pockets of insiders who then criticize the so-called "evil venture capitalists." Some equate meme coins with early crypto investments, which is a mistake. The difference is that among the false projects supported by venture capital today, perhaps only a very few will create trillions of dollars in value over the next decade.

Value will only be distributed.

Value should be claimed.

Value is merely a product of the means of acquisition.

Fundamentally, meme coins are indeed full of fun; they even have the potential to become the next escapist trend in consumer culture. In the future, they may become agents of value creation, as the tokenization of culture is a powerful and underdeveloped tool. However, the current narrative of meme coins is inherently steeped in strong Marxist overtones.

So, how can we transform this narrative into a positive-sum cultural finance game?

The Rise of Cultural Finance

Since the foundation of crypto culture is money, and money is the driving force of desire culture, we may have found the key to breakthrough. Culture (in this case, money) has already become a product, which also explains the emergence of meme coins and phenomena like pump.fun.

We typically like to think from the framework of "bundling/unbundling" when considering the waves of new product and technology adoption. In September 2023, before the meme coin frenzy erupted, we proposed a model and pointed out: "Perhaps this is not very intuitive, but cultural relevance will be traded."

Our direction was correct, but we failed to foresee the rapid rise of meme coins. In hindsight, this was reasonable, as the wealth effect at the time met an environment lacking real innovation, triggering the explosion of this phenomenon. However, meme coins are not a dead end. They actually provide an excellent concept validation for "Cultural Finance" (CultureFi) and "Cultural Coins," while crypto technology is gradually becoming a powerful cultural incubator.

Meme coins show us that brands and distribution channels can be effectively bundled together, which is also the core of meme coins—they are highly efficient distribution machines. Although the forms of meme coins we see today are still very primitive, relying more on short-term rapid price increases and lacking sustainability, they lay the groundwork for the evolution of future cultural coins. Price increases are undoubtedly the most effective marketing tool, and in the logic of meme coins, price increases are not only a means but also an end. However, for future cultural coins, price increases are merely a tool to achieve greater goals, just like Ethereum, Solana, or Bitcoin.

The future of cultural coins will be richer and more diverse—tokens will not only be carriers of culture itself but also mediums for distribution and dissemination. Below is my revision of the "bundling/unbundling" model; while it may not be the final version, it reflects my current in-depth thoughts and insights on the vertical field of crypto consumers.

The potential impact of this trend is undeniable, and we believe there is still significant room for innovation in the issuance of meme coins. Instead of continuing to launch short-term "missiles" that may be manipulated by "pump and dump" groups, perhaps we can build a dedicated meme coin "crowdfunding platform" that transforms these tokens into true cultural coins, not just for creating humorous memes but closely linked to cultural carriers of lifestyle products.

This crowdfunding platform can transform simple price fluctuation games into tools for unlocking products and opportunities (such as gaining access to specific products or content). With the powerful capital formation capabilities of cryptocurrencies, this approach can be used to initiate cultural coin projects with clear missions—whether they are fashion brands, record companies, or decentralized science (DeSci) projects (like $HAIR), or even innovative things we have yet to conceive.

Prediction markets like Polymarket have already demonstrated the potential to capture value through predicting events, fashion, and culture. In today's 24/7 "live reality show" world, it is perfectly normal for people to want to stay closely connected to the spirit of the times through financial tools to gain pleasure and dopamine stimulation.

Today's meme coins are like those early websites of the internet (if they had been financialized); they are still in a chaotic and functionally limited primitive state. And when culture itself becomes a battleground, direct participation will only further raise the stakes and potential impact of this game.

Cultural coins may soon develop a practicality that leads us from the "pre-industrial era" of the internet to the rapid industrialization of the internet. If you believe that the expansion of freedom drove the rapid progress of the industrial era, then cryptocurrencies are the extension of that freedom provided to the internet.

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