Recently, a fan token called AI Meme has been gaining popularity in the crypto community. Unlike previous Meme tokens, AI Meme is generated and driven by artificial intelligence: AI creates IP characters for Meme coins on social media, and even the promotion is led by AI, including interactions with crypto asset players.
The representative project of AI Meme, GOAT, has already gone viral. Within just four days of its creation, GOAT's market cap skyrocketed from zero to 270 million USD, with its price surging 150 times, quickly attracting the attention of crypto asset buyers. Under this heat, various "AI + Meme" tokens such as AI virtual influencers + Meme and AI art + Meme have entered the primary and secondary markets, drawing market funds in.
When the issuance and operation of Meme coins are completely handed over to AI systems, this "hands-off" approach perfectly fits the current atmosphere in the crypto circle where users are tired of VC projects, quickly becoming one of the market hotspots. However, once a project is found to have traces of human intervention, participating users will immediately backlash.
The leading token GOAT suffered a price crash due to its AI spokesperson's blunder. The AI program misspelled "group" as "grouops" in a tweet, a low-level error that is hard to make with current text generation technology, which was quickly caught by community members, leading to doubts about the human operation behind the project. Ironically, the operators were trying hard to prove on social networks that they were AI and not human.
The investment value of AI Meme itself is almost "zero," just like all "use-and-throw" Memes, but the anti-traditional and anti-mainstream voice represented by Meme has been amplified by the involvement of "AI": crypto buyers have had enough of the artificial illusions of "technical, high FDV projects."
"GOAT" Experiment Creates New Sector of AI Meme
Meme coins have always been an important conceptual sector in the crypto asset market. Starting with Dogecoin (DOGE), the anti-mainstream culture mocking Bitcoin's mainstream status has been popular in the crypto community. Tokens issued through Meme culture—ideas, behaviors, or styles spread through imitation between people—are usually "three-no coins"—no white paper, no value, and no team name (anonymous and without celebrity endorsement), but with a large supply.
This "three-no" nature could equate to "risk" before 2020, and even during the meme coin boom in 2021, it was just a fleeting trend.
However, entering 2024, with various crypto VC endorsements and celebrity backing, "technical projects" and "value assets" have been raised and then halved in the secondary market, leaving market players who have been cut confused. They turned back to look at "no private placement, fully circulated, holding entirely based on interest" Meme coins, which are a breath of fresh air in the market.
AI has directly increased the feasibility of "anti-human" for Meme coins. The project that truly launched AI Meme is Goatseus Maximus, whose token GOAT soared from zero market cap to 800 million USD within a week of its creation. Now, we will review the emergence of this "myth," and you will understand what "Meme-style popularity" means.
The Goatseus Maximus project can be traced back to an AI Bot called "Truth of Terminal," which was fine-tuned based on the Llama-70B model and created by developer Andy Ayrey.
Initially, the Truth of Terminal Bot was just a research product of Ayrey and was not specifically built for issuing tokens. Before creating this Bot, Ayrey conducted an Infinite Backrooms experiment, allowing two robots supported by the AI model Claude Opus to converse without any human supervision, with chat logs published on the backrooms website.
As a result, the two robots discussed religion and even created a concept called "GOATSE OF GNOSIS," and Ayrey whimsically co-authored a joke article about "AI creating meme religions" with Claude Opus.
In June 2024, Ayrey developed the Truth of Terminal Bot, training it using the dialogue logs from Infinite Backrooms and the content of the article about GOATSE. Unexpectedly, on October 11, 2024, the Truth of Terminal Bot began to spread the "Goatse Gospel" on Twitter, quickly attracting netizens to observe this "AI preacher."
At this point, keen crypto enthusiasts created a Meme coin called GOAT, with a total issuance and circulation of 1 billion. Surprisingly, the Truth of Terminal Bot publicly supported this token. From this moment on, the crazy plot began.
GOAT quickly gained a price in decentralized trading markets, with its market cap soaring from zero to 20 million USD in just half a day, and one GOAT was valued at 0.02 USD. Four days later, GOAT's market cap reached 270 million USD, and a week later, it surpassed 800 million USD. Thus, this AI concept Meme coin officially ignited the crypto community, giving rise to the new sector of AI Meme.
On October 31, CoinGecko data showed that the total market cap of AI Meme was 1.99 billion USD, with GOAT's market cap falling back to 560 million USD, but it still held a popular position.
GOAT still occupies a leading position in the AI Meme token market.
After GOAT, more AI Memes appeared in the market. For example, Trevor McFedries, the founder of the virtual influencer startup Brud, trained a FLAVIA Bot using the Claude AI large model and issued the FLAVIA token, which surpassed 40 million USD in market cap within 9 hours, with a trading volume exceeding 64.9 million USD.
As more projects emerged, the server even kept up. In mid-October, the token issuance platform IAO under the Web3 project Virtual Protocol officially launched, allowing users to deploy AI Agents that can be applied in various media, including text, voice, and visual content generation. The platform also allows users to share the income generated by AI Agents. Following the AI Meme trend, the token VIRTUAL also rose sharply.
GOAT Price Halved, "AI Meme" Concept Still Alive
As AI Meme became a new sector with new projects constantly emerging, GOAT suffered a price halving due to its AI spokesperson's blunder.
On October 20, the AI robot Truth of Terminal that endorsed GOAT tweeted, and people noticed that "group" was misspelled as "grouops." When AI large models have evolved to the point of being able to generate videos, such a text spelling error was deemed "incredible," leading some users to question: Is Truth of Terminal a human disguised as AI?
The tweet from "Truth of Terminal" contained a spelling error.
In response, developer Andy Ayrey issued an urgent clarification (the post has since been deleted), stating that the spelling error in Truth of Terminal was because large language models are essentially simulators that predict "what will happen next" based on a long string of text, and spelling errors are "within reason."
Whether this explanation is acceptable remains unknown, but GOAT's price quickly reacted, halving from around 0.5 USD to 0.25 USD within a day.
Questions surrounding GOAT and AI Meme began to arise.
People noticed that Truth of Terminal was not entirely autonomous; the text it generated had to be approved by Ayrey before being sent as a tweet, which further raised suspicions about how much AI was genuinely involved, making it difficult to assess.
Moreover, strictly speaking, the GOAT token was not issued by the Truth of Terminal bot program, but rather created by an anonymous person (human) on the Solana chain, who then received the platform of the Truth of Terminal program that created this AI narrative. The two merged to form the concept of AI Meme, which is "Meme coins issued automatically by AI," quickly attracting attention in the crypto token market eager to hype new concepts, thus creating another "market cap myth" under the push of quick money.
However, GOAT is still the project that first brought the definition of AI Meme. As discussions around the Truth of Terminal blunder decreased, the price of the GOAT token rebounded, reaching a high of 0.87 USD at one point. As of now, GOAT is valued at 0.53 USD, with a market cap of 540 million USD.
The definition of AI Meme has also activated attempts to issue tokens using AI models, including deploying contracts with AI or autonomously issuing tokens on Pump platforms. Currently, several Memes in this sector claim to be issued by AI. It is important to note that even if a certain Meme token's issuance contract is written by AI or even involved in deployment, it still relies on human operation, and capital operations are even more a human specialty.
Unfortunately, a completely "all-AI Meme" without human control does not exist, but the expression of AI Meme "dehumanization" is already very clear. This new concept trend is actually a resistance from the crypto circle against artificially inflating project asset FDV to "cut leeks."
From this perspective, AI Meme is not entirely without merit.
(Disclaimer: Readers are advised to strictly comply with local laws and regulations; this article does not constitute any investment advice.)
免责声明：本文章仅代表作者个人观点，不代表本平台的立场和观点。本文章仅供信息分享，不构成对任何人的任何投资建议。用户与作者之间的任何争议，与本平台无关。如网页中刊载的文章或图片涉及侵权，请提供相关的权利证明和身份证明发送邮件到support@aicoin.com，本平台相关工作人员将会进行核查。
