Meme coins are the perfect tool for measuring community value; they are a tokenized expression of culture.
Written by: JJ Alicea
Translated by: Block unicorn
Historically, memes have been a part of the human experience, representing the transfer of cultural products across generations—ideas that endure, hold significant meaning, and develop in a snowball effect across eras. Memes are the focal point of society, carrying value in the form of collective influence.
Today, people often associate memes with triviality or even absurdity, primarily because internet memes are usually centered around humor. However, the reason humor resonates is that it contains a kernel of truth.
"Memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by being transmitted from one brain to another; this process can broadly be termed imitation. Just as genes are transmitted from one body to another through sperm or eggs and propagate in the gene pool, memes propagate in the meme pool by being transmitted from one brain to another." — Richard Dawkins
Memes are the basic units of cultural transmission. In ancient societies, religious stories and shared histories were often passed down orally from person to person, with each storyteller adding their own perspective or embellishment. This process helped solidify the beliefs and values of the community, embedding them deeply into the cultural structure. Similarly, in modern society, memes transfer cultural fragments or ideas from one mind to another, evolving with each retelling or reinterpretation. Both modes of transmission rely on repetition, resonance, and the subtle shifts that occur as people interpret and share, allowing the essence of ideas to persist and adapt over time. Thus, memes serve as modern narrative tools, distilling complex ideas into simple, easily shareable forms that convey cultural information and spread rapidly across the globe.
Community
Memes are the basic units of cultural transmission, while communities are the ecological environments where memes accumulate value. In other words, memes are important ideas, and communities are the people to whom those ideas matter.
Communities typically exhibit the following notable characteristics:
Shared interests and goals
Communication and interaction
Structure and identity
Knowledge and resource sharing
Collective identity
Communities often begin with a small number of individuals dedicated to disrupting mainstream culture. The open-source software movement originated from a small group of developers, such as those pushing the Linux project, who challenged the dominance of proprietary software and advocated for free access and modifiable code. The punk rock movement began in cities like New York and London, driven by a small group of passionate musicians, artists, and fans who rejected the polished sound of mainstream rock and the consumerism of popular culture. The VaccinateCA organization is composed of a group of tech optimists committed to disseminating vaccine supply information to as many people as possible to combat a government system constrained by logistics.
These communities were initially highly localized, with only a few devoted believers sharing a common vision and collective belief in the malleability of the world. Ultimately, these communities had a profound impact on technology, finance, culture, art, entertainment, and healthcare.
The Linux operating system saves businesses and governments over $60 billion in licensing fees each year, supports over 90% of internet infrastructure, and the Android operating system, built on the Linux kernel, powers about 70% of smartphones worldwide. Punk rock became the soundtrack for political and social uprisings in regions like Eastern Europe (e.g., Poland's Solidarity movement) and Latin America. Punk fans and bands popularized zines, small self-published magazines often focused on music, politics, and alternative lifestyles—becoming grassroots pioneers of modern blogging and independent digital journalism. VaccinateCA provided reliable vaccine supply information for over 1,000 vaccination sites, while Google offered only 127 options—thus improving the efficiency of vaccine distribution.
This is grassroots value creation driven from the bottom up by communities.
Meme
The first use of gold can be traced back to ancient civilizations in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and parts of Eastern Europe. By 4000 BC, people valued gold for its unique beauty, rarity, and malleability, crafting it into jewelry, ceremonial items, and symbols of status. At the same time, copper, silver, and bronze were also popular for making tools and ornaments. So, what makes gold so unique?
Unlike other metals, gold does not tarnish or corrode, giving it enduring properties that symbolize eternity and stability. The longevity of gold means it resists change, obsolescence, and competition, thus having a chance to continue existing in the future. Gold has become a meme with lasting influence because it is important, unique, and resonates with humanity.
Gold is one of the largest asset classes in the world, yet it has no practical utility—no production use, no cash flow, and no business model. Its value exists solely because we collectively assign it value. It is a metal with limited intrinsic utility, but its perceived value stems from its beauty, rarity, and symbolic significance in human culture. It is not a useful commodity like crude oil, nor is it a valuable ownership representation like Apple stock. However, as gold's collective influence continues to grow and more people adopt it, it has become a store of value, potentially even becoming a world reserve currency, perhaps replacing another meme—the US dollar.
One might argue that Bitcoin (BTC) is the earliest "meme coin" in a digital sense—an asset that initially seemed worthless but has now become a global store of value across economies.
Bitcoin has not only sparked a financial revolution but has also ignited a cultural movement. Through decentralized technology, it enables peer-to-peer value exchange, financial autonomy, and the rise of a global grassroots community bound by shared beliefs.
The birth of Bitcoin coincided with the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, a moment of significant importance that tapped into widespread distrust of traditional financial systems and created a new narrative of decentralized value. People buy Bitcoin not because it has potential cash flow, but because of its unique value proposition: it is a store of value, a belief in future appreciation, and, most importantly, a symbol of a new financial ecosystem free from corporate or individual control. It is a trustless asset that can support a trustless economy.
Bitcoin holders feel they are part of something larger—a community, not just financial investors. If you doubt this, search for "Apple tattoo" or "Uber tattoo" and compare it to "Bitcoin tattoo."
Assessing Community Value
Outsiders often overlook the power and value of communities, just as they initially misunderstood Bitcoin. In the traditional financial world, professionals typically rely on analytical methods taught at schools like Wharton—discounted cash flow, comparative analysis, cash flow, and EBITDA. Consequently, companies shape their metrics and reports around these frameworks. This limited perspective is precisely why many initially misunderstood the value of GameStop and why crypto assets like Bitcoin and meme coins continue to be misinterpreted by traditional finance.
Today, the communities created by these "companies" hold immense value. Here, "companies" can refer to anything—startups, publicly traded companies, crypto protocols, KOLs, creative endeavors, or even a subreddit. Over time, a company's valuation depends not only on its profits but also on the value created and accumulated by its community—whether internal or external (e.g., Reddit + GameStop).
In understanding new products and brands, over 86% of internet users trust Reddit and its communities more than advertisements; adults under 45 trust news on social media platforms more than traditional news networks; 63% of Gen Z and millennials trust influencers more than brands. Gen Z members spend an average of 8.5 hours online daily, with 55% using smartphones for over 5 hours each day, and Americans send an average of 94 text messages daily.
The TikTok book community has driven bestsellers in the publishing industry, with some books seeing sales increase by 1,000% after gaining recognition in the community. The Reddit r/WallStreetBets community was able to push GameStop's stock price from under $20 to over $300 in just a few days. Following a collaboration, Bud Light's sales dropped by 26%, and Anheuser-Busch's stock price fell by 20%, resulting in a market value loss of $26 billion—all caused by its conservative community.
Communities cannot be accurately predicted by traditional financial assessment frameworks because their significance and impact are dynamic, often growing, shrinking, and transforming. They cannot simply be incorporated into the tables and lists of investment prospectuses or financial models.
Financial companies often overlook the enduring power of communities, viewing them as anomalies, underestimating their influence, and dismissing them as mere frivolous activities.
We believe that as the speed of interconnectedness increases and online interactions continue to evolve, communities will continue to grow and exert greater influence. The proliferation of digital platforms has made it easier than ever for individuals to find and connect with like-minded groups, breaking down the geographical and social barriers that once limited community formation.
Meme Coins: Vehicles of Community Ownership
Meme coins are the perfect tool for measuring community value. They are a tokenized expression of culture.
Similar to social networks, the value of meme coins comes from the communities they gather. However, they represent a fundamental shift in how value is distributed and controlled. Unlike platforms like Instagram or Facebook, where the value generated by user activity (content creation, interaction, and data) is primarily captured by the platform and its shareholders, meme coins disrupt this model, allowing users to be both creators and owners of network value.
Bonk was distributed to users through airdrops and quickly became the preferred meme coin on Solana. The initial recipients were those who continued to contribute to existing communities, protocols, and core infrastructure after the collapse of FTX. Bonk became a tokenized symbol of resilience in the face of adversity, and the enthusiasm of the initial recipients quickly spread to a broader user base, driving up Bonk's value and creating wealth within the ecosystem. This wealth remained within the community, supporting the development of projects like Bonkbot, bringing immense value to Solana, its product users, and the Bonk token itself.
This is grassroots value creation—bottom-up, community-driven, with no external investors, only the human capital within the community creating value for the community.
As the digitalization of global assets progresses, more memes can be monetized, manufactured, and spontaneously created—extending the concept of "meme" to anything of social significance and transforming it into a tool for community monetization through immutable smart contracts.
The Future
The future will resemble a continuation of the past, with technology continually evolving, cities expanding, and culture adapting to the tools and media of the times. However, machines cannot take away the right to produce memes. Culture—including its creation, dissemination, and persistence—cannot be outsourced to large floating-point matrix operations (referring to the technique of performing matrix operations using floating-point numbers). While machines may generate products that appear to be memes—hollow snapshots of familiar ideas optimized by algorithms, mass-produced for instant attention—they will lack the deeper resonance and transformative power of true memes.
Throughout history, culture has always been the result of collective effort, and memes are the smallest units of cultural transmission, encoding the ideas and values of their time. Memes are not merely fragments of media; they are carriers of shared meaning. The vitality of memes comes from being accepted, not created. Their birth is not an isolated act of creation but a chemical reaction woven from mutual understanding, humor, and emotion.
On Loisaida Avenue in Manhattan, there is a small Puerto Rican restaurant called Rinconcito. There are no reservations, no reward programs, no point systems, or electronic membership cards. They do not ask for your email address to send targeted ads, and there are almost no contact methods to reach them. You won’t see them compromising to cater to some outrageous trend on TikTok, nor will they bottle their self-patented sauces and sell them to the masses.
They trade in culture, with honest people cooking food with care at fair prices—this has been the case for decades. In every community, this approach resonates deeply, and people recognize: this is how life should be. And that is their secret ingredient—culture, waiting for the right price.
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