The Next Wave of Memecoins | Jacek Trociński | ETHWarsaw [4]

Okay, very cool. Nice to see everybody here. I am Yasuk. I am the founder of the memecoin called Djen. Uh maybe some of you have heard of it.

It is one of the biggest meme coins in the world. I think it's top 400 right now on Coin Market Cap. Um we went from 0 or $5,000 that I put into the initial liquidity pool. Um up to $1.7 billion market cap.

um at sort of like the main at sort of the main peak. Um now we sort of fallen. We had 2024 which was a pretty big meme cycle and now we're about 114 million market cap which is a pretty big achievement. If somebody had told me a year and a half ago that I'd be running a company or a business or a meme worth $100 million, I would have said you're crazy. So, um, yes, uh, today I'm going to be talking about memes, memecoins, ecosystems, and, uh, I'll be sort of talking about my experience, what I've learned over the last year and a half, and where I think memecoins are sort of going and why they're relevant and important.

Um, okay. So, the the the the name of the talk was essentially the next wave of meme coins. Um, and I think we all sort of know what what a meme is, but um, if we don't, I'll sort of go through it and I kind of want to dissect, you know, what is this meme? Uh, intuitively, we all sort of know what a meme is. What is a meme coin?

So, let's sort of start off with this idea. Um, a meme essentially is this sort of cultural idea that spreads virally. And I think intuitively we all sort of know the gifts and the images um that are spread around, but I think it's worth sort of dissecting what makes a meme really great. And so one of the um hallmarks of a meme for me, at least what I believe in is that it has to be remixable. So obviously you have like a meme um image and then you have different text and you fill it out and you try to spread a propaganda idea um whatever it is.

Um they also form a sense of community and that's something very important especially now as we're going more from communities in the real life to more communities in the virtual um world. Uh memecoins are this sort of new community and I think social networks were sort of the first online communities. Uh before that we had forums and things like that and obviously Facebook is valued at like $1.8 trillion or whatever it is right now. It's pretty ridiculous.

um uh in a good way. In a good way and I think uh memes and meme coins are essentially uh uh this new social network that we're building on the blockchain. Um another thing that's really important to memes is they have to be organic. And so one of the things that people usually talk about is that they think that they can manufacture a meme that somehow this is uh something that you can cultivate on your own. I personally don't believe in that.

I think a great meme is something that happens naturally from the bottom up. And the way I think about this is sometimes um like with music or with like a song, there are sometime tracks from an artist that you've never heard of. Every artist that's big had to have their one hit that sort of like elevated them to the top. Um and usually that track has this organic appeal to like a really big mass audience. Um and that's something you can't really manufacture.

if you could manufacture it, um Warner Brothers and Sony and everybody else would basically be doing that. Um you can't. And even artists, um some of the greatest artists who have like one great hit, of course they'll try and create another great hit, but they don't always succeed. And so you have one hit wonders. Um and the same thing is with memes.

You can try to manufacture it and of course marketing agencies try to do this. Um and sometimes they themselves are really surprised that hey this ad went viral that this ad um was a success. I remember in the US when I was growing up there was a Verizon ad um where this guy was walking around and he was asking hey can you hear me now? Can you hear me now? He was on a ship somewhere.

Can you hear me now? And as kids we would mimic that. The ad became really really viral. Um and I don't think Verizon intended for that but it was a huge huge success. Um, so you cannot fabricate this.

You can have huge amounts of distribution and of course that helps. If you're a big artist in the music industry, you have lots of distribution. You can ride the wave. Um, but you can't create the initial hit. And so being organic is super important.

Um, so these are sort of the elements that I've sort of observed and sort of picked apart. Um, a memecoin of course is sort of an extension of the meme. Um, some examples that we all know are Doge, uh, a couple billion dollar market cap, SHIB, Bon, Pangu, and DGEN is on the list as well. Um, they are driven by these community narratives and not so much by technical fundamentals. And so, essentially, uh, I think one of the bigger growth drivers for memecoins is they're you can also sort of grow and and and and look at certain metrics.

And I think those metrics are usually um is the meme spreading, how many impressions is it getting? Um how many like is the social community growing? Um and of course this this whole memecoin is essentially um a meme um with liquidity attached to it. Okay, so why does this even matter? Why are we even talking about memecoins?

Uh you know, we're here at ETH Warsaw. People are creating these super ambitious projects and gigabrain chats everywhere. uh what what is the point of this whole memecoin thing? Is this just some speculative bubble uh that makes no sense? Is this just air?

People come up to me at the booth and they just don't understand uh uh meme coins often. They they think this is uh some ridiculous thing to be honest. Um but it's not. Uh memecoins are really onboarding millions of people on chain. Um the volumes of meme coins which we'll go into the next slide are really really high.

um uh like the biggest exchanges in the world are essentially listing meme coins because they have retail appeal um where something like unis swap or a protocol is more geared toward like a VC investor, a sophisticated investor um where retail doesn't really understand those products. They don't know how to value them. They don't really care. Um and they do care about memes. They understand memes and they're willing to buy them and they want to join the community.

Uh they want to be a part of something. They want to believe in something. Um and like I said uh in this day and age maybe good or bad we are going into more virtual communities. We are spending more time online. We're moving away from religion um and from other sort of uh let's say legacy institutions and now people are trying to find new ways to substitute what those institutions had to offer.

Uh some things like belief, some things like community um etc etc. And now we're finding new ways to sort of replicate that um or at least trying to in some sort of way. And and uh meme coins are certainly like a social um um aspect that they give to people. And uh of course they're also like in entertainment. There's entertainment value in memecoins.

Um people are now the new generation is now slowly moving away from legacy media. They're moving to YouTube. They're moving to Tik Tok. They're moving to Discord. um they're finding new ways of entertaining themselves and um to be honest meme coins are also a form of that sort of entertainment.

There's a lot of animations, there's a lot of funny things, but also the speculative gambling aspect is a part of that and DGEN embodies that uh that wholly. Um especially in Asian countries like Korea, we're seeing a lot of gambling happen. These people like to go to casinos. My wife uh watches a Polish um lady who now lives in Korea. He she has a Korean uh husband and what he does after a really long day of work is they work really long over there 10 12 hours he comes home and he trades meme coins and other tokens.

Uh these are these are things that people like to do to basically um spend their time. Um we are moving away in my opinion uh from pure speculation meme coins like Doge and SH uh ENU and these kind of meme coins into uh memecoins that offer their communities a little bit more. So essentially these meme coins are now offering ecosystems that you can be a part of. They're offering toys. They're offering intellectual property avenues uh that they're sort of um branding and and monetizing.

Um, and you can kind of think of it like influencers of the past and of the present. Um, Paris Hilton or Kim Kardashian or something. They have uh a ton of metrics online. They have a ton of following. They are in themselves a meme.

Donald Trump is a meme. Elon Musk is a meme. Uh, you have to be a meme in the modern world to basically exist. Uh, and to and to have some sort of success. And essentially um I think we're starting to see people are realizing this and they're trying to build like teams around uh these memes.

And so one of the things that I certain certainly believe in is that somebody's going to flip Dogecoin at some point. Um and they're going to have a team around it. They're going to build an ecosystem around it. There's some people that believe that ETH is going to flip uh Bitcoin. Uh which is probably possible.

We're here at ETH Warsaw, so I think there's a lot of maxis. Uh, but I personally believe that somebody's going to flip Doge. Um, one of the biggest reasons is that Elon Musk was one of the biggest Kos for Dogecoin, but Dogecoin at the moment doesn't really have a team behind it. The team has sort of drifted apart. Um, they've taken profits and they're not really actively developing the project.

So, I think teams like Pudgy Penguin, DGEN, uh, Bonk, uh, etc. will probably take their place. Um, looking sort of at the memecoin volumes, uh, Doge alone can do up to 40 billion in daily volume. Obviously, it depends on the season and and what sort of, uh, cycle we're in. Um, this is more or less just to kind of show that uh, the volumes and the interest is quite big.

Uh in March 2024, we saw memecoin spot volume at 13 billion uh over like a 7-day average, surpassing Ethereum, Salana, uh some of the biggest, let's say, protocol or um utility tokens. Uh we also see that Robin Hood is listing quite a bit of meme coins. Uh Robin Hood being sort of the de facto exchange for retail in the US. uh their volumes are absolutely enormous and and they're very authentic volumes. They're not institutional traders.

They're not API traders or bots or u arbitrage traders. Um of course, I'm sure there's some of that going on as well in the background uh with market making and so on, but um these are more or less real retail traders um trading tokens. And what kind of tokens do they like to trade? They like to trade meme coins um because these are things that they understand fundamentally. whereas unis swap u which I love and and other protocols are a little bit less understandable to them although we are building more consumer apps and so pumpf fun is something that more people understand um poly market doesn't have a token but that's something that people might understand and trade um and Robin Hood is building a cool mix of different tokens but uh I would say maybe I'm not sure the stats but I wouldn't be surprised if 50% of them were memes um and then we can kind of talk about different types of meme coins and we've definitely seen pumpf fun and the rise of token launchers this year uh which has been kind of interesting to see and essentially um we have this idea of belief is greater than utility with memes um community conviction drives value essentially uh people have a mission statement in memecoins djen has den to $1 which we borrowed from the dogecoin community uh dogecoin is actively trying to get to $1 as well there.

Um, and we kind of have these two archetypes. We have sort of like the trench meme coins, the pump dot funds. They're usually known as sort of like these extractive memes. Um, but really one of the things that makes a meme super super important is that it has to maintain relevance. And so you have to have this organic sort of uh element to it, but you also need to maintain relevance.

And so we know that relevance sort of dies over time. Uh, we see that all the time. And we see that with like even Elon Musk's popularity was very very high at some point in time. It's still very high, but it's sort of fading and and at some point I'm I wouldn't be surprised if someone sort of takes his place and becomes the new meme um genius that we all sort of uh flock to. Uh Tesla, we also see this sort of in meme stocks.

Uh people are not really valuing companies at fundamental levels. They're valuing them for their meme value. So AMC, GameStop, and a lot of other uh stocks sort of had the same phenomenon where people are sort of exploring the meme. They like the company. Uh they like eating popcorn at a AMC.

They they remember their childhood there and so that's why they're buying uh the stock and the stocks valuations are not driven by any fundamentals. But for the trench meme coins, these have very low relevance uh time frames. So essentially uh somebody says something today, we create a meme coin about it and we try to spread it. However, um it's very difficult to create a memecoin that has a long lifespan that can be multiple cycle memecoin like doge or ship. Uh DGEN has that.

It represents um the movement in crypto of dgens trading NFTts and trading all kinds of other things. Um but that is something it's almost like a song. We can go back to sort of the music analogy. um it's really hard to build a hit that can stay span years yet alone decades. And so you have people like the Beatles and Bonjovi and and certain bands that are able to do that.

However, that's very very rare. And with memecoins, it's sort of the same thing. So when you're investing, when you're thinking of buying a memecoin, these are sort of the things that I would think about like is it an organic bottom up community? Um is it going to be relevant 5 years down the line? Is there a team building it uh actively?

um who are the sort of the Koss and other people and is there like um sort of a remixable element to all of this where we have the hat we put the hat on different things which sort of virally drives this meme to to sort of spread um and that's sort of the cult memecoin and so there are very few cult meme coins um and and DJ is certainly one of them Pangu is one of them and we can sort of talk about Pudgy Penguins uh one of the greatest memes of all times one of the greatest ecosystems of all times. It was just naturally a very very great uh NFT project, an amazing penguin. Um it just sort of stood out. Uh was this fabricated? No, I don't think so.

I think it was organically very great. Um and obviously the NFT sort of crash destroyed the market cap for them. Um and then we had Luca Nets who bought the project for uh 2.5 million I believe and and now he's built it into Pangu is a $2 billion um valuation market cap uh token. The NFT I'm not exactly sure.

Um but we don't value Pudgy Penguin based off the toys they're selling because they are selling um toys in Amazon on Walgreens on Walmart. Um, I believe these stats might be incorrect cuz I sort of took them uh pretty quickly, but we have about a million plushies sold and 10 million plus toys sold. Uh, for a toy company, is Pudgy Penguins a toy company? No, they're not a toy company. They're also selling recently Pokemon style cards um in 7-Elevens in Japan.

They're creating a movie um which is going to be probably by one of the biggest Hollywood studios, maybe Pixar or somebody like that, maybe Walt Disney. So, they're creating a Pudgy Penguins movie. They're also going to create a fund together probably with um I don't know who, but some kind of fund that's going to be tradable on Wall Street. So, they they are spreading the token and the meme as far as possible. And I wouldn't be surprised if they flipped Dogecoin um in the next few years.

Uh and and I think this is a really great model of a business. They're focusing on their intellectual property, licensing, so forth and so on. Um, but again, nobody values them as a toy company. They don't produce toys. They don't produce Pokemon cards.

They don't have warehouses. They don't have distribution. Um, what they do have is a really, really great brand. They have virality. They have remixability.

And they have def essentially become the de facto um mascot of crypto. Uh, so they're doing a fantastic job. Uh, Bon is sort of another one. um they do several hundred million uh of volume every day. I don't remember the market cap here.

Um we see that Bonk really sort of kicked off the Salana ecosystem. They air dropped their tokens to a lot of builders um back when Salana was sort of in the dumps. They weren't doing so great um and people weren't feeling great about uh Salana and and they sort of helped change that and and and also give money to people. Um, Salana in general is a very great meme ecosystem and they're really great at onboarding retail and and it is in part due to or in large part due to the meme coins. Um, so they've had different sort of things.

I'm not an expert on the Bonk ecosystem, but they recently had Bonk.f fun, which I didn't put up here, but they flipped Pump. Fun. And I think a lot of people saw that uh for a short while and they sort of showed the power uh of the meme and they were able to make u several million dollars off of that if not several tens of millions. Um they also have the Bonba, they have Bonk Swap, Bonk Live, Bonk Bets, all sort of things.

They're um acquiring different companies. Um they're essentially building a team and a business. Um and I wouldn't be surprised if Bonk is also going to stay around for a really really really long time. Um and that sort of brings us to DGEN. Uh I need to shill our token here as well.

Uh what are we sort of doing at DGEN? Um this is sort of like quickly written down, but I can sort of describe um our vision um for the future. DJ essentially started off on Farcaster. We aird dropped $50 million worth of tokens uh in our AirDrop 2 launch phase. Uh two caster people, two content creators.

We've we created this meta of um basically earn money for posting content which now Zora has sort of taken on uh Coinbase wallet has taken on and they're sort of doing that in their base app. Um we launched with that idea and and I'm really happy to see it spreading further because I do believe that content creators should be getting paid. Um and obviously web two platforms are going in that direction too. We have Reddit and YouTube and all kinds of other places where content creators can already create um earn money. Um but for DJ, we started organically.

Um it blew up. I never thought DJ was going to reach the market cap it did. Um fortunately um we've been around now for a year and a half, almost two years. And yeah, we're remixable. We have the hat.

We put the hat in different places. We're organic. We're bottom up. um built by the community. The community created the hat, the logo, the lore and we're also building an ecosystem which is something that you need to do to differentiate yourself today.

Um we have the DJ chain which has been a little bit deprioritized. We're going to work on marketing and fixing that and making it even even bigger ecosystem. We also have the DJ app which is launching end of October. Uh this is going to be a Farcaster client. Coinbase wallet is also building a Farcaster client.

So we're seeing um is sort of like renewed interest in Farcaster, this decentralized social network. Um I'm not sure if these are going to be the biggest growth drivers for us um in sort of the short to medium term, but we are also thinking about IP going down the Pudgy Penguins route. Um licensing the hat, we have a trademark on DGEN. Um and so we are thinking about different licenses and partnerships and places that we can sort of spread the hat both in real life and virtually. Um, and aside for that, it's just a really great ticker.

It represents a really great movement in crypto. Um, and I'm really proud of what we've built so far, and I think it's up only from here, but that's not financial advice. Um, aside from that, uh, yeah, I think I sort of touched on memes sort of becoming this, uh, emerging business model. I think you're going to see a lot of uh companies essentially driven by meme marketing. So you might see Coca-Cola or somebody else I think partnering with some of these companies in the future.

Um and probably also they're probably already doing a lot of things with memes that I don't even know about. I'm not a marketing person. Um but I'm sure that memes are becoming very very essential to getting the word out. um whether that's ideas, whether that's brands, whether that's um propaganda, whatever you're trying to spread, you need to spread it through memes um as one of your marketing strategies. Um and of course IP licensing, that's something I talked about.

Uh building out the intellectual property, building out um like onchain economics and for like the real crypto people. Um that's sort of an essential thing uh a part of all of this. Um, gaming, that's another thing that people are getting into. Uh, and Pudgy World or Pudgy Party, I think is what they called it. Uh, just launched last week, which I think is also really great.

And of course, retail listings. Retail loves to trade memes, uh, more than anything else. Um, yeah, the big picture, uh, memes are essentially creating businesses now. They're going to be legit. This is no longer a sort of air speculative nonsense that people ask you what the hell is this memecoin?

What I don't understand where the value is being driven. Um I think at this point uh everybody sort of will understand that no memes are driving community. They're driving entertainment. They're creating business and they are selling their IP um and licensing and and making money from that. And uh as always the hat stays on.

Uh that is our uh theme and that is our slogan at DGEN. Our mission is to get DGEN to $1 and uh we're on our way there and we want to become one of the biggest meme coins in the world. I think we're on number 400 something place on Coin Market Cap. Um I think we can get up to the top 100 and the top 10 and eventually maybe even flip Pudgy Penguins. Uh that is our goal.

That is our mission. Um, I will not stop until we uh uh flip every memecoin out in the in the world and we will do that. Um, I am confident of that. So, thank you for coming here and if you have any uh questions, uh, we have 3 minutes. Um, feel free to ask them.

If not, uh, check out DJ.

Yeah. Thanks a lot. Any questions? Oh, there's one.

All right. So, I'm guessing everyone here heard about the pumped up fund, right? Everyone got that.

Y

and obviously it onboarded a lot of people. But what a lot of my friends which are not in crypto remember about that is the kid who rugged people while streaming himself. What are your thoughts on pumpf fun? Yeah, with pump.f fun I sort of lump it into like I I maybe I shouldn't do this, but I also think Zora is sort of in the same um I don't know framework or in the same sort of area where you're essentially launching tokens.

Um here you sort of have fan tokens, creator tokens. Here you sort of have these short-term meme coins. Yes, a lot of liquidity you could think about as being drained. Um is it being drained? I don't know the exact stats uh of how this is working.

Uh what I do know that is with pump.f fun 0.002% of the users on there are driving like 90% of the volume. So essentially you have a few whales maybe even up to 10, I don't know, uh driving like the 100% of the volume. And that's why you saw bunk.

f fun uh was was flipping uh pump.f fun in the matter of like a day. Uh because you just need 10 people to basically um go to the other place. Is it a bad thing? Um, I don't know.

I think these memes are probably not the thing that I would personally invest in or recommend people invest in. I think it's a fun speculative thing to do if you know that that's what it is. It's kind of like going to the casino, throwing a couple chips and and sort of knowing that, hey, this is going to be gone. I don't think I think that DeFi natives really really like pump fun and crypto people. However, I don't think retail, which is the really the mass audience, enjoys pumpf fun.

most retail people that I know and from what I've seen and from what I've sort of heard in the stats is they sort of want to buy and hold. So retail uh my mom, my wife, um people that I know outside of crypto, they don't want to be actively trading every day. They don't want to make this their day job. That's a very small subset of people in the world. Retail, they want to buy something they believe in.

They want to find a cool meme. They want to buy and hold it for a couple weeks, a couple months, maybe a couple years, and then they want to sell it. um they don't want to be actively trading it um anywhere. And so I think the bigger market is is the retail clients. Um and so pumpf fun I think has its appeal.

I also heard from somebody who was at A16Z that I think their cohort of users uh they need a new cohort of users every two weeks or so because people get burnt out. And so I think it's like with Las Vegas, you can go to Vegas once every year, once every 5 years. You're not going to hang out there every day. If you do, then you have probably a problem with gambling. But uh yeah, I think we have time for one more question maybe.

Yep. I just want to ask Danilo, the next speaker, to go to the tech guys.

Yeah, I need to run.

So I found this Den bank note. Is it uh redeemable for Digen tokens or something?

It's not redeemable, but that's the future currency, man. So you have you have the future currency of the world. Um it's not redeemable. We don't have an idea of what to do with that Djun dollar but it is limited. So uh there is Victor here from Flock.

They created the logo for DJ and they also produced those in 2024 for Farcon. Um and those are the last ones. I don't have any more. And so at some point in the future I think we'll do something with I just don't know what.