The Importance Of Meme Coins In The Blockchain Ecosystems

June 9, 2024 - Around 12 mins mins to read

Meme coins, initially created as humorous or satirical digital currencies, have evolved into significant financial entities. Their recent rise has caused blockchain platforms to race to develop meme ecosystems. Today, let’s learn with Coincu about the importance and potential of meme coins in blockchain ecosystems.

The Importance Of Meme Coins In The Blockchain Ecosystems 12

Table Of Contents

Background on the Development of Meme Coins on Blockchain Ecosystems
Solana is the Leading Ecosystem in the Use of Meme Coins
Base Also Shows Many Positive Signs With Meme Coin
Memecoin on TON Explodes
Aptos Also Has Its Own Meme Coin Ecosystem
Conclusion

Background on the Development of Meme Coins on Blockchain Ecosystems

Many blockchains are using meme coins to draw investors into their ecosystems; the two most well-known and successful examples are Solana and Base. On the other hand, several networks, like Ton and Aptos, have also used this strategy without much success.

It appears that big funds in the sector are aware of and interested in meme coins because DWF Labs CEO Andrey Grachev recently disclosed plans to invest in them.

In addition, Memecoin Rush, a $1 million liquidity mining incentive program designed to spark the community coin ecosystem on the Avalanche (AVAX) blockchain, has entered its first phase by the Avalanche Foundation.

The plan, which was revealed in a blog post, will begin with two well-known Avalanche native platforms, SteakHut and Trader Joe, in order to encourage trade and supply liquidity for the community of tokens chosen.

The aforementioned favorable aspects indicate the direction that meme coins on blockchains should take and their potential for expansion in the near future.

Solana is the Leading Ecosystem in the Use of Meme Coins

Solana is an essential player in the meme currency capital-raising game. Meme coin played a significant role in the Solana ecosystem’s remarkable comeback in the late Q3–early Q4 of 2023 and Q1 of 2024.

How did Solana Use Memecoin to Develop Its Ecosystem?

The Rise of Bonk

Bonk started the Solana meme coin wave. Although Bonk was born near the end of 2022, the community paid him little mind. The price of the BONK coin did not start to trend upward until the end of November 2023.

On January 4, 2023, Bonk—the first Doge-meme coin for Solana—was airdropped to the Solana community by a group of mysterious developers known as “The Bonk Squad.” For the Solana community, the Bonk airdrop event was a momentous occasion. The Solana community received 100 billion BONK tokens in total as a result of the airdrop. Additionally, this brought the Solana ecosystem back into focus following the demise of FTX and a year-long decline in 2022.

After a calm period, the price of BONK increased from $0.0000002/BONK on January 1, 2023, to $0.000004/BONK on January 5, 2023, reviving the Solana ecosystem. Additionally, this represented the first significant achievement for the pricing of SOL and the ecosystem as a whole in 2023.

Nevertheless, BONK’s price was swiftly and brutally dropped in a short period of time. Despite the fact that the Bonk airdrop brought attention to the Solana ecosystem, Bonk was merely a meme coin with no apparent purpose, and users kept hoarding coins during the downtrend when market capital was scarce, therefore the attention was short-lived.

Following over a year of Sideways, on November 6, 2023, BONK’s price began to rise steadily from the $0.0000007/BONK mark. On March 5, 2024, it reached its ATH, trading at $0.00004. Because of Bitcoin’s ascent, money from the spot Bitcoin ETF revivified the entire market and enabled a number of meme coins to consistently break through an all-time high. In turn, Coinbase and Binance listed BONK, highlighting the Solana ecosystem.

Dogwifhat and the Wave of New Memes

If Bonk drew the community’s attention to the meme coin on Solana, then WIF – dogwifhat is the next meme coin that kept the attention lasting. Launched on 12/13/2023, coincidentally, Bonk was having a strong increase from the beginning of November after a long sideway year and reached an ATH in the short term on 12/15/2023.

The price of WIF also had nearly a 100-fold growth from $0.0047 on 12/13/2023 to $0.32 on 12/22/2023. This attracted users to bring money to the Solana ecosystem to continue trading, exchanging, and looking for meme coins.

With the emergence of BONK and WIF, activities on the Solana network have had significant changes after more than a year of silence in the face of a series of FUD news and the harshness of the crypto winter.

When BONK and WIF successively hit ATH early and late in March, the appearance of BOME on 3/14/2024 quickly achieved a capitalization of $1 billion just 3 days after its launch and was listed on Binance, making meme coin on Solana hotter than ever.

The emergence of these meme coins is timely, as old meme coins have just hit ATH, and new meme coins have continued and further fueled the madness of meme coins on Solana.

Positive Trading Volume

March is also the month when Solana’s transaction volume reached a record high, and the price of SOL also returned to the $200 mark in mid-March and early April.

In March, the Solana ecosystem also witnessed the emergence of Popcat, which had twice the capitalization of over $300 million. Slerf, with the hot trend of pre-sale, quickly reached a capitalization of $551 million. March 28 is also the time when WEN of wenwencoin reached an ATH with a price of $0.00048 after Airdropping to the Solana community in January. In addition, there is MEW – cat in a dogs world launched on March 26 and quickly approached $848 million in capitalization.

With a large number of meme coins, and many meme coins quickly reaching high capitalization milestones, a huge amount of money has been poured into the Solana ecosystem. The trading volume on DEX in the Solana ecosystem compared to other ecosystems continuously reached high levels, especially in March.

Solana’s TVL in January was $1.4 blillion and gradually increased to $2.4 blillion by the end of February. But only in March did this number go from $2.4 blillion to nearly $4.9 blillion with a performance of over 100%, somewhat reflecting the impact of Memecoin. Although this figure is also influenced by the airdrop hunting money flow, with many opportunities to make money from Memecoin in March, the TVL of the ecosystem has grown very well.

The price of SOL also increased from $108 on February 28 to $208 on March 18, reflecting the demand to buy SOL to participate in trading meme coins on DEX with the MEME/SOL pair. Clearly, meme coins bring many benefits to ecosystems, not only with dApps but also with the price of the ecosystem’s token.

Community FOMO Airdrops

The wave of FOMO airdrops on projects in the Solana ecosystem, amplified by the meme coin wave, has created a very successful Q1 for the whole Solana ecosystem in general. Meme coin assumes the role of attracting money flow from other ecosystems, while DeFi protocols that have not released tokens, like Kamino, Meteora, Jupiter, MarginFi, and NFT trading platforms, will be tasked with retaining money flow thanks to the airdrop and Incentive programs.

Looking at the timeline of airdrop projects on Solana, combined with the emergence of meme coins in this period, makes us admire the way the Solana Foundation builds an ecosystem. They know how to attract users to the ecosystem, do marketing, and help money flow to stay with the ecosystem, thereby promoting all projects to grow. This is further amplified by the overall market growth, with Bitcoin leading the way, making this campaign even more effective.

However, at this time, the meme coin on Solana has cooled down compared to March and April. However, looking at the pairs with large volumes on DEX, we can easily see that up to 5/11 pairs are related to meme coins. It shows us how attractive the price trend of meme coins is, and they still have positive impacts even when FOMO time has passed.

Solana has used meme coin and created a buzz for the entire ecosystem, thereby making Solana excel more than any ecosystem in Q1. So, with Solana’s success, will other ecosystems follow and apply? Let’s analyze more about other ecosystems that have also used meme coins to see how effective it is.

Base Also Shows Many Positive Signs With Meme Coin

Another ecosystem that has achieved impressive statistics in using meme coins is Base, a layer 2 on Ethereum.

Base is an ecosystem with quality projects in the SocialFi sector, notably Farcaster and Friend.tech. Friend.tech has launched version 2 and also conducted an airdrop for users; however, this event did not receive much attention from the community, contrary to the early days of the project when there were more than 500,000 users in the first few days of launch.

Besides SocialFi, in 2024, the meme coin was seen as another tool that helped Base attract investors’ funds. DEGEN with Degenchain is the first name that made activities on the Base ecosystem lively. The price of DEGEN increased from $0.0017 on March 14 to an ATH at $0.056 on April 1. On the evening of March 28, Degen also announced the launch of Layer 3 built on Base, the price of DEGEN at that time also increased by more than 2000% within 30 days.

The volume and user numbers on DEX in the Base ecosystem simultaneously reached ATH in March. In addition to DEGEN, the Base ecosystem also has many other notable meme coins such as $mfer, ROOST, BRETT, and NORMIE.

The period from mid-March to mid-May was when Aerodrome – Top 1 DEX on Base deployed Incentive with a very attractive APR for all meme coins, causing the project’s TVL to increase from $150 million at the end of February to $796 million at the end of April. The total TVL of the entire Base ecosystem also increased from $465 million at the end of February to over $1.5 billion on May 18.

In addition to impacting the general activities of the ecosystem, the emergence of Degen also brought other positive impacts to SocialFi applications, and the biggest beneficiary was Farcaster. Anyone who uses Farcaster is all too familiar with being able to tip DEGEN to content creators.

Degen launched various airdrop campaigns divided into different seasons with the method being earning Points on Farcaster by receiving DEGEN tips from others. With this activity, the user numbers and specific actions like Cast, Reactions on Farcaster have become lively thanks to the influx of people onto the platform to participate in hunting airdrops from Degen.

In season 1, the amount of DEGEN airdropped to users at one point had a value exceeding the figure of $1000 per account. With the use of meme coin, Base has also brought many more positive things to the ecosystem, and Base’s revenue has also increased thanks to the bustling on-chain activities.

Memecoin on TON Explodes

Another ecosystem joining the meme coin trend is Ton. The meme coin movement on Ton was started by Ton Fish, considered the first meme coin on Ton. Launched in mid-January 2024, however, it wasn’t until late February that FISH’s price experienced significant growth and marked a growth milestone of more than 100 times when it reached its ATH on March 21, 2024. Along with the frenzy of meme coins on Solana and Base, meme coins on Ton became a destination for users.

Trading meme coin on Ton by users buying TON and then using TON to trade on Stone.Fi has led to a significant growth spurt in TON’s price. Other prominent meme coins in the Ton ecosystem include RENO, TONK, MMM, and SHIT, which also have high trading volumes on Ton, but only FISH has made a significant impact.

However, looking at the trading volume on Ton’s DEXes recently, the pairs with the highest volumes are mostly meme coin pairs. The project’s TVL also increased in April and May; however, the components related to DeFi in the Ton ecosystem are still not very prominent.

Aptos Also Has Its Own Meme Coin Ecosystem

Aptos is also an ecosystem with directions quite similar to Solana. Although it has not exploded like Solana, the appearance of meme coins on Aptos has made this ecosystem more bustling.

First, GUI airdropped to the owners of Aptos Monkeys, AptoRobos, Aptomingos, Mavrik, Spooks, Bruh Bears NFT sets, and eligible users who interacted on applications such as Pancakeswap, Thala, Liquidswap, Amnis Finance, Aries Markets, Kana Labs, Merkle Trade. The price of GUI also had impressive growth, increasing from $0.000007 on December 28, 2023, to $0.00008 on March 21, 2024.

CHEWY and SHRIMP launched and airdropped to users in the phase of March 2024. UPTOS also conducted an airdrop for users in April 2024 And especially, UPTOS is the first meme project to receive a Grant from the Aptos Foundation! Besides, many other notable meme coins exist on Aptos, such as MAU, DOODOO, CRED, and APTS.

Although there are many meme coins, the impact of these coins has not been significant on the overall activity of the Aptos ecosystem. This is still the phase where projects on Aptos are being built. In the future, when the projects become more tightly linked, it may be an appropriate time for meme coins on Aptos to explode more strongly, thereby drawing attention to applications ready to retain users.

Conclusion

The rapid increase in the value of meme coins underlines their growing popularity and reception in the crypto market. As such, with their continuous popularity, these coins are also piquing the interest of serious investors, further blurring the lines between memes and mainstream cryptocurrencies.

But what’s worth noting here is that this meteoric rise in value comes with a corresponding increase in volatility and risk. This is typical for all cryptocurrencies; therefore, potential investors are advised to be prudent and conduct in-depth research while investing in meme coins.

DISCLAIMER: The information on this website is provided as general market commentary and does not constitute investment advice. We encourage you to do your own research before investing.

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