Memecoins harness cultural attention; CultureFi holds future potential.
By Christopher Liquin, CEO and Founder of Cupcake; Paul Hsu, Founder and CEO of Decasonic
Memecoins are dead, long live memecoins
In 2024, there’s always another memecoin. Platforms like Pump.Fun are generating over $1M per month, making it effortless to launch new memecoins. Jupiter, Raydium, Photon, and Phantom support effortless trading across the $50B+ memecoin market. The next wave of innovation appears to be platforms made for effortless shorting of memecoins (e.g. Save’s Dumpy.fun). It’s never been easier to launch, buy, sell, or short your favorite meme.
Yet it’s never been harder to sustain cultural attention. It’s never been harder to build sustainable engagement and businesses around this cycle’s new innovations. The genie is certainly out of the bottle on memecoins, but as with past cycles (does anyone remember NFTs or ICOs?), 99% of them will go to zero in today’s market structure.
What’s the value and opportunity in culture?
Cultural attention is a highly valuable intangible asset. Brand managers across the Fortune 1,000 crave “cultural relevance,” that silver bullet in nailing the zeitgeist, catching lightning in a bottle. When a brand, a product, or a memecoin nails the meta and finds itself in the slipstream of culture, you get Ocean Spray’s Cranberry Juice TikTok phenomenon, you get Wordle or BeReal’s viral spread, you get $POPCAT, $BONK, or the long list of other coins with their day in the sun.
The catalyst is always a niche group of passionate, high-engagement evangelists. Wordle had an early user base of only 300K, but, in its glory days, it felt like it was literally everywhere online because this passionate group of superusers wanted to share, flex their scores, and compete with their friends. As a crypto parallel, $WIF, the current leader of Solana memecoins with a market cap of $2.5B, only has 170K holders.
Solana, as an ecosystem, is a network of incredibly passionate, global superusers. It has a native token, SOL, which serves to align incentives around network growth. It has all the ingredients of mainstream cultural relevance and virality. But, with memecoins as the only “killer consumer app,” it is a victim of its own success. Each memecoin’s rise and fall serves to fracture and fragment the potential network-wide cultural reach. No sustained platform exists to capture the consumer escape velocity potential. As a network of memecoins, it’s an entire ecosystem built around “here today, gone tomorrow.”
According to a report by Newzoo’s report, the global gamification market is expected to reach $30.7 billion by 2025, driven by the increasing integration of gaming elements into social media platforms. We believe the time to invest in CultureFi is now. In this bull cycle, we’re seeing a shift towards culture attention, as exemplified by the recent memecoin rally which has reached a market cap of over $60 billion. Cultural attention is a high-value asset that accrues long-term value through sustained attention and engagement, estimated at more than $10 billion. Solana is a booming ecosystem for shipping user-first applications, with its tech infrastructure being highly scalable, cost-effective, and well-suited for retail activity. Solana may be the world’s first mainstream blockchain and a prime ecosystem for capturing CultureFi value.
Memecoins are just Hashtags with native value
Looking back at Web2 innovation, there’s a clear parallel between memecoins and hashtags. “Trending hashtags” on Twitter highlighted where the cultural energy was pointing at that given moment. It had a very similar, here today, gone tomorrow structure. The most successful hashtags focused on shared cultural moments: viral debates around #TheDress, the #MeToo movement, #FreeBritney, or even #COVID19. They often had associated community values and behaviors like the ALS #IceBucketChallenge or #NoMakeupSelfie. The platforms of the time were fit-for-purpose. Hashtags were deeply integrated into the algorithms and sharing features of platforms like Twitter and Facebook, which helped sustain their relevance and broaden their reach, but this market structure also accrued meaningful network effects to those platforms themselves.
Now, the stakes are higher. Money is on the line, and the pace of shifting metas is faster than ever. Whether it’s Vice President Harris inspiring the $MOONKAMA coin ($350M market cap), popstar Iggy Azalea launching the $MOTHER token ($70M), or the viral weirdness of Hawk Tuah girl igniting $HAWKTUAH ($500M), it’s clear that memecoins are a new expression of cultural attention with hashtags as a direct ancestor. While the industry has built new rails for the financial layer - launching and trading - a massive opportunity exists for new fit-for-purpose social platforms, built on and integrated with Solana, that capture the social network effects of this ever-changing cultural virality.
Social dynamics of memecoin communities
Currently, the social dynamics of memecoin communities are fragmented across telegram groups, Discord chats, Twitter circles, and hacked-together websites. Spend any time embedded in a memecoin community, and you see a group of creative, ambitious, often slightly aimless, internet-natives loosely coordinating: who can create the best memes, the most viral content, how can we spread the word of our community’s lore & history? Today’s social tools are limited, and you end up with armies of financially-aligned degens shilling on Twitter as loudly as possible. Shouting into the void. $RANDOMTOKEN higher.
Sometimes it works, but most times it doesn’t. The fragmented Web2 social landscape doesn’t quite capture the rich potential: the competition, the coordination, the lore & narrative, the added financial interests. The format itself doesn’t work well for these superusers either: text, picture, and video content feeds are inherently passive with users spending 95% of their time scrolling through endless content vs. actually engaging. It takes a lot to break through.
A fit-for-purpose Social Competition Platform on Solana
Cupcake is developing a Social Competition Platform to enhance internet culture dynamics, targeting financially-aligned micro-communities. Users actively participate in creating, competing, and coordinating, with high-quality content and engagement rewarded. In May 2024, the open beta saw 15K users in 2M+ social games, validating the platform's high-engagement model. As it grows, users can earn tokens through challenges, unlock exclusive events, and participate in community decisions. This approach transforms passive consumption into active participation, making Cupcake a sustainable, interactive, and vibrant social ecosystem.
At Decasonic, we believe in Cupcake's ability to execute their vision with a strong product-driven approach. Cupcake’s unique blend of questing, GameFi, and SocialFi elements positions them to capture and accelerate CultureFi growth within the Solana ecosystem. By combining nostalgic minigames, social leaderboards, and blockchain technology, Cupcake creates a new category of social gaming applications called CultureFi. This convergence is reshaping online interactions and offers investors a unique opportunity.
Cupcake has demonstrated early traction and product-market fit with their unique value proposition of social casual gaming integrated with meme culture. Their strong management team, led by Chris Liquin, is committed to exceeding targets on their product roadmap and build-out.
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