Creating new tokens has never been easier, and crypto markets have a wider trading infrastructure. Meme tokens may be here to stay, starting a meme supercycle. Meme trading will remain volatile but offer fast turnover opportunities to retail investors.
Meme tokens build a lasting effect on crypto markets, potentially sparking a meme supercycle. These often short-lived and volatile tokens are too numerous for regulation while offering a much shorter waiting period before launching. The current activity on meme token markets suggests a supercycle, where meme tokens are here to stay and may even accelerate based on the PolitiFi trend.
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Meme token traders do not need to read lengthy white papers—their main goal is a quick 1000X on one of their tokens, even if others fail immediately. The recent expansion of memes and the influence of existing meme tokens suggest the crypto market may be in a meme supercycle.
The meme supercycle also started with Dogecoin (DOGE), which not only broke above the $0.01 mark but, at one point, attempted to get close to $1. It took years since DOGE’s launch to attempt the next batch of meme tokens.
After the Meme 1.0 trend, which included SHIB and FLOKI, the Pepe (PEPE) trend took over the market. After those first tokens made it big, it was a matter of time before any meme could be taken from social media and wrapped as a crypto asset.
What are the benefits of a meme supercycle?
Meme tokens are community-driven and are helping build new types of approaches to crypto. Most of all, meme projects drew attention to the dominance of VC-backed assets, which had to answer to their early investors.
Additionally, memes don’t hide their position as purely speculative assets. Meme token buyers want to skip the stage where they convince themselves they are in “for the technology”. Meme launches also vary in their approach. Some token launches happen quickly and rely on bot-trading strategies. Others, like the recently announced Solciety, aim to copy the ICO model, with presale stages and a longer cooldown period for buyers before the asset starts trading.
Memes like PEPE also showed the power of “hodling”, which grows the influence of new tokens. But meme tokens are also adequately liquid, making the best use of existing DEX. The 2024 meme season helped build the influence of Raydium, where the barriers to entry are low for retail traders.
Meme tokens lead to extreme risk, rapid losses
Memes are still extremely risky to trade despite the positive tales of traders printing millions in a single airdrop. Reselling and trading meme tokens is even faster and more dynamic than flipping or sniping NFT. Often, it takes only a few seconds of bot-driven trading to crash any retail attempt at making gains.
The fatigue from risk may end the most exuberant meme activity, leaving only a few surviving projects. Despite this, meme tokens offer near-peak returns even in June compared to other narratives.
Traders still expect a switch to other narratives and possibly a return to blue chips or leading tokens. For retail, however, memes will always offer an easy entry point and big potential returns for a small investment.
Memes bring PolitiFi narrative to life
Some try to benefit from the bigger picture, if not directly trading memes. Most ideas for meme tokens are taken directly from online hype and are heavily influenced by news trends and politics.
PolitiFi is a new class of meme tokens that focuses mostly on US politics. It taps into long-running Internet pranks from the last few years. PolitiFi gained even more attention after the controversial launch of the DJT token.
As with other meme assets, PolitiFi also contains its share of scams. Even if buyers don’t have to read white papers, they still need to research the available liquidity and sift out projects that launch with a liquidity pool of $7. They also need to vet the community, which can also contain insiders.
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PolitiFi also competes with celebrity-driven meme tokens. Some assets are viewed with suspicion, as they are not always community-driven and allow outsized power to the influencer or celebrity.
Cryptopolitan reporting by Hristina Vasileva
