gm Bankless Nation, this year's major memecoins are now bigger than the biggest NFTs were in 2021. Is this paradigm here to stay, or just a meme bullrun playing out?
gm Bankless Nation, The biggest memecoins in 2024 are now bigger than the biggest NFTs were in 2021. Is this paradigm here to stay, or just the first major meme bullrun playing out?
Today's Issue ⬇️
🪙 News Roundup: Meme-o-Mania Interest in memecoins goes parabolic.
📚 Learn: What I'm Reading My favorite posts this week.
The new wave of major memecoins are now bigger than the biggest Ethereum collectibles were at their combined peak during the last bullrun, when CryptoPunks, Bored Apes, Azuki, etc. were seeing all-time highs in trading activity.
To be sure, what's similar here is the allure of high returns. NFTs were the playground for degens in 2021, while memecoins have decidedly taken up that mantle this cycle.
What's different, though, is accessibility.
For instance, if you were just getting excited about NFTs in 2021, you couldn't just go easily drop $20 on a CryptoPunk. There are only 10,000, right, and as unique collectibles they're indivisible unless you do some NFTfi wrap-and-shard magic. This dynamic helped the 'Punks floor price rocket past 100 ETH at one point! But most folks don't have that much crypto to spend on anything.
On the flip side, memecoins are fungible. Anyone any time can drop as little as $1 (or much more, or even less, etc.) on WIF, POPCAT, MOG, and so forth to get a divisible bag and start playing along in the memes casino.
Plus, most memecoin action these days is taking place on chains like Solana and Base where transaction fees are drastically cheaper than those that we saw around NFTs in 2021, particularly during periods of network congestion.
All that said, the biggest memecoins “flipping” the biggest NFTs isn't so surprising when you consider the lower barrier to entry that memecoins enjoy—more people can easily pile into a fungible token than the reigning 10k PFP collections.
To be sure, the future of NFTs has never been brighter, as their use cases are branching out in all directions, and low-cost mints are very accessible. My main point here is that the cryptoeconomy's culture vertical now has two major asset classes, NFTs and memecoins, while in 2021 it just had one.
The lines are blurring here as well. DN-404 tokens have accompanying fungible and non-fungible assets. Zora recently launched ERC-20z tokens, which can evolve from NFTs to ERC-20s on command. And I've also seen more memecoin projects starting to deploy their own NFT PFP collections too.
Both of these asset types can be approached and used in different ways, of course, but ultimately they're both community-driven and can be complementary. I'll be watching the collective experiments that take place at these crossroads closely in the years ahead, and you should too!
Mantle kickstarts Season 1 of Methamorphosis. Building on the success of their Liquid Staking Token, mETH, Mantle LSP announces plans for a new Liquid Restaking Token, cmETH, along with a governance token, COOK. With Methamorphosis, participants can now farm Powder for future COOK tokens and position themselves early for upcoming cmETH release.
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