"CultureFi": The Grand Narrative that Makes Memes More Valuable

Author: Matti, Zee Prime Capital; Translation: zhouzhou, BlockBeats Editor's Note: The rise of meme coin today has well demonstrated the wealth effect and innovation opportunities in the encryption culture. Although meme is still in the early stage of pursuing short-term gains, it has provided reference value for future cultural finance and cultural coins. The article proposes to build a meme coin crowdfunding platform to let Tokens not only be limited to memes, but also combined with lifestyle products, fashion brands, DeSci, and other cultural projects to unleash the power of capital formation. In the future, cultural coins will become the carrier of value creation and distribution.

The following is the main content:

In the narrative of MEME coin, humor and optimism coexist, but its logic is misleading, often interpreting the world with the mindset of Zero-sum Game, and borrowing some uncomfortable Marxist views, emphasizing the redistribution of power and wealth, while ignoring the creation of real value.

"No need to create value, just get a share." This kind of mentality is widely accepted, and Airdrop seems to have become a "welfare". The more free resources obtained, the stronger the desire. However, opportunities are not obtained out of thin air, but by striving for them. The jealousy of the opportunity for seed round investment is the rationalization of meme coin. However, market access is one thing, and obtaining the opportunity for seed round investment depends on individual social capital. In addition, many people overlook the survivorship bias - most seed round investments are actually losses.

In the current encryption market, investors, project party, and users have become accustomed to trading tokens without actual value through 'meme premium'. The natural evolution of this market paradigm has led to a more straightforward phenomenon: 'If that's the case, let's just issue tokens that obviously have no value.' This assumption suggests that there is no real creative intent in the encryption field, but the fact is not so—'You are not a lottery ticket.'

The essence of meme coin is just a fluctuating social game, which is not a problem. It can be seen as a new type of lottery, vaguely associated with the spirit of the times. However, the rationalization behind meme coin is unsettling: resisting the 'evil capitalists' who exploit our profits! Even without value, we have the right to obtain wealth! We have the right to outperform the market!

However, there is a fundamental difference between wanting to make money and demanding to make money. The narrative of meme coin caters to this hollow desire, ultimately filling the pockets of insiders, who then criticize the so-called 'evil venture capitalists.' Some people equate meme coin with early encryption investments, which is wrong. The difference is that in today's venture-backed false projects, perhaps only a few projects can create trillions of dollars in value in the next decade.

Value will only be distributed.

Value should be sought.

Value is just the product of the way to obtain.

Fundamentally, meme coins are indeed full of fun, and they even have the potential to become the next trend of escapism in consumer culture. In the future, they may become agents of value creation, as the tokenization of culture is a powerful and underdeveloped tool. However, the current narrative of meme coins essentially carries a strong Marxist color.

So, how to transform this narrative into a culture financial game of positive-sum?

The Rise of Cultural Finance

Because the foundation of encryption culture is money, and money is the driving force of desire culture, we may have found the key to breakthrough. Culture (in this case, money) has become a product, which also explains well the emergence of meme coin and phenomena like pump.fun.

We usually like to think about the waves of new products and technologies from the perspective of 'bundling/unbundling'. In September 2023, before the meme coin frenzy, we proposed a model and pointed out that 'perhaps it is not intuitive, but cultural correlation will be traded.'

Our direction is correct, but we failed to anticipate the rapid rise of meme coins. In retrospect, this is actually reasonable, as the convergence of wealth effect and lack of actual innovation at the time triggered this phenomenon. However, meme coins are not a dead end. They actually provide excellent concept validation for 'CultureFi' and 'culture coins', and encryption technology is gradually becoming a powerful cultural incubator.

The meme coin has shown us that branding and distribution channels can be effectively bundled together, which is also the core of meme coin - they are highly efficient distribution machines. Although the forms of meme coins we see today are still very primitive, they rely more on short-term rapid Pump and Dump and lack sustainability, they have laid the foundation for the evolution of future cultural coins. Price pump is undoubtedly the most effective marketing tool, and in the logic of meme coin, price pump is not only a means, but also a purpose. However, for future cultural coins, price pump is just a tool to a larger goal, just like Ethereum, Solana, or BTC.

The future of cultural coins will be more diverse - Tokens are not only carriers of culture itself, but also the medium of distribution and dissemination. Here are my revisions to the 'bundling/unbundling' model. Although it may not be the final version, it reflects my current in-depth thinking and insights into the vertical field of consumer encryption.

The potential impact of this trend cannot be ignored. We believe that there is still great innovation space for the issuance of MEME Tokens. Instead of continuing to launch short-term "missiles" that may be manipulated by "Pump and Dump" groups, we can build a dedicated MEME Token "Crowdfunding platform" to transform these Tokens into true cultural coins, which are closely connected to lifestyle products, rather than just creating humorous memes.

This Crowdfunding platform can transform simple price up and down games into tools for unlocking products and opportunities (such as gaining access to specific products or content). With the powerful capital formation ability of Crypto Assets, this method can be used to launch cultural currency projects with clear missions - whether it's fashion brands, record companies, or Decentralization science (DeSci) projects (such as $HAIR), or even innovative things we haven't thought of yet.

Prediction markets like Polymarket have already demonstrated the potential to capture value through predicting events, trends, and culture. In today's 24/7 world of 'live reality shows', people want to stay closely connected to the zeitgeist through financial instruments to seek pleasure and dopamine stimulation, which is completely normal.

Today's meme coins are like those early websites of the internet (if they were financialized), still in their chaotic and primitive state with limited functionality. And when culture itself becomes a battlefield, direct participation only further raises the stakes and potential impact of this game.

Soon, cultural coins may develop a utility, leading us from what is essentially the pre-industrial age of the internet to a rapid industrialization of the internet. If you believe that it was the free expansion that drove the rapid progress of the industrial age, then Cryptocurrency is the extension of that freedom for the internet.