The Similarities and Differences of Meme from a Long-Cycle Perspective

Author: Alex Xu, Research Partner at Mint Ventures

In the crypto cycles I have personally experienced (2016-2026), each cycle of memes has its place.

However, in the past few rounds of vigorous bull markets, the presence of memes has varied greatly. My personal feeling is:

2016-2018 Bull Market: The presence was relatively thin; I can hardly recall any meme assets from that round besides Doge (perhaps it's just that it was a long time ago).

2020-2022 Bull Market: The presence increased, but it was still not at the center stage (the original Doge and the new generation Shiba performed well, and during April-May 2021, animal memes were all the rage).

2023-2025 Bull Market: A true central position, with significantly extended heat and presence time, and a rich variety of mutated forms (from the earliest Bitcoin inscription memes to political memes, cult memes, social media memes, presidential memes, and AI agent memes).

A question worth pondering and answering is: What determines the presence and mental share of memes in each round of the crypto bull market cycle?

This question will affect how we choose the main investment line throughout the entire crypto bull market, namely: whether to continue to overweight memes in terms of energy and funds in this round of the bull market.

From the examples of meme types in each round above, it can be seen that my definition of memes is quite generalized. For instance, inscription assets and AI launchpad projects themed around agents are all categorized as memes.

In my definition, crypto assets can roughly be divided into business/production-type assets and meme-type assets:

When the main focus of attention and trading is on its business aspect, such as the product-market fit (PMF), assets under management (AUM), revenue-generating ability, and token buyback and burn of a protocol, that asset tends to approach a business/production-type asset. These types of assets can be driven by various narratives in the short term, but the ultimate question they must answer is: How is my ability to make money/token return? This is similar to most listed companies.

When the main trading focus is on the consensus aspect of the asset, namely: the scope of dissemination and understanding of the asset, as well as the recognition intensity of investors and potential investors towards it, this type of asset tends to approach meme assets. From this perspective, consensus is the "fundamentals" of meme assets.

In this seemingly binary classification method, there are also some middle grounds, such as a large number of AI agent projects based on Virtual and AI16z emerging in 2025 (do you still remember the web3 virtual influencer Luna who sang and danced live? And the web3 research AI chatbot AIXBT?).

These projects were mostly born with a business-type positioning, but were driven more by narrative consensus in the early stages. By the time they came to an end, they were still far from achieving true PMF and meaningful revenue scale, so in my definition, they are closer to memes rather than business-type projects.

Another type of marker is meme launchpads, such as pumps and pons. Although they belong to meme infrastructure, they essentially belong to business-type projects. However, the participation heat of memes is their core business metric, which determines their valuation level.

Returning to the key question, what determines the position and weight of memes in each round of the market? Under what circumstances will memes become the main line of the market?

I believe the core factor is mainly: the supply and quality of business/production-type assets in the cycle.

When the narrative of business-type assets in that cycle explodes + business development goes smoothly, it will become the main direction of speculative funds in the crypto field. When business-type projects decline, quality product innovation is scarce, and business data is generally weak, crypto funds will choose to flow into meme asset categories that are unrelated to traditional fundamentals.

Because FOMO emotions and the desire for wealth always resurrect with the cycle, the funds and emotions brought by the bull market must have a destination.

This is also why the presence of memes has been so different in the past few cycles:

2016-2018 Bull Market: The year of the explosion of smart contracts/public chains, the most explosive cycle in terms of narrative and imagination, the narrative of public chains and the future business imagination space was large enough that even traditional VCs went crazy, absorbing almost all speculative funds;

2020-2022 Bull Market: The year of blockchain applications, the narrative was still high quality, with DeFi, NFT, and GameFi taking turns to appear, the web3 concept became globally popular, and observable business data skyrocketed (TVL, trading volume, transaction fees, active addresses, and crazy APR), the amount of funds attracted by the industry further increased. However, under the influence of celebrities like Musk and Vitalik (whose address was hit by coins), memes began to take on the overflow of funds;

2023-2025 Bull Market: The most sluggish round of blockchain business narratives and operations, most product innovations from the previous round were debunked, and there were no strictly new products. The growth rate of funds absorbed by the industry, although far less than the previous two rounds, is still large, mostly flowing into memes.

So, what are the background conditions determining the position of memes in this seemingly slowly unfolding bull market cycle?

Currently, many conditions are similar to the previous cycle, namely:

1. Quality business-type narratives (business models that make sense) are still scarce, and the few (RWA, prediction markets) are mostly controlled by non-token issuing enterprises or listed companies. There are not many good secondary token carriers (mainly Ondo, but the token value has not yet been captured);

2. FOMO and the desire for wealth are undying; there are always gamblers visiting the casino in any era.

Therefore, unless a large number of quality business-type projects emerge again at some stage, memes will likely still be the main line of this bull market (if not the only one).

Does this mean that investors should overweight memes in this round? Not necessarily.

This cycle has two new points that will increase the difficulty of speculation and survival for memes:

1. The supply side of memes is very abundant: after the last cycle, the meme issuance pipeline and harvesting process have become highly industrialized, and the supply side is more sufficient, even approaching infinity.

2. The demand side mentality is short-sighted and fragile: after multiple rounds of harvesting various narratives in the last cycle, the basic investment base with sufficient faith in memes has greatly diminished (do you remember the last round when Murad advocated the meme supercycle?), the essence of meme consensus is a kind of capital solidarity, and changes in mentality can lead to unstable solidarity, resulting in a decrease in the market cap ceiling and median lifespan of memes.

More importantly, the short-sighted mentality of the demand side and caution towards solidarity will, in turn, lead to the supply side (the devs) tightening their nets faster. This is a self-reinforcing process, and it is also the most concerning situation for meme launchpad projects.

In fact, even at the beginning of the last round of this meme supercycle (January 2024), when memes were overweighted, as of today, the returns of the meme sector are still in the middle of the crypto sector, still negative, and significantly underperforming BTC:

Note: Based on the SOSOValue crypto track index, the index statistical logic is the top ten targets in this track (monthly updates) and market cap weight (refreshed every five minutes).

It is worth noting that the above index, because it counts the top market cap memes, has a significant gap from the actual operations of early meme dog users on-chain. The mortality rate and volatility (including upward volatility) of early on-chain memes are much higher than those of top memes. Although there is no reliable statistics, I think it is likely a curve with worse cyclical return trends.

Having discussed the difficulties of meme speculation in this round, let’s talk about the marginal positive points compared to the last round:

Mainly the new player Robinhood's net inflow of users and funds on-chain.

Of course, the current number of users on Robinhood on-chain who are traditional brokerage app investors is still relatively low, but if Robinhood's memes continue to be hot, users who are continuously beaten in semiconductor stocks may consider trying their luck here.

In addition, Robinhood still has some cards to play, such as launching its own strong memes and meme launchpads on the main site, which has the ability to fuel on-chain heat.

Of course, if these cards are played too early, it may lead to a lack of imagination in the future, so keeping them hidden in the short term poses a greater threat to the bears.

Let’s take a look at what new narratives are currently in the meme market.

As mentioned earlier, memes are a generalized asset class. In just the last round, in a short span of over two years, it has gone through multiple iterations of inscriptions, politics, cult/retro internet culture, social media, top influencers (Trump), and now AI agents.

Among the current categories of memes, the bull market as a Chinese meme is easy to understand, while a relatively new one is the stock meme themed on Robinhood, which includes:

1. Paired with listed company stocks: where there is Nvidia (NVDA), there is AI (Artificial Inu), freely created.

2. Paired with on-chain RWA coin stocks based on Uniswap's AMM liquidity pools.

3. Based on the above mechanisms, the creators of stock memes have various custom ways of handling the fees generated from trading, such as being used to repurchase and burn stock memes or distributed to holders of stock memes.

Based on the above mechanisms, the narrative that has emerged in the market recently is: "Coin stocks meme squeeze Wall Street."

In terms of specific processes: enthusiastic meme traders buy stock memes on-chain, because the on-chain liquidity of stock memes mainly comes from pairing with coin stocks, when users buy stock memes with stablecoins or ETH, they need to first route to buy the paired coin stocks, forming one-sided buying pressure on coin stocks. If the on-chain coin stocks cannot be minted smoothly due to weekends or other reasons, and the total on-chain quantity is small, it cannot quickly balance the on-chain price of coin stocks relative to the normal price in the stock market through minting and selling, there will be a situation where the on-chain price of coin stocks skyrockets several times in a short period.

Recently, the situation of Boner (stock meme) - HIMS (coin stock) on Robinhood is just like this.

Considering that Hims itself has a large short position in the stock market, the narrative of "on-chain finance counterattacking Wall Street" or even "squeezing Wall Street" has taken shape.

So how is the quality of this kind of meme narrative?

Generally speaking, it is average.

A good meme narrative needs to have good narrative logic and appeal, strong dissemination, and good anti-falsifiability.

First, the short-term surge of HIMS coin stocks comes from the unsmooth minting mechanism of coin stocks on Robinhood, so this narrative is logically weak and easily falsifiable (the minting/burning depth of coin stocks on Ondo is better, and HIMS did not have much fluctuation that day).

Secondly, "squeezing Wall Street" is an old tune with insufficient novelty, full of traces of artificial planning, lacking the original movement subject—2021's GameStop—initially appeared, and the appeal and self-dissemination brought by natural community fermentation.

Moreover, the narrative template of stock memes is also rapidly replicating, with projects like SAYLORMOON emerging quickly.

At the end of the article, I want to talk about what kind of investors are suitable for memes.

Whether it is investment or speculation, the core of the former is to assess the long-term intrinsic value of assets, while the core of the latter is to predict short-term capital voting. Although the methods and focuses differ, there is a commonality in one thing: those who are good at and focused on this field win money from those who are not focused or good at it.

Based on my observations of excellent meme players around me, they often possess several or all of the following advantages:

1. Energetic, active thinking, and passionate about trading itself.

2. Imaginative and highly sensitive to narratives.

3. Stable and continuous on-the-ground/on-chain monitoring and execution, very sensitive to market temperature and directional changes.

4. A relatively closed high-cognition practical small circle, sharing targets and cognition, with frequent and intensive communication.

5. Formed a relatively systematic speculative framework, with the ability to quickly patch and even iterate overall.

*Another important bonus point:

If you are a KOL with a sufficient number of downstream subscribers, you have the ability to diffuse narratives, accelerate consensus building, and attract solidarity for some smaller, earlier memes, helping small projects cross the critical stage from death to life. If you also have a network connecting other KOLs, you can unite to amplify this ability.

In the field of value investing, some of the above advantages will become ineffective, or even have negative impacts. Their behavior patterns are:

1. Low trading frequency, fewer executions.

2. Unwilling to pay for the imagination and story premium of assets.

3. Staying away from Mr. Market, not closely monitoring fluctuations and market quotes, actively isolating from public emotions.

This is why value investing and market speculation are difficult to be compatible in one person, because the core endowments required are clearly mutually exclusive.

It is hard to imagine someone actively buying into the grand vision and story of target A, only to become cautious and conservative about target B, believing only in logic with sufficient evidence.

But in any case, whether doing speculation or investment, it is necessary to be based on sufficient self-understanding, not to choose investment routes that are incompatible with one's endowments and nature, and fully leverage strengths while avoiding weaknesses, which is also a form of "not making difficult problems" in investment.

This is just my personal opinion, for reference only.

I wish everyone good luck in this round of bull market cycle hunting.

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