Talking about the Memecoin cycle: It’s all about the “early days”

Author: Westie Source: X, @WestieCapital Translation: Shan Ouba, Golden Finance

Let's talk about the memecoin cycle. Forget their practicality, forget the long-term vision, and even forget the coherent narrative. The essence of this cycle is not about these things.

It has only one core goal: Seize early opportunities.

Spark: ETF craze and Solana's revival

This spark is not just general momentum in the market. It's more specific. In late 2023, the Bitcoin ETF application hinted that institutional funds would enter the cryptocurrency market. Solana staged a strong comeback after the FTX crash. All of this became a fire starter - a story of regaining legitimacy and recovery.

Traditional altcoins feel outdated. Many projects carry the baggage of a bear market. Those that are venture-backed, with roadmaps and whitepapers, often have valuations that look more like… elaborate exit strategies than exciting innovations.

Memecoin offers a different alternative: raw, unfiltered, and fun. The anti-VC coin. No whitepaper, and often no website. Just a meme, a ticker, and a launch. Its appeal is simplicity and a sense of risk. Memecoin became the ultimate “high-risk test,” especially because traditional altcoins look so predictable.

If Bitcoin can 2x on the ETF craze, and Solana rises from the ashes, maybe a Dogecoin with no use can go 100x. That’s the spark: ETF optimism, Solana’s resurgence, boredom with venture-backed altcoins.

BONK: The First Taste of “Early”

Then, BONK came.

BONK wasn’t complicated, or deeply meme-y. But it was the first to capture the energy. People saw the volatility, saw the gains, and gradually formed a basic understanding: Something is happening. This is different. This is fast.

Initially, “early” wasn’t a conscious goal. It was more like, “This is volatile, maybe take a small gamble.” But the BONK run—a breakout followed by predictable volatility—began to define the game.

Elemental Shift: Absurdity Emerges from a Limited Meme Pool

The metagame shifted. Crypto brains began to understand: “Memecoin is a game. The goal of the game is to find the next BONK, but better.”

“Better” didn’t refer to the technology or the team. “Better” meant higher virality. How? At this early stage, the memecoin metagame was still nascent, and the options for differentiation were surprisingly limited. There weren’t thousands of complex strategies or narratives to choose from. In fact, the pool of ready-made memes on the internet was itself small. You weren’t picking from thousands of options, you were choosing from a limited pool of ones that resonated with you intuitively.

And what stood out in this limited selection? Absurd.

In this context, “better” became synonymous with “absurder.” Because in this immature memecoin market, absurdity was a powerful signal. It caught attention and was inherently shareable. More importantly, as the market was still figuring out what a “good” memecoin was, humor and instant, raw laughter became a powerful selection mechanism.

Thus Dogwifhat (WIF) was born.

“Wif hat,” a misspelled, meaningless image of a Shiba Inu wearing a hat. The pinnacle of internet absurdity. For many, the immediate reaction was to laugh. It was just funny. And in this sense of humor, this absurdity, there was a signal:

“This is new. This is fresh. This is… early?”

The game became intuitive. Not just finding a memecoin, but finding the one that would go viral before it became a massive hit. Capturing the zeitgeist, the internet joke, the fleeting sense of absurdity. In these early days, the most laugh-out-loud, ridiculous coins in that limited pool of memes naturally stood out.

To find that coin, you had to be early.

Memescope: Optimizing Speed ​​and Control

The metagame iterates quickly. “Early” doesn’t just mean the point after the coin is launched. That’s too late. The real “early” is before the coin is launched. Before the crowds come in, before the hype starts, before the price explodes.

And so, tools like Photon and “memescope” were born. The game became tactical. Traders went all in on memescope — Photon’s memecoin launch page. The metagame is this: refresh memescope all day, snap up new coins quickly, be the first to buy them. Pure “early” optimization — speed, responsiveness, staring at the screen all day.

The “Memescope metagame” still looks like some kind of democratized way to play — anyone with the tools and time can participate. But beneath the surface, a darker dynamic begins to emerge: the rise of **“insiders”** who are minting memecoins and manipulating the indicators that memescope traders rely on.

These coins are not always spontaneous, grassroots movements. Increasingly, memecoins are carefully designed for profit. These “insiders” will:

• Create memecoins out of thin air: often without a real community or organic momentum to base them on.

• Manipulated data: Artificially inflate on-chain data, create fake social media attention, and manipulate “trending” ranking systems to make coins look more popular than they actually are.

• Directly target trader resources: Knowing that memescope and similar tools have become central to memecoin trading, they specifically design manipulations to exploit these platforms.

• Hiring market makers: Creating the illusion of real trading volume at launch, making new coins look immediately active and attractive on charts.

• Working with KOLs: Paying influencers to promote the coins they have created, creating social validation, and driving initial FOMO (fear of missing out).

• Deploy armies of “reply-takers” on Twitter: Build networks of bots or paid accounts whose sole purpose is to reply to large crypto accounts, flood the information space, and create false buzz about their tokens.

Memescope traders genuinely believe they are playing the “early” game, even though they are actually always behind those who are actually capturing the most value.

These two key elements of the memecoin game — absurdity as a driver of virality, and “insiders” realizing the “early” game and manipulating exit liquidity — are now ready to enter the final “Boss Level.”

Fartcoin: The Quest for Mass Attention and Ultimate Ridiculousness

For those actively trying to create the “next WIF” — the next memecoin capable of achieving escape velocity — a crucial realization dawned on them: To get the masses to buy your memecoin, you had to grab their fleeting attention. And in the memecoin space, attention is not gained through complex narratives or technological promises, but through utter, impossible-to-ignore spectacle. For the “early” quest, there is now full acceptance of this: it’s not just about speed, or even just about absurdity, but about strategically creating ultimate absurdity as the ultimate attention grabbing mechanism.

That’s when Fartcoin came on the scene.

Fartcoin. Imagine looking at this from the perspective of a memecoin creator’s quest for mass adoption. What better way to grab attention than launching a token called “Fartcoin”? It was not only ridiculous, it was pervasively and instantaneously ridiculous. The name itself was an inevitable conversation starter, a clickbait headline waiting to happen. It seemed designed with laser precision to create a sensation that would cut through the internet noise: “Look at these stupid things people are actually throwing money at!”

Fartcoin became the ultimate experiment in the attention economy in the memecoin world. It wasn’t just another token launch; it was a deliberate, almost cynical attempt to use absurdity to attract attention for the masses. It emerged as a stark and potentially hilarious proof-of-concept: in the memecoin game, especially in the pursuit of true “escape velocity” and mainstream adoption, extreme absurdity is not just a desirable trait; it is a core marketing strategy, distilled to its purest, most provocative form.

Is there a more ridiculous memecoin than Fartcoin?

Inside Games and the Trump Ceiling

Next, over the manipulation tactics that had already emerged in the “memescope” era, another more fundamental realization gradually emerged: the era of purely ridiculous animal memecoins, despite initial explosive growth, had become unsustainable. The market had become smarter.

The meta needed a new angle, a veneer of legitimacy. At this point, we saw the rise of “substantial” memes—tokens that, while still memetic in nature, could defend themselves with a thin layer of plausible pseudo-deniability. Thus, the AI ​​coin meta emerged. Suddenly, buying a memecoin was not just about buying a dog with a hat, but about “investing” in the future of artificial intelligence! This provided a reason for purchase, however tenuous, beyond the sheer absurdity.

But behind this shift in thematic trappings, the core mechanics of the game and the roles of the insiders remained the same. Information asymmetry remains key. Those groups of insiders simply adapted to this new meta, using their early access to information to continue to exploit this advantage. They knew about the launch of AI coins before anyone else and continued to exploit this advantage.

This evolution eventually gave rise to the celebrity memecoin meta. Insiders realized that the ultimate way to create viral launches and ensure exit liquidity was to work with celebrities - who often had huge influence but limited understanding of crypto, to serve as the front for these insider operations. What’s more, these insiders still operate behind the scenes, often suggesting that they are simply “better traders”, subtly (or not so subtly) suggesting that their excess returns are a reflection of skill rather than information advantage, further exacerbating the frustration of ordinary participants who are increasingly excluded from the “early” game.

The “inside game” is fully revealed in its most cynical and transparent form, covering:

• Being a promoter. Create a token, control the narrative, create virality with either extreme absurdity or a veneer of substance. Extreme “early”, extreme virality control.

• Be an insider. Find the promoters of ridiculous or seemingly substantive tokens, get in on them early, get involved before they hit crypto Twitter. Information asymmetry about virality/substance potential is an advantage.

• Be an influencer. Build a fan base as early access to ridiculously viral or seemingly substantive tokens, and then… you know. Amplify the chosen narrative, drive headlines, secure exit liquidity.

After this shift toward creating viral absurdity and controlling the launch narrative became prominent, Fartcoin demonstrated the raw power of extreme absurdity, followed by the emergence of Trumpcoin.

Trumpcoin The biggest, most ridiculous memecoin on the planet? Suddenly, even creating absurdity didn’t matter. How to outdo Trump’s absurdity and create something with more news potential? Hardly.

Imagine your reaction as a memecoin trader when Trumpcoin launched. Anyone paying attention could see that it was an internal launch. 80% of the token supply was clearly locked up to insiders. The on-chain data screamed out token snipers and pre-launch access. It shouldn’t mean anything, but it didn’t. It was Trump. The president-elect of the United States. The memecoin of all memecoins. The ultimate celebrity coin. Of course you’d buy it. It felt like a new paradigm. The inside game was obvious, but for Trump, it didn’t matter. It was too big to ignore.

Then came the launch of MELANIA.

At that point, it was as if the air had been drained out of the air. The people in the club suddenly became sober. The inside game of Trumpcoin was so obvious that the emergence of Melaniacoin made it completely and inevitably exposed. The mechanism is the same, the cash grab has become more transparent. What is the difference? With Trump, memecoin briefly surpassed this cynicism, but with Melaniacoin, nothing can surpass it.

The inside game that had always been revealed, even though people had previously chosen not to care, finally became known after the emergence of Melaniacoin. The emperor has no clothes. The cycle has broken.

Trumpcoin is not just the peak memecoin; it becomes the ultimate case of another level: the clearest example of the peak of the inside game. It is not just a memecoin, it is a political and cultural force, launched with an aura of insider access and destined success.

Is there a more transparent and massive inside game than Trump and Melaniacoin?

Echoes of 2021: The “Early” Cycle of NFTs

The whole memecoin cycle… does it feel familiar? Back to 2021, the NFT craze.

What was the spark? The rise of ETH, based on the DeFi summer. NFTs emerged as a “beta play” for ETH as a higher-risk, higher-reward investment.

The meta quickly coalesced around the PFP project. “Community” became the buzzword, but in reality, the game was about finding the next “Bored Ape,” the project that would skyrocket and gain cultural recognition.

Just like memecoin, people realized: the game is “early.” But in the NFT space, “early” means striving for whitelisting. Discord check-ins, Twitter interactions, endless quests—whitelist scrambles became NFT’s memescope refresh, a relentless pursuit of pre-release access. The “early” optimization escalated. People realized that the first to participate were creators. Soon, celebrities began to join in. You saw Steph Curry and Jimmy Fallon showing off seven-figure JPEGs, while Logan Paul openly defrauded his fans. Who’s next? The NFT space also seems to have reached a celebrity-driven peak, a meta fatigue point. Speaking of turning the cycle… NELK, which once represented the peak of the celebrity NFT craze in 2021, just launched its own memecoin, Fullsend. If that’s not a signal, what is? The similarities are obvious. Different asset classes, but the same underlying game: a relentless pursuit of “early” that ultimately leads to self-consumption. At a certain point, there is no room for the game to grow; you need to completely reset the game.

The Twilight Zone and the Inevitable Reset

At the end of the memecoin cycle, and in the aftermath of the NFT frenzy, we saw the emergence of coins like LIBRA, where people seemed to be pouring their entire portfolios into them, desperately hoping to recapture the magic of the TRUMP trade. It was a classic sign of what George Soros called the “Twilight Zone” — a phase in the market cycle. As Soros observed, it is a phase where “people continue to play the game even though they no longer believe in it.” Belief in the magic of the “early days” is waning, but the ingrained habit of chasing memecoin rallies remains.

Soros warns, “Eventually there will be a crossover or inflection point where the trend begins to go down and the bias reverses, leading to a catastrophic acceleration downward (8), often referred to as a crash.”

So, you have to ask yourself: Are there any more variants of this metagame that can continue? Are there more layers to this game?

Is there a more ridiculous meme than Fartcoin? Is there a bigger and more transparent insider game than TRUMP and MELANIA coin?

Probably not. At least not in this cycle.

The memecoin cycle, defined by the pursuit of “early days,” may have come to an end. It was driven by hype, absurdity, and the promise of “early days.” But like all hype cycles, it was inherently self-destructive. As the mechanisms became clear and the illusion faded, the pursuit of “early days” began to self-destruct.

Yet the human urge to be “early” remains. It’s deeply embedded in crypto psychology.

This memecoin cycle may be over, but the desire remains. The game will likely return with new rules, new absurdities, and new players who may still crave… you guessed it… early days.

Stay safe, friends.