According to Mechanism Capital co-founder Andrew Kang, memecoin projects that leverage a deeper culture could be much more profitable than standard memecoin projects based on animals and simple jokes. In an article published on April 7th at X, Kang stated that a new class of culture coins focusing on cultural values such as politics, brands, and lifestyles has the capacity to go much more viral than recent popular memecoin projects.
Continued Interest in Memecoins
Andrew Kang explained that these communities could be entirely related to politics, consumer goods, sports, lifestyles, or a mix of all these elements.
Kang cited two Solana-based memecoin projects, Jeo Boden (BODEN) and Doland Tremp (TREMP), as recent examples of rapidly growing cultural projects within communities. BODEN has grown significantly since its launch on March 9th, achieving over 700,000% in gains since its inception, with a market value of $473 million according to CoinGecko data.
The Donald Trump parody, TREMP, has also made significant gains since its launch on February 27th, though it has not attracted as much attention as BODEN. According to Birdeye data, it currently has a market value of $73 million. Kang mentioned other memecoin projects like ZYN and MOUTAI, which draw similarities from successful consumer brands, suggesting they could ride the tailwinds of brands’ cyclical economies and stated the following:
“Compared to animal-themed memecoin projects, those representing consumer brands may have the additional advantage of leveraging the associated lifestyle of the brand for more virality.”
Statements on Memecoin Projects
Overall, Kang argued that the decision to invest in memecoin projects is not far from investing in normal assets that yield large returns. However, crypto industry experts are divided on the impact of memecoin projects on the sector.
BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes believes that memecoin projects are a clear positive for their own blockchain networks. Conversely, others say they are a dangerous and speculative mess that betrays the founding principles of blockchain technology.
Regardless of their effects on the ecosystem, memecoin projects have proven themselves to be the most profitable sector in crypto in the first quarter of this year. According to a market report by CoinGecko, the top 10 memecoins recorded an average gain of 1,312.6% for their holders in the first quarter of 2024. CoinGecko analyst Lim Yu Qian commented on the matter:
“Memecoin projects were 4.6 times more profitable than the next best-performing crypto projects of tokenized real-world assets (RWA) and were 33.3 times more profitable than the lowest-yielding Layer-2 projects in the first quarter of this year.”
