Ten years ago, two weeks before the Ethereum project was publicly announced, I published this post on Bitcoin magazine arguing that issuing coins could be a new way to fund important public projects. The thinking went: society needs ways to fund valuable large-scale projects, markets and institutions (both corporations and governments) are the main techniques that we have today, and both work in some cases and fail in others. Issuing new coins seems like a third class of large-scale funding technology, and it seems different enough from both markets and institutions that it would succeed and fail in different places - and so it could fill in some important gaps.

The next big thing may start out by piggybacking off a popular memecoin

According to on-chain analyst @ai_9684xtpa, on March 3rd, BlockBeats reported that a whale address that had previously sold PEPE for a profit of $3.49 million on March 1st, has now transferred 3.88 million MEME tokens worth $1.61 million from Binance to a new address that holds SHIB/MANA/SAND/GALA tokens, within the last 2 minutes.

According to CoinGecko data on March 2nd, with the skyrocketing of meme coins, SHIB and DOGE ranked 3rd and 4th in terms of 24-hour spot trading volume on the entire network (excluding stablecoins), with 5.9 billion and 5 billion US dollars respectively. In addition, the total trading volume of the meme coin sector exceeded 15.2 billion US dollars in 24 hours.

Andrew Kang, co-founder of Mechanism Capital, wrote on X platform that Meme coins have become the focus of global speculative liquidity. Compared to traditional equity, Meme coins are now easily accessible to global users. This is why the rise of Dogecoin exceeds the rise in Gamestop stock prices. In the previous cycle, the total market value of Meme coins reached 100 billion US dollars, and the market value peak of each cycle usually has multiple growth. In addition to retail investors, HWN traders and hedge funds are gradually entering the market, and there is still a long way to go in the future.

According to a report by K33 Research on Friday, BTC has been leading the rise of digital assets recently, but there are early signs that the so-called "altcoin season" is coming, during which smaller tokens will perform well. K33 wrote: "Historically, the performance of altcoins will begin to surpass our current level." The report points out that since the market bottomed out in November 2022, the market value of Bitcoin has doubled relative to the total value of all cryptocurrencies except BTC and Ethereum. This situation is similar to the situation before the altcoins started catching up with BTC at the end of 2020. The analyst added that the "huge" rebound of Meme coins this week may be a "possible early sign" of the upcoming altcoin season.

Lookonchain monitoring shows that within 14 hours, a trader earned over $1.6 million through trading mem coin WEN. When WEN opened, the trader spent 125.5 million USDC to buy 20 billion WEN and sold 12.5 billion WEN for 807,000 USDC, realizing a profit of $682,000. Currently, the trader holds 7.6 billion WEN ($941,000) unrealized profit of $941,000.

Blockchain analyst @ai_9684xtpa monitored and found that a suspected MEME market maker address transferred $1.81 million worth of MEME from OKX 16 hours ago, and deposited 6 million tokens to participate in market making on HTX and Kucoin two hours ago. The address currently holds 373 million MEME tokens, accounting for 4.2% of the total circulating supply of MEME, worth $9.03 million.

Possibly influenced by the announcement of "Binance Labs investing in MEME", MEME rose nearly 20% in a short time, now priced at $0.0287.

On January 4th, Binance Labs announced its investment in Memecoin (MEME), the native ecosystem token of Memeland. Memeland's core focus is on building and investing in SocialFi and creator economies, utilizing meme internet culture to connect creators and communities through its MEME token and NFTs.