Memecoins have been a dominant crypto narrative for the better part of the last two market cycles, and that sentiment doesn’t seem to be fizzling out anytime soon.
Web3 AI search platform Kaito AI analyzed the social dominance of narratives prevalent in the market, using social graph data, mentions and conversation on social media.
Memes took the lead as one of the strongest narrative in the first and second quarter of 2024, noted Sandra Leow, the founder of Kaito AI, in a post on X.
Narrative matters in crypto, and we all love to track narratives.
Before we dive into the juicy bits, here’s a short of recap of @_kaitoai's narrative mindshare methodology. To put it simply, our narrative mindshare indicator measures the social dominance of narrative relative… pic.twitter.com/fz85SaMROZ
— Sandra 🌊 (@sandraaleow) May 15, 2024
She shared data that shows the narrative mindshare of memes grew 53.24% since January and dominates 13.32% of the overall market, second only to AI which dominates 27.99% at present.
The strongest growing narrative, however, was SocialFi, which grew 65.31% since the start of the year, driven by the revival of projects like Friendtech and newer players in the space like Fantasystop.
To the downside, the narrative around BRC20 tokens saw a 58.45% decline, followed by GameFi, which declined 33.70% over the same period.
“AI + memes have consistently been a dominant narrative since the start of the year. Question is whether mindshare continues to hold up for both of these sectors,” noted Sandra, adding that the “question is whether mindshare continues to hold up for both of these sectors.”
In her view, the case for AI is quite clear, given the rollout of OpenAI’s ChatGPT models and how crypto investors have embraced AI-related tokens in the same way that equity investors have taken to Nvidia.
“Memes also generally have no ceiling as it is completely subjected to market trends and culture,” said Sadra.
That view was shared by Mechanism Capital co-founder Andrew Kang, who said in an April X post that this cycle had led to the rise of a new class of memecoins, which he dubs “culture coins.”
Culture Coins: A new class of Memecoins
You could consider all memecoins as coins of culture. Memes themselves are defined as elements of culture that are spread by individuals throughout the world. The first big memecoin, Doge was based on a famous internet meme itself and the… pic.twitter.com/8ZANSXIdIQ
— Andrew Kang (@Rewkang) April 7, 2024
A report from CoinGecko earlier this year also found that the memecoin narrative was 4.6 times more profitable than the next best performing narrative of Real World Assets (RWAs), and 33.3 times more profitable than the layer 2 narrative.
