Memecoins
Find winning culture
AB updates are for informational purposes only. Do not construe any of the following as investment, financial, or other advice. You make your own decisions.
Disclaimer: AB Research is a culmination of research & insights from the diverse capacity of the AB Team. Ultimately our focus & mission is financial freedom. This is a special edition. Whitetail owns Base Gods and Miggles.
Dogecoin is the original memecoin. Created in December 2013 by Billy Markus & Jackson Palmer, it was inspired by the "Doge" meme which features a photo of a Shiba Inu named Kabosu. The photo is one taken by Kabosu's owner, Atsuko Sato, in 2010 where Kabosu is seen with a somewhat quizzical expression, looking directly at the camera.
This image became iconic in the meme community before being adopted as the logo for Dogecoin. There is no supply cap for this coin and it inflates at 5 billion tokens per year (~3.4%). As of December 2024, a single doge is trading at $0.41 with a total market cap of $60B. Dogecoin is worth more than Ford, Hilton, BNY Mellon, and SnowFlake. This is due to its provenance and creation of the Department Of Government Efficiency (D.O.G.E) led by Elon Musk & Vivek Ramaswamy.
How did this meme survive to be a 7 most valuable crypto asset? Why are 3 out of the top 20 crypto assets memes?
People might view buying memecoins as pure luck and burning money. I actually believe it has higher EV than sports betting. AB believes that it is possible to identify these strong communities (or cults) as they develop. We look at successful and emerging memes in crypto.
One of the big winners over the past two years has been $PEPE. The Pepe the Frog meme was launched in 2005 when artist Matt Furie introduced the character in his indie comic book "Boy's Club." However, it became a notable internet meme around 2008 when it started gaining popularity on sites like Myspace, Gaia Online, and 4chan. In 2016 Rare pepes were early NFTs minted on the Bitcoin protocol.
PEPE was launched on April 17th, 2023. The launch was unique due to a few factors. There was no presale. 93% of tokens were airdropped to the community. The LP tokens were burned and the contract was renounced, meaning the developer no longer controlled the contract. The community even gifted Matt Furie $600,000 for using the image (which he dumped and is now worth more than $24,000,000). The Pepe community was strong prior to crypto and people that understood or invested in PEPE were rewarded handsomely.
One of the strongest communities on Base is Mr. Miggles. A cat that was featured in a Coinbase ad that went viral. Since the launch, the Miggles community has been developed by Purr Labs and agreed to multiple deals with Coinbase.
Purr labs is a new entertainment company focused on onchain IP monetization and utilization. This is a new corporate strategy enabled by blockchain and Jesse Pollak, the creator of Base, often comments on the posts. Coinbase shop is already selling Miggles gear. There clearly is a relationship between these two entities in which Coinbase is supporting Miggles/Purr Labs.
Mister Miggles was initially featured on coinbase in a mintable NFT on July 17th, 2024. Since then, there are videos of coinbase executives, including Brian Armstrong, discussing how the relationship with Miggles is intentional.
On Halloween, Coinbase featured Mr. Miggles in a remix challenge that led to over 1.5k creations and 24k mints. We view this as a prime example in online community building.
Finally, Mr Miggles was randomly featured in a coinbase wallet ad. There is no need to include him in this ad. At all. But they do anyways. Bullish.
The technical term for this is a “bread trail”. Use this information as you want. Can only bring a horse to water. At AB, we’ve already called our shot.
Mr Miggles also has an 10K PFP NFT collection (floor 0.044E). For communities with both tokens and IP, analysis is required to evaluate which one is in better positioned to accrue value.
For example, I own Miggles token not PFP because the token is more liquid and I don’t find the NFTs that compelling as a use case. Mostly I prefer token over NFTs due to liquidity. For our next community, I own Base gods NFT not the community’s TYBG tokens. This is because I believe that Base gods represent the premier NFTs on Base and that as the L2 continues to develop, these will be the sacred artifacts of the network. There are only 807 and magnitudes less for sale.
The Base god cult is one of the more unique communities we’ve come across. It’s building an onchain religion after Base god (Brian Armstrong). The community is a year old and has great lore, you can literally spend hours reading basegod.fun.
809 Base gods were launched in January 2024. The limited quantity and 0% creator fees (Howey test) piqued our interest. 809 is important because Base main net launched on August 9th 2023. The Bald Alliance is limited to base gods only. Below is a prediction from the largest Base god holder (+15% of supply)
I like the NFTs personally so I will continue to use it as my PFP regardless of price. Besides the art, the low edition size for a PFP collection and lack of creator royalties piqued our interest before we dove into the TYBG lore. The current floor for Base gods is ~1.5E or $6,000. This is up from the low of 0.2-0.4E this summer.
Jesse Pollak has committed to shaving his head at $10B TVL on Base which was recently reached. The attention this brings will grow the TYBG community. Our bet is that this stays one of the premier communities on Base as the network continues to grow. People like to flex. Base gods is the ultimate flex on Base.
There are always winning communities in life. From Football to NVDA to Bitcoin. Being in the right place with a certain mixture of people creates greatness. This will continue to happen onchain as people can receive direct financial compensation. People might say this is bad, we view this as building the strongest communities just ask Bitcoin. Winning communities are always being built and cultivated. It is not always a surprise if you’re paying attention.
Cheers,
Whitetail & Co
AB updates are for informational purposes only. Do not construe any of the following as investment, financial, or other advice. You make your own decisions.