GM HEARTLAND |
With Helium headed to the moon, the rocket ship emoji is out, and the blimp rigid airship emoji is in. 🎈  |
—El Prof, Muhammed & Chad |
TOKEN | PRICE CHANGE | PRICE |
|---|---|---|
Solana ($SOL) | -0.43% | $240.90 |
Helium ($HNT) | +32.52% | $8.68 |
Pyth ($PYTH) | +9.11% | $0.52 |
Save ($SLND) | +2.15% | $1.28 |
(Price changes reflect past 7 days as of 12.6.24)
A central intelligence technology.
The process of breaking down data silos between software vendors and custom built solutions to give a holistic picture of available information.
The powerhaus of the (brain) cell.
Gone are the days when a single token starred in each bull cycle. Now a token stars in each news cycle. And since news cycles today last about 24 hours, and our newsletter goes out just once a week, about half a dozen new stars are minted between each one.
Our beloved Solana, for example, broke its all-time high. It has since come back down to earth, but still hovers well above its familiar $220 price point, which the real OGs will recognize from last cycle. The catalysts were Grayscale’s (fifth) filing (lol) for a spot $SOL ETF, the bullish nature of the incoming federal government, and the overturning of some U.S. sanctions on Tornado Cash. None of these are particularly paradigm-shifting for the token. But, nevertheless, all of the above have me hyped with anticipation for the back half of this bull run.
Then there are the one-hit wonders, like the shitcoins shilled so hard they forced pump.fun to take its live streaming feature offline, much to the dismay of degenerate memecoin speculators and risk-takers everywhere. Or even my beloved $mother, although lately, it has not necessarily been newsworthy for the right reasons. (I won’t even bore you with more updates about $motherland casio devs, who are behind on their product release, all while teasing live-streaming of their own.)
The star of the utility conversation this week isn’t even my inflated hopeful Helium, whose mining token is quickly becoming an arbitrage opportunity for network providers. It’s Ripple ($XRP), also known as your uncle’s favorite boomer coin. (Or, in our circles, Rose, because it smells like the feds.)
Ripple is one of several prominent “alt coins” that have banded together to form a sort of global banking cabal to compete with bigger players like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana, by providing a consortium approach to supplying the next generation of international money software. Or, as Yahoo called them last year, “7 compliant cryptos that could be MASSIVE with ISO 20022 standards”, a truly credible representation.
Snark aside, anyone monitoring the Google trends of various tokens over the last year might have noticed that search interest in XRP has been climbing at a much faster clip than Ethereum or Solana. It broke away back in August, and has only further outpaced them since the election of Donald Trump.
Who watches Google Trends? We do. We are an advertising technology company in the web3 space. This is our edge, Lord. Meanwhile, the X degens, who are discovering with much dismay that TikTokers can pump coins too, may have to revert to monitoring legacy media for the tokens they’re hustling this cycle to catch more tailwinds.
As for Ripple, full disclosure, my family has skin in the game. We used last cycle’s winnings to put a down payment on our first home. Even when Ripple was banned on Coinbase (which is doubling down on the Evil Empire vibes this cycle with their recent Solana slander) we transferred this obvious Fed coin over to our Ledger wallets to hodl, and snagged more along the way.
Honestly, I hope my XRP goes to 0, to make way for a truly decentralized banking solution. But for now, the bad guys keep winning, and I’m not going to risk being poor in that dystopian future.
—El Prof
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C$152.4M YTD revenue.
Global ETP leader.
Behind the meteoric rise of memecoins, there lies a powerful social and technological engine: TikTok.
As Meta continues to become the embodiment of Mark Zuckerberg’s neurotic tendency to sacrifice all shreds of personality in a desperate attempt to fit in, and X devolves into Truth Social without Trump, TikTok has become the chief incubator of internet memes. As a result, it has also become the heart of the memecoin movement.
Take CHILLGUY, for example. Born from a carefree TikTok meme featuring a laid-back dog (pictured above) the token surged massively in recent months — by upwards of 500,000% by some calculations. The coin’s influence extends far beyond the typical crypto space, with endorsements from prominent athletes, celebrities, and even political figures like El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele, whose tweet about the coin garnered 9.5 million impressions.
Of course, trying to reverse engineer a memecoin’s success is like trying to learn the Twinkie recipe by eating one. Still, there are a couple clear reasons why TikTok is becoming the most logical and effective means of pumping memes.
Unlike X (formerly Twitter), which attracts a more technical, crypto-focused community, TikTok thrives on bite-sized, shareable content, more likely to spark viral trends. This makes it an ideal platform for pump.fun creators, who can find an audience of millions within days. Even better, an audience of young degens, allergic to in-depth analysis.
Beyond that, LMAO founder Suki Yang points out that the prevalence of hustle culture and digital trend ownership among Gen Z social media users is a particularly conducive combination for memecoin adoption. And Nicolai Søndergaard, a research analyst at blockchain analytics firm Nansen, recently observed that Gen Z’s “financial nihilism” and skepticism toward traditional finance (TradFi) make TikTok the ideal platform for new crypto trends. He went on to add that TikTok has become an “idea generator” for the crypto world, while crypto Twitter merely serves to amplify and run with those trends.
This dynamic is not only visible on social media but also in crypto applications like Phantom Wallet, where users rush to invest in trending tokens without deep analysis. The mere appearance of a meme in the trending section can spark a flurry of activity, further solidifying the idea that in the memecoin market, success is often driven more by viral attention than by traditional market fundamentals.
If last cycle was dominated by crypto Twitter, this is shaping up to be the cycle of crypto TikTok. It has given rise to a new generation of investors who prioritize immediacy, social validation, and financial independence over such gauche TradFi ideas as, you know, analysis and long-term planning.
—Muhammed
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