#277: Dogwifhat ($WIF)

🧢 How did this memecoin go from 0 to $2 billion 3 months?

Yesterday I was conflicted. What will I write about tomorrow? I had two topics I was particularly keen on covering, but wasn’t sure which to write about first. They didn’t deserve to be jammed into one combined piece. I left it up to X to decide for me (I also posted on Warpcast but no one replied, not cool enough I guess):

WIF it is! I’ll cover the Blast incentive structure next week.

Before we dive in

I want to set a few things straight so we don’t get it twisted:

• I purchased WIF a few months ago and still hold it. It’s not a life-changing amount and I don’t expect it to be.

• I’m writing about WIF because I think there are unique lessons to be learned about the meme behind the memecoin, not because I want you to buy some.

• I won’t be able to cover everything about WIF and will miss some details. The goal is to cover the meat and potatoes, not the 10-course meal.

• I’ve covered memes and PEPE before, and I believe that understanding memes is important and will only increase in importance as it pertains to society, culture, and growth/marketing strategies. Memes aren’t for everybody, but it’s helpful to know people who get them.

• I initially considered writing about WIF over a month ago, but decided to hold off because it didn’t feel compelling enough. As memecoins have blown up over the past couple of weeks and taken up more mindshare in the space, I figured it would be worth covering as a topic that deserves to be understood better vs. looked down upon. It’s ok to have the conflicting views of ‘I think memecoins are dumb and they’ll go to 0’ and ‘a lot of people enjoy owning and buying memecoins’.

With that said, what does the state of memes and memecoins look like? There are currently 6 memecoins in the top 100 coins by market cap, and 3 of them are from this cycle.

This is remarkable no matter how you slice it. The memecoin darlings of last cycle, DOGE and SHIB, round out the top 10 🤯

So with the backdrop set, how did WIF get to where it is today?

The origins of WIF and how meme templates work

Dogwifhat started in 2019 from a viral photo of a Shiba Inu wearing a beanie, literally a dog with (or ‘wif’ in dog speak I guess) a hat.

The gaming community adopted the picture and created different variations of the meme template, particularly the hat. We see this with many other popular memes that have become templatized. A simple example of this is Drake’s iconic Hotline Bling music video scene which is a popular meme template still used today:

Memes typically have a visual component and/or text component. With the Drake meme, the static component is Drake on the lefthand side. The ‘canvas’ is on the right-hand side, which can be either text or image.

Basic, right? We have seen hundreds if not thousands of memes in our lives at this point.

Why WIF is a unique meme

What makes WIF special? The meme has the same image + text components, but has different layers to it, which are manifested in different ways. Let’s start by literally breaking down dogwifhat into its separate parts:

Another way to think about it is the dogwifhat meme is composable…just like tokens! People can reuse and recombine the meme in different contexts, amplifying virality, creativity, and influence. The dog, word, and hat are separate Lego blocks that can be used in various ways.

Dog as the Lego block

When you view the dog by itself, it’s just a cute dog. It’s missing one crucial feature though: A hat! As the dogwifthat meme proliferated as a memecoin, plenty of memes using the same dog with a different ‘hat’ popped up.

This is how the original dogwifhat meme proliferated. Different gamers took the dog as the template and put different eSports team logos on the beanie.

Source

The WIF version of the dog template goes beyond the beanie background and completely replaces the beanie with different hats. The Harry Potter version in the upper left sticks out to me because it ignores the hat rule and focuses on the forehead scar, glasses, and scarf, which also works well if the viewer is familiar with the meme.

Wif as the Lego block

When we think of memes, they are usually visual-first. However, dogwifhat has grown to a point where wif (replacing the word ‘with’) is a meme in itself, referencing the ‘parent’ meme.

In this small sample of posts, people are using ‘wif’ or the ‘wifhat’ phrasing to proliferate the meme.

Off the top of my head, here are a few more:

• You’re either wif us or you’re against us

• Would you like fries wif that?

• We’re leaving wif or wifout you

And of course, you can easily apply the visual elements of WIF to those phrases.

Hat as the Lego block

This is the most popular component of the meme. It’s all about the hat and the hat can go on…anything. Whether it’s on other animals, logos, or people’s heads, the hat became instantly recognizable within crypto.

Note that this isn’t the first time the broader crypto/web3 community, including companies, participated in a meme or cultural moment.

The post on the left was particularly notable to me because in a way WIF was vampire attacking the credibility of the other memes the hat was on, making the hat itself more credible. Putting a hat on a photo, logo, meme, or person is easy. Doing the same with Hotline Bling Drake is much harder.

The ultimate representation of the hat (so far) was shown last month. Someone knitted a 15 pound hat and put it on the Wall Street Bull. No, this isn’t photoshop.

This is arguably one of the strongest manifestations of a meme I’ve seen, short of putting a hat on the Statue of Liberty or displaying it on the Las Vegas Sphere lol.

On top of that, the hat doesn’t have to be represented visually. It can be referenced in written form as well. The hat itself is composable in the format it’s represented. Again, this is hard for a meme to (eg: you can’t do this with Hotline Bling Drake).

Putting it together

At this point, this is probably what you’re thinking:

Oh yeahhhh, we’re gonna do some more. Let’s hammer this point home.

Let’s do a live example (I didn’t prep this part lol) of Hotline Bling Drake x WIF. How can we use each of the components of WIF — dog, wif, hat on top of the Drake meme?

Ok I’m having too much fun, here’s a few others off the top of my head. Brownie points to you if know these other meme templates.

Note how in some variations of the Drake x WIF memes, the left panels are the same but the right panels are different. In other variations, the left panels are different while the right panels are the same.

Repeat after me: Composability

From 0 to $2 billion

So for those who are bewildered at how a literal dog with a hat could reach a $2 billion market cap at its peak and think we’re all idiots (we are), I hope this helps clarify one of the reasons for its meteoric rise. This is on top of other reasons such as prominent influencers and traders who hold a significant amount and got in early promoting it.

Are there other coins that exhibit similar attributes? One sticks out to me: MOG (which I have referenced before but for different reasons). If you’re curious enough, check them out and note the parallels in the way the memes and symbols are used to capture attention. I’ll leave it at that to preserve my sanity 🙃

And if you’re a builder and wondering WTF DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH GROWTH OR MARKETING?!

Having a meme strategy is becoming more than a ‘that’s nice to have’ or ‘it doesn’t make sense for our business’. It can’t replace a good product, but it can materially augment acquisition and content marketing strategies (Monad is a great example of this).

See you next week!