#322: Pacmoon Burns the Past and Builds For the Future with ARMY
🪖 A memecoin's journey migrating from Blast to Solana
Blast post-TGE
Blast’s TGE (token generation event) in late June came with a bang and faded into distant memory (remember, 1 month on the blockchain = 1 calendar year in these parts), leaving users and mercenaries wondering what was next.
Unfortunately, the Blast team did not have the fast-follows that some hoped for, resulting in stagnation in the ecosystem and users moving their capital and attention elsewhere.
One of the projects impacted by this gradual post-TGE stagnation was Pacmoon, the leading memecoin of the Blast ecosystem. I’ve enjoyed following Pacmoon’s journey since the team has taken a growth-oriented approach, implementing creative approaches to increase attention, engage their community, and proliferate the meme. At the end of the day though, the ecosystem a project decides to build on is as much of a determinant for success as other factors.
And in early August, Pacmoon announced that it was going to make some changes. Although Pacman (founder of Blast and the namesake of Pacmoon) provided more clarity several days later, it was too little too late.
Migrating communities across blockchains is a mass coordination exercise and it’s damn hard, as few have done it successfully at scale. In early 2023, DeGods notably migrated their communities to Ethereum and recently migrated back to Solana. On top of that, the DeGods community recently moved their main channel of communications to Telegram, bringing all their communities under one roof.
Migrating memecoin communities across blockchains is even harder considering the types of people that buy, sell, and hold them, and the sheer number of memecoins out there. If you think NFTs with every animal collection on Noah’s Ark were crazy, memecoins put NFTs to shame. There have been over 1.8 million memecoins launched on Pump.Fun alone. That’s just one memecoin launchpad on one blockchain.
With that uphill battle, how did Pacmoon navigate this migration?
The Decision
A day after the initial announcement, the Pacmoon team shared that they were going to make a decision.
The term ‘the decision’ and the hats with logos scene is a familiar one for sports fans. In 2010, ESPN aired The Decision, a special event where Lebron James announced that he would leave the Cleveland Cavaliers and take his talents to South Beach with the Miami Heat. The hats are a common scene when college recruits announce and sign with the college they’ll be playing for on their hopeful path to becoming a pro.
Pacmoon took a page from the sports world and applied this in a digital manner, using this moment to gain more attention and engagement as the team prepared the eventual move. In these moments, the player makes their decision live, but Pacmoon extended the announcement further, narrowing the 4 choices down to 2.
The (actual) Decision
Ultimately, the team decided to migrate to the Solana, concluding several days of speculation. The announcement of the final decision also provided more context, with each team member breaking down a different element of the decision.
Why Pacmoon is leaving Blast by Lamboland
Tokens, community, and culture are what make a blockchain successful
Unfortunately, Blast didn’t focus on that and didn’t provide social support to projects focused on these parts of the ecosystem
Why Pacmoon is migrating to Solana by Bobby Big Yield
The team believes Solana will be the hub for memecoins
Despite the memecoin saturation on SOL, strong communities will be a primary differentiator and Pacmoon has that
The Solana ecosystem is larger than Blast’s and allows for more partnership opportunities
Why Pacmoon is rebranding to ARMY by Solja Boy
The Pacmoon meme was too niche for the team’s goals
ARMY is a better meme and more appealing to broad audiences
The team intern created a Pacmoon character, Pacnub, which resonated with the community. This was a big unlock for UGC and getting the community involved.
Pacnub has been updated to reflect ARMY’s aesthetic
This approach reminds me of what Azuki did with their AnimeChain announcement, delegating each factor of the decision to a specific team member while increasing the surface area of awareness.
As a part of the migration process, holders have until September 13th to burn their PAC for ARMY, with the visual accompaniment that could be shared for social signaling.
ARMY is born
Today ARMY launched with PAC holders getting airdropped their ARMY allocation, marking a new beginning.
(note: The shooting in the video is the new ARMY character killing the old Pacmoon. Consider it a version of ego death, deep! 🤔)
The scene in the launch video that caught my eye was the new character raising a flag that showed multiple logos of prominent companies and communities in the Solana ecosystem including DeGods, Claynosaurz, Phantom, Magic Eden, Jupiter, Bodoggos, Tensor, Solana Monkey Business, SUPERBASEDD, Mad Lads.
As launch day progressed, the ARMY team periodically posted their character waving the flags of different Solana communities with corresponding backgrounds, showing the composibility of their meme. This reminds me of WIF and why WIF was such a good meme.
The ARMY website also includes a meme bank, soldier style guide, GIFs, and even a Spotify playlist to get you in the mood 😂 Along with the army theme, these resources help the migrated community to quickly rally around the new collective identity, while inviting others in the Solana ecosystem to join in and support.
Will ARMY survive?
ARMY is particularly interesting to me because they’re trying to do what few if any memecoins have done: Migrate to another blockchain and thrive. The team has proven they can also make tough decisions when conditions aren’t in their favor while 99.99% of memecoin devs would have given up by this point to launch something else.
ARMY also doesn’t get the boost of momentum from being a new memecoin on the block since that has already been used up with Pacmoon. Instead, they have to earn the momentum through other means whether it’s partnerships, providing resources to the community, or other creative approaches. All while literally tens of thousands of other memecoins are launched daily and have that new token shine.
Because of this, chances are ARMY will have to take at least a somewhat different approach around marketing and growth if they want to be successful. So with that, I salute the ARMY team for taking another shot at memecoin success. I’m here for it 🫡
See you Thursday!
and they head down to zero lol.