#336: More Memecoin Shenanigans

🐸 Featuring APU, Circle on Shape, Security, and ArtRun

More memecoin shenanigans

As memecoin mania has continued to dominate headlines, it has dominated a good chunk of my mindshare as well this week (it wasn’t on purpose, I promise!). Fortunately, there have been several developments from the traditional memecoin concept that are worth noting and sharing.

But before we get to that there was one set of exchanges on my timeline that happened to me yesterday.

I got raided by the APU community

Yesterday I shared a segment of my last piece, The Memecoin Super(onboarding)cycle on X.

I don’t post on X a lot, so I expected to get a few likes here and there. However, shortly after posting several members of the APU memecoin community started replying to the post and promoting their token.

I mentioned APU in the piece, calling out their BKFC partnership to promote the memecoin, but that was nowhere to be found in the screenshot. My conclusion was that either 1) an APU community member read my piece and told the community to reply to the post or 2) an APU community regularly searches for posts (or uses a bot) with the term ‘memecoin’ and gets the community to reply.

A small sample of the replies on the post.

Was I going viral? Nope. I was being raided. NOT by the FBI lol.

Raiding happens on social media when a community coordinates efforts to amplify their presence, usually on posts from influencers or notable figures. However, as I kept engaging their replies and poking the bear (er, frog?), I actually got some more info that I found interesting.

APU’s other sponsorships

In my Memecoin Super(onboarding)cycle piece, I highlighted one partnership that the APU community recently secured with BKFC. In fact, APU had already secured several partnerships prior to this:

• 10 Matchroom Boxing fights starting August 31 with their logo in the ring, promotions across social content, and hospitality experiences for the community

• 2024/25 season sponsor of Prima Pramac Racing MotoGP (think F1 of motorcycle racing) - Prima Pramac is the #2 team in the MotoGP standings, and has the top individual racer in the league currently.

• 2024/25 season sleeve sponsor of Udinese Calcio, an Italian football team in the Serie A league.

This sponsorship strategy reminds me of Red Bull back in the day when they sponsored (and still do) extreme sports events and athletes, and have since expanded to owning teams.

It’s a far-fetched thought now, but it wouldn’t be that surprising if a successful memecoin community eventually purchases a sports team. This has happened before already with DeGods purchasing a basketball team in 2022.

The Udinese Calcio sponsorship is particularly interesting because the sleeve sponsorship doesn’t just appear IRL, it appears in the FIFA video game too.

And if that’s the case, I assume this may happen with the MotoGP24 video game as well.

As silly and debatably ineffective sponsorships might be, I think a memecoin executing one of these sponsorships is more effective than a brand doing the same. As a hypothetical with my local NBA team: Sustainability and legal considerations aside, which jersey sponsor would elicit a stronger consumer response?

The dog could wear a Golden State Warriors themed beanie too!

In the case of APU, these sponsorships seem to be the work of one individual, the same one that funded the BKFC sponsorship. Some memecoin communities will have whales or certain community members who will go beyond the extra mile to increase the likelihood of success.

Point is, a new wave of sponsorships and partnerships is happening as memecoin valuations and grow. And if they continue to grow, the scale of these sponsorships will move up the ladder of prominence.

Circle on Shape

Yesterday, a memecoin in the form of a circle launched on the new creator-focused Shape network: Circle on Shape.

The first in your face difference between Circle and any other memecoin is the fact that…it’s a circle. Instead of a chart showing a line going up and down, Circle’s market cap is represented by the size of the circle.

Higher market cap, bigger circle.

Smaller market cap, smaller circle.

Still a memecoin, but refreshing take on how the value of the memecoin is represented. And the creator even commented on how stupid the idea was.

Similar to other memecoins, the superpower of Circle is its composability as a meme. In this case, it’s a shape and object instead of a character, giving the community a lot of room play around with it. And because Circle launched on Shape, a creator/artist-focused ecosystem, many of the early community consists of artists providing an unfair content advantage despite the lack of lore around the meme.

In just a day, popular digital artists have remixed their own version of Circle in their own signature style.

Vinnie Hager, Odious, die with the most likes, Beeple

Whether the Circle continues to grow or not remains to be seen, but the concept challenges the traditional stereotypes of a memecoin and at minimum we got some cool art from it.

Security

Security is a performance art piece created by SHL0MS, that’s sorta like Banksy if he started his career in the 2020’s. He’s known his performance artwork such as blowing up a Lamborghini and creating a hoax about Gmail shutting down. This thread provides a good background.

How does Security work?

• There’s a van driving around Frieze London art fair. You know what they say about sketchy vans…enter them!

• People enter the van and can check the price for a share of security and physically/verbally initiate a transaction by paying for a share

• The more shares purchased, the higher the price gets. This is similar to the concept of bonding curves that used to be popular back in the day, with friendtech being the most prominent recent example.

• Once payment is complete, a ‘Certificate of Non-Share Purchase’ is physically printed

The closing price of Security was $27.39, and the closing price of Security today is $37.62.

Security clearly isn’t a memecoin, but it does have similar attributes and brings the emotions and concepts associated with them into a physical format. And inevitably, they’ll be going onchain after the IRL performance concludes, giving Security a second life for frenzied speculation.

ArtRun

ArtRun is a minting platform built on top of Zora that brings a memecoin frontend element to the creator-focused minting platform it’s hooked up to.

The content on ArtRun and Zora are the same, but the frontend and how the content is portrayed are significantly different.

Some notable differences upon first glance on the homepage:

• ArtRun focuses less on the content and more on factors such as market cap, price per token (each NFT), total NFTs minted, and time left to mint, if applicable

• Each piece of content is called an artcoin

• Each piece of content has a ticker

The differences becomes even more obvious when you look at a specific artcoin, such as Limitless.

Does it make some people feel icky? Yes.

Could this help creators? Yes! Secondary trading volume creates fees which are split 75/25 to the creator and Zora.

Where is this all going?

What’s notable is everything I’ve mentioned in today’s piece has happened in the past 1-2 days. Whether all this energy fizzles away in a couple weeks or accelerates even more remains to be seen.

Tying this back to my last piece, particularly with onboarding new and existing users, the types of mechanics memecoins inherently have will become increasingly prevalent. If a new crypto user started with memecoins, they’re going to have a different foundation of knowledge about crypto, web3, and dApps than someone who started off with NFTs or DAOs.

Breaking down the ‘I entered crypto from memecoins’ cohort, someone that starts off from an app like Moonshot, an app that abstracts away a lot of the complexities of blockchain and wallets, will have a different understanding of crypto than someone that entered memecoins through pump.fun, DexScreener, Jupiter, and BullX.

Just like how every platform and project has some sort of quest or points system over the past year, will we start seeing more memecoin-like features pop up everywhere? I guess we’ll have to wait and find out.

See you next week!