The Past, Present, and Future of VC Coins and Meme Coins

It is not just the VC coin and meme coin phenomenon that has aroused more thinking

Fu Shaoqing, SatoshiLab, Wanwudao BTC Studio

1. Preface

It is not just the VC coin and meme coin phenomenon that has aroused more thinking. Many well-known people in the industry have also raised similar questions and are trying to find solutions. For example, in the Twitter space event where He Yi answered questions about girlfriend coins, Jason (Chen Jian) asked whether the tokens launched on Binance have a mechanism to solve the problem that the project team sells the tokens as soon as they are listed and then lies flat. There is also the "A Crazy Idea for Token Issuance" recently published by CZ, which is trying to find solutions to related problems.

I think all teams that are truly working hard on projects hope that the market will reward real contributors, rather than allowing Ponzi schemes, scammers, speculators, etc. to take away the dividends of this industry and disrupt its development.

Because VC coins and meme coins serve as good case studies, this article will analyze these two phenomena.

2. The past and present of VC coins

VC coin did not come out of thin air. Its emergence has historical reasons. Although VC coin does not seem perfect now, it played a relatively important role in the beginning, and important projects in the industry have the participation of VC.

2.1. The chaos of ICO in 2017 - a riot of demons

2017 was a key year for the initial coin offering (ICO) in the blockchain field. According to statistics, the amount of ICO financing that year exceeded 5 billion US dollars. In addition to the classic ICO projects introduced below, the author also participated in the ICO of some small projects, and fully felt the madness at that time. It is not an exaggeration to describe it as a swarm of demons. At that time, as long as a project's token was to be ICO, someone would give a platform, and the white paper was well written. It would be immediately snapped up when thrown into some groups. People were crazy and irrational at that time. To exaggerate, even if a pile of shit was thrown into the group, it would be snapped up. If you don'99t believe it, search for the token situation of MLGB (Malego Coin). (This also reflects the powerful power of ICO)

As for the cause of the outbreak , I summarized it as follows through communication with DeepSeek and Chatgpt, as well as my own understanding:

(1) The maturity of coin issuance technology: In particular, the launch of Ethereum has enabled developers to easily create smart contracts and decentralized applications (DApps), which has promoted the rise of ICOs.

(2) There are several other reasons: market demand, the concept of decentralization has gained popularity, people have good expectations, and there is a low threshold for investment.

Several classic cases occurred during this period

(1) Ethereum: Although Ethereum's ICO was conducted in 2014, in 2017, Ethereum's smart contract platform was widely used in the ICO of many new projects. At the same time, this project was also conducted through ICO. Overall, this project is still very good and has now grown into the second largest cryptocurrency in the world of Crypto.

(2) EOS: EOS raised nearly $4.3 billion through a year-long, phased ICO in 2017, becoming one of the largest ICOs of the year. This project has now almost disappeared, partly because of the wrong technical route and partly because of insufficient control over market demand.

(3) TRON: TRON also raised a lot of money in its ICO in 2017. During the period, it was accused of exchanging coins with other projects and plagiarizing them. However, it developed rapidly afterwards and attracted a lot of attention. From this point of view, compared with those projects that ran away, is Sun Ge doing quite well? He has a very accurate grasp of market demand, for example, the revenue of Tron stablecoin. Tron's control of technical implementation and market demand is in sharp contrast to EOS. The development results of Tron are still quite good. If HSR (Hshare, nicknamed "braised pork"), who exchanged coins at the beginning, had kept the share of Tron, the income would be higher than his own project.

(4) Filecoin: Filecoin successfully raised more than $250 million in 2017. Its concept of distributed storage has attracted widespread attention. The founding team, including Juan Benite, is a very prestigious team. This project cannot be said to be a success or a failure, but whether it can develop healthily is a question.

The author personally feels that there are more non-classic cases and they have a greater impact, which is also a major historical reason for the emergence of VC coins.

Problems Exposed

(1) Lack of supervision: