How AI is pushing memecoins into their next big phase
GOAT still has plenty of ground to make up on major memecoins PEPE and DOGE
Deacons docs/Shutterstock modified by Blockworks
This is a segment from the Empire newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe.
Thanks to the success of GOAT, there’s a new trend in town: AI memecoins.
Whether it’s a lasting trend is still up in the air — and you could argue that it’s far too soon even to debate this topic — but it at least can’t be ignored (if you’re active in crypto).
As of now, nothing’s coming close to GOAT and Truth Terminal, but K33 analyst David Zimmerman pointed out that “the staying-power test for GOAT and its closely associated tokens now comes after this first major selloff. While the market decides this through price discovery, the debates on X over the substance of this new narrative are deafening.”
For Zimmerman and K33, it doesn’t matter if AI memecoins are truly here for good.
“Whether it’s a cute animal, an obscure new DeFi project, or an LLM-associated memecoin, they are almost all best simplified to one thing — momentum-trade opportunity. Crypto produces strange new narratives on a regular basis, but they can all be boiled down to momentum or volatility. A quick look at GOAT we see an abundance of big moves backed by significant volume for relatively small onchain tokens,” Zimmerman wrote.
And if we’re just looking at the data, AI memecoins have quite a ways to go to catch up to DOGE, PEPE or any of the major memecoins.
Zimmerman’s analysis is simple: Ignore the noise.
“If the optimistic proponents of AI memecoins turn out to be correct, and we are at the beginning stages of a rising tide that ushers in a new ‘easy mode’ period akin to the DeFi Summer of 2020, then we have months of opportunities in a budding sector ahead. If the opposite occurs, then one does not want to be left holding the AI memecoin bag,” he said.
Start your day with top crypto insights from David Canellis and Katherine Ross. Subscribe to the Empire newsletter.
Explore the growing intersection between crypto, macroeconomics, policy and finance with Ben Strack, Casey Wagner and Felix Jauvin. Subscribe to the Forward Guidance newsletter.
Get alpha directly in your inbox with the 0xResearch newsletter — market highlights, charts, degen trade ideas, governance updates, and more.
The Lightspeed newsletter is all things Solana, in your inbox, every day. Subscribe to daily Solana news from Jack Kubinec and Jeff Albus.