From DOGE to PEPE, the path of creative equity in Memecoin

In-depth exploration of Memecoin from the joke of DOGE to the rise of PEPE, analyzing the ideals and realities in the pursuit of creative equity, revealing the challenges and opportunities behind capital manipulation and technological evolution. (Background: Dog Hat Coin $WIF 'Pink Hat' sold for 6.8 BTC! Buyer BAGS CEO: 800,000 USD for 1 billion meme narratives) (Background information: The trading secrets of meme coin whales: the gambling and manipulation under the high returns of Memecoin) From the joke of Dogecoin to the myth of 'fair launch': The creation code of memes - in 2013, as a satire of the frenzy of cryptocurrency speculation, programmer Jackson Palmer and Billy Markus created Dogecoin using a Japanese Shiba Inu meme. No one expected this 'joke coin' to spread like a virus in the Reddit community, where users tipped excellent creators, crowdfunded the Jamaican bobsled team's Olympic expenses, and initiated the absurd campaign 'Send Dogecoin to the Moon.' This completely spontaneous community behavior unexpectedly gave birth to the purest model of fairness in cryptocurrency history, with no white paper, no team allocation, and 100 billion tokens solely produced through mining, allowing everyone to participate from the same starting line. Ten years later, Dogecoin's market value stabilized at the tens of billions of dollars level, and people finally realized that the 'equality' of meme coins never lay in the code, but in the hands of users who stayed up late spreading memes. However, capital quickly rewrote this idealistic experiment. On the day when 'Dogecoin Father' Elon Musk jokingly called himself the 'Father of Dogecoin' on SNL in 2021, the price plummeted by 34%, trapping countless retail investors who had bought in at high prices. This darkly humorous twist revealed the fatal contradiction of meme coins: they rely on community sentiment for survival, yet are easily affected by celebrity effects and capital manipulation. Take the Bonk coin of 2023, for example, which claimed to distribute half of its 50 trillion tokens to Solana ecosystem contributors, attempting to replicate Dogecoin's decentralized gene. However, the definition of 'contributors' was vague, and a large amount of tokens ultimately flowed into early institutional wallets, with a significant volatility of 70% on the first day of listing. Combined curves and liquidity traps: Inequality wrapped in algorithms. Platforms like pump.fun simplify token creation to 'done in three minutes,' making the issuance of meme coins appear democratic. However, the 'combined curve pricing model' that pops up before clicking the 'create' button hides mathematical traps that most people do not understand. This algorithm links price and circulation, superficially creating a fair mechanism of 'buying pressure pushing the price naturally up,' but in reality, it creates new inequalities. Data from a certain cat-themed meme coin 'fair launch' in 2023 showed that the top 100 traders averaged a profit of 300% through front-running trades, while subsequent participants faced a loss rate of as high as 82%. Comparison of meme coin launch models and their impact on equality. More concealed manipulations occur in liquidity pools. The 2022 Squid Game token crash is still fresh in everyone's memory. Developers paired the token with Ethereum, then pulled all liquidity at once when the price surged, rendering the tokens in retail investors' hands worthless code. This 'rug pull' scam has become a standard procedure in the meme coin field: first attracting funds with a promise of '100% liquidity locked,' then artificially inflating prices with false community hype, before suddenly deleting social accounts to abscond with the money. Data from blockchain security company CertiK indicates that in 2023, over 1,200 meme coin projects 'pulled the rug,' with an average lifespan of just 4.7 days and a total amount involved reaching 4.3 billion USD. The ideals and realities of DAO governance: when community voting degenerates into a 'whale game.' In the face of endless scams, DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) were once seen as a salvation for meme coins. The NeoPepe project white paper promised 'community votes decide every decision, developers have no privileges,' but when the community voted on whether to burn 50% of the tokens, early 'whales' holding 30% of the tokens united to veto the proposal, rendering the 12,000 votes from ordinary holders meaningless. This kind of 'seemingly decentralized, but actually centralized' governance dilemma is everywhere in the meme coin field. The 'community burn plan' of Shiba Inu (SHIB) seemed democratic, but in practice, 90% of the burn volume came from ordinary retail investors, while early whale wallets remained untouched. The irreconcilable contradictions within the meme coin community led to this governance failure. On one hand, they must rely on the 'decentralized' label to attract believers; on the other hand, without a core team to guide the project, chaos easily ensues. In 2023, a well-known frog-themed meme coin community had disagreements on 'whether to go public on centralized exchanges,' with supporters and opponents arguing on Discord, resulting in the resignation of seven core developers, bringing the project to a standstill. Cryptocurrency researcher Laura Shin once said, 'Meme coin communities are like wild parties; when the music stops, no one knows who will clean up the mess.' Regulatory gray areas: when 'non-securities' status becomes a shield for fraud. The U.S. SEC classified meme coins as 'non-securities' intending to give innovation breathing space, but scammers took it as a protective charm. In 2023, the TRUMP coin leveraged political hype to inflate coin prices for profit. The SEC could not classify it as a security, making it difficult to intervene, resulting in 12,000 investors losing over 80 million USD. Regulatory loopholes have spawned more covert manipulation tactics. A team first created ten similar meme coins, deliberately allowing nine of them to fail, and when investors trusted the tenth one, they absconded with the money under the guise of 'cross-chain migration' or 'contract upgrades'. Ironically, some projects have used regulatory loopholes to actively launch marketing campaigns. A so-called 'compliant meme coin' launched in early 2024 prominently stated in its white paper, 'This project does not comply with the SEC's definition of securities,' but sneakily added in the disclaimer that 'no returns are guaranteed.' Ordinary investors find it hard to recognize the real risks behind this 'compliance packaging + high-risk implication' rhetoric. Former SEC commissioner Hester Peirce warned, 'Saying meme coins are not securities does not mean they are safe investments; they could be a hundred times more dangerous than securities.' Survival guide for adventurers: how to protect yourself in the meme coin frenzy. Although fraught with risks, meme coins still entice countless people to join the frenzy. If you must participate, remember these hard-earned lessons: do not trust the promises of 'anonymous teams'; 92% of rug-pull projects hide their identities; carefully check liquidity lock proof, ensuring that the fund pool is managed by a third-party platform and cannot be controlled by the project team; also be wary of sudden surges of 'dark horses,' as 87% of meme coins that surged over 1000% in 2023 revealed their true nature within 72 hours. Real opportunities often hide in the less noisy corners. Dogecoin has demonstrated over ten years that the value of meme coins never lies in price curves but in the cultural significance continuously created by the community. PEPE...