CultureFi: A new cultural carrier, creating a grand narrative that adds value to memes

Authored by: Matti, Zee Prime Capital

Compiled by zhouzhou, BlockBeats

Editor's note: The rise of meme coins today is a good demonstration of the wealth effect and innovation opportunities in the encryption culture. Although meme is still in the early stage of pursuing short-term gains, it provides reference value for future cultural finance and cultural coins. The article proposes to build a meme coin crowdfunding platform, which combines tokens not only with memes, but also with lifestyle products, fashion brands, DeSci and other cultural projects to leverage the power of capital formation. In the future, cultural coins will become the carrier of value creation and distribution.

The following is the main content:

In the narrative of MEME coin, fun and optimism coexist, but its logic is misleading, often interpreting the world with Zero-sum Game thinking, borrowing some uncomfortable Marxist perspectives, emphasizing the redistribution of power and wealth, and ignoring real value creation.

"No need to create value, just take a share." This mentality is widely accepted, and Airdrops seem to have become a kind of "benefit". The more free resources obtained, the stronger the desire. However, opportunities are not obtained out of thin air, but through hard work. The jealousy of the seed round investment opportunity is the rationalization of the MEME coin. However, market access is one thing, and obtaining the seed round investment opportunity depends on individual social capital. In addition, many people overlook the survivorship bias - in fact, most seed round investments are losses.

In the current encryption market, investors, project parties, and users have become accustomed to trading Tokens without actual value through 'meme premiums'. The natural evolution of this market paradigm has led to a more straightforward phenomenon: 'since that's the case, let's just issue Tokens that obviously have no value.' This assumption assumes that there is no real creative intent in the encryption field, but this is not the case - 'You are not a lottery ticket'.

Meme Coin is essentially just a social game of ups and downs, and there's nothing wrong with that. It can be seen as a new type of lottery, vaguely linked to the zeitgeist. However, the rationalization logic behind Meme Coin is disturbing: rebel against the "evil capitalists" who exploit our earnings! Even if there is no value, we are entitled to wealth! We have the right to outperform the market!

However, there is a fundamental difference between wanting to make money and demanding to make money. The narrative of meme coin caters to this hollow desire, ultimately filling the pockets of insiders, who then criticize the so-called 'evil risk investors'. Some equate meme coin with early encryption investments, which is wrong. The difference is that in today's venture-backed false projects, perhaps only a few projects can create trillions of dollars in value in the next decade.

Value will only be distributed.

Value should be claimed.

Value is just the product of the acquisition path.

Fundamentally, meme coins are indeed full of fun, and they even have the potential to become the next trend of escapism in consumer culture. In the future, they may also become agents of value creation, as the tokenization of culture is a powerful and underdeveloped tool. However, the current narrative of meme coins essentially carries a strong Marxist color.

So, how do we transform this narrative into a culture of financial game with positive sum outcomes?

The Rise of Cultural Finance

As the foundation of encryption culture is money, and money is precisely the driving force of desire culture, we may have found the key to breakthrough. Culture (in this case, money) has become a product, which also explains well the emergence of phenomena such as meme coin and platforms like pump.fun.

We typically like to think about the waves that new products and technologies adopt from the 'bundling/unbundling' framework. In September 2023, before the craze of meme coin erupted, we proposed a model and pointed out: 'Perhaps not very intuitive, but the cultural correlation will be traded.'

Our direction is correct, but we failed to anticipate the rapid rise of MEME coin. In hindsight, this is actually reasonable, as the convergence of the wealth effect and a lack of real innovation at the time sparked this phenomenon. However, meme coins are not a dead end. In fact, they provide excellent concept validation for 'CultureFi' and 'culturecoins,' and encryption technology is gradually becoming a powerful cultural incubator.

Meme Coin shows us that brands and distribution channels can be effectively bundled together, which is at the heart of Meme Coin – they are extremely efficient distribution machines. Although the meme coin forms we see today are still very primitive, relying more on short-term quick pump and dump and lacking sustainability, they lay the groundwork for the evolution of cultural coins in the future. Price Pump is undoubtedly the most effective marketing tool, and in the logic of Meme Coin, Price Pump is not only a means, but also an end. But for the culture coin of the future, the price pump is just a tool for a bigger goal, just like Ethereum, Solana, or BTC.

The future of cultural Token will be more diverse - Token is not only the carrier of culture itself, but also the medium of distribution and communication. Here are my revisions to the 'bundling / unbundling' model, although it may not be the final version, it reflects my in-depth thinking and insights on the vertical field of encryption consumption at the moment.

The potential impact of this trend cannot be ignored, and we believe that there is still great innovation space for the issuance of meme coins. Instead of continuing to launch short-term 'missiles' that may be manipulated by 'Pump and Dump' groups, perhaps it is possible to build a dedicated meme coin 'Crowdfunding platform' to transform these tokens into true cultural coins, which are closely related to lifestyle products, rather than just creating funny memes.

This Crowdfunding platform can turn simple price fluctuations games into tools for unlocking products and opportunities (such as access to specific products or content). With Crypto Assets' strong capital formation capabilities, this approach can be used to launch mission-driven cultural coin projects - whether it's fashion brands, record companies, or Decentralization Science (DeSci) projects like $HAIR, or even innovative things we haven't thought of yet.

Prediction markets like Polymarket have already demonstrated the potential to capture value through predicting events, trends, and culture. In today's 24/7 'live reality show' world, people want to stay closely connected to the zeitgeist through financial tools to seek pleasure and dopamine stimulation, which is completely normal.

Today's meme coin is like those early websites of the internet (if they were financialized), they are still in a primitive state, disorderly and with limited functionality. And when culture itself becomes a battle, direct involvement will only further raise the stakes and potential impact of this game.

Soon, cultural coins may develop a practicality, leading us from what is equivalent to the 'pre-industrial era' of the Internet to its rapid industrialization. If you think it was the free expansion that drove the rapid progress of the industrial era, then cryptocurrency is the extension of this freedom provided for the Internet.