Author: Haseeb Qureshi, Dragonfly Managing Partner; Translation: Golden Finance xiaozou

In 2021, We think GameFi should be like Axie Infinity. This also means embedding tokens in MOBA, MMORPG or card games. The vast majority of these projects fail to attract users. But perhaps the most viral crypto “game” has been right under our noses all along: crypto trading itself. Crypto trading is a fun, viral social activity that our industry provides, attracting hundreds of millions of people into the crypto game.

But in just the past few years, the crypto trading game has become less attractive to ordinary players - volatility has dropped significantly, and technology has become more Complex, the underwriting of these assets now requires more specialization than ever before.

Let’s take a look at Meme coins. Meme coin is a gamified crypto trading simulation that retains only the most primitive elements of crypto trading. There are no code audits, no governance forums, no technical roadmap—just slap-in-the-face volatility, rug-pulling, and memes. The rules are simple: follow some weirdo on Twitter, watch and participate with all your heart, and hope for the best. Like all viral games, meme currency trading is social, transcends languages ​​and cultures, and is fun to watch at any skill level.

I once played an old NES trading simulation game, Wall Street Kid, in which you played a stock trader, trading "Yapples" or "Reebucks" ” and other randomly selected fake stocks. There is no such thing as real research or analysis. It simulates financial fantasy without any real work involved.

Meme Coin is a modern version of the massively multiplayer version of this type of trading simulator: full of chaos, attractive fantasy, and highly addictive.

If you understand Meme coins as a game, then suddenly, many The narrative about meme coins will collapse. The idea that meme coin games are taking market share from tech/venture coins is nonsense – it’s like saying Axie Infinity is doing the samethings. The meme coin trading game drives demand for block space, as does any GameFi success. This is good for all the underlying factors of Meme coins!

Even in the heyday of Meme coins, Meme coins were not mainstream in the market. Ahead of the U.S. presidential election, most trading still occurs in the “tech” crypto space, with the Binance trading pair peaking at around 25% of meme coin trading volume. The industry is large enough to accommodate different companies at the same time.

This is why the financial nihilism story about Meme coins never made sense to me. Even though the Meme coin game is fun, we have to remember that most people don’t want to trade Meme coins. Memecoin maxis found this difficult to understand. But most people get into the crypto world because they believe in the technology. Yes, they really believe crypto will change the world.

What reason do they have for not believing it? That’s what we’ve been telling them — that’s what Satoshi Nakamoto told them — and what Elon Musk and Donald Trump have told them. They believe in us. So it's no surprise that they want to invest in technology. Cryptocurrency is first and foremost a futuristic project.

Meme coins have retreated somewhat in recent weeks as volatility and a frenzied trend of rising but not falling have returned. Regular crypto trading has become attractive to retail investors again, and as a result, Meme coin trading volume has dropped to 10% of Binance’s trading volume in recent days. But at some point, it will show its charm again, and Meme Coin will once again become a more interesting game for those who want to get involved.

But if you understand it as a game, then you can more clearly see Meme coin trading’s place in the crypto pantheon. The meme game works extremely well because it plays to the strengths of cryptocurrencies. It's chaotic, disruptive, and the onboarding experience is great, so it's no surprise that it's attracted tens of millions of people into the crypto world. Meme coin trading taps directly into the core fantasy of cryptocurrency being fun.

So we should give up on the idea that Meme coins are a rebellion against the crypto industry . The correct understanding should be that meme currency trading has as much of a rebellious spirit as the cryptocurrency itself. Meme coins are not a rebellion against the core beliefs of cryptocurrencies, but a representation and celebration of them.