In 2017 and 2021, we witnessed the rise and crash of memecoins, however we called them differently: ICOs and liquidity mining. Artists have been responding to the ebbs, flows, hypes and collapses of coins since early on. Artcoins have existed before the ERC20 standard.
In 2014, Nili Lerner, through Counterparty, issued 1000,000 “Art-Coins'', appropriating brand names like Coca Cola and eBay, all backed by the value of her existing physical artwork. Sarah Meyohas’ early version of Bitchcoin (2015) were “regular tokens”.
Clickmine by Sarah Friend is a clicker game that “Mined” an hyperinflationary ERC-20 by clicking frantically with your mouse. That same year, One Token by Sam Hart, Jared Pereira, and Saraswathi Subbaraman proposed an exploration of scarcity through an ERC-20 token.
In 2018, Jonas Lund tokenised his practice through the JLT, Jonas Lund Token around collective governance for his artistic practice. Around that time as well, we got sanguine: Kevin Abosch created an ERC-20, and 100 prints of the contract address made with his own blood.
In 2020 we saw FOMO3D take Reddit by storm, proposing a dystopian penny auction that dragged many. And the best summer of our lives came along: the 2020 DeFi Summer, where we spent months liquidity mining, refreshing ourselves by dipping our toes into Pool2, all thanks to YAM, Based, Sushi, and many more. SBF would come into the pools and megafarm them, leaving us with only 500% APY. Tough times. We now stand in the shoulders of those giants fitted with telegram chats flourishing of the dankest stickers that I have treasured till now.
The DeFi summer brought new riches into our wallets. As any regular rich person would, in 2021 we started collecting art. NFTs, to be precise. Then we started collecting memes, and later we started collecting feet pics, the downward spiral continued. SBF had gotten bigger, he was somehow a guru, and we all acquired a collective amnesia that was really fast cured when his house of cards tumbled. Financial nihilism wasn’t something that the earlier foodcoins, memecoins and artcoins were created upon, but now, we had it: if this guy made everything mean nothing, then let’s spiral more into more nothingness.
Fast forward to 2023, the year we decided it was all about the nothingmentals and none about the fundamentals. Alongside the many Shiba inu derivatives alongside came $PEPE, shilled by Pauly0X and Ryder Ripps, together with many others. GPT-4 learned how to build coins, as artist Rhett proved with $TURBO. Commenting on this phenomena, artist Sterling Crispin launched CAP$ and Reversible. Figure31 explored a social coordination game with Reaper’s Gambit, and Stevie P did the same with Money Making Opportunity.
We entered 2024 with a new wave of coins, ones that felt a lot like restoring the vibes of the 2020 DeFi summer, and it felt good. 747 $CRASH worldbuilding Boeings, airports and bringing back aesthetics and elevated the game. That cute dog with the woolen hat entered the game with $WIF. Solana came in strong, Phantom wallet to support. Jeo Boden showed up, ready for prime-time. Number went up for Jeo, number of voters went down for Joe. And then the gates of hell, which in this industry, are more like revolving doors of hell, opened again. $JENNER catapulted us to new levels of cringe, a Fremdschämen that’s too much to endure, no matter how comitted to the bit one is. $MOTHER by Iggy Azalea brought back some goodness, unapologetically warming up this space to a new kind of bratness. And then, that crescendo of wank called $DJT powered by the posterchildren of Nightmare Blunt Rotation, Barron Trump, Martin Shkreli and Ansem made the news. But either way, that’s not what truly interests me - artists are also using Solana to mint their coins. They make paintings about them (hi Earl!), and also play with the ephemerality and the volatility of markets that only make sense if they were (and they are), just performance art.
Base coins were starting to pop up: $DEGEN led and continues to lead the charge. Of course, the VCs (who I’d love to have them comment on this post), then made up “scenecoins” - tokens of affiliation to a particular scene or club, whatever it is. I think $HIGHER is one of them, but at this point, my gastric ulcer prevents me from digging deeper. Anyways, these scenecoin labellig gave a new raison d'etre to the Art of the Shitcoin.
I always know when things are derailing when this one friend dms me to ask me what kind of use-case could I find for some (random industry) that wants to issue a coin. This time it was Botox. I would have reacted, but my well-paralyzed forehead prevented me from doing so.
I still remember the times where (allegedly!!!!) projects needed to be ready to pay a big chunk of cash to (mostly Asian) CEXs to get listed. And now Coinbase, once seen as a coin kingmaker, lists Base memecoins every single week. The Base twitter replies are now, my cozy place in this world. I never imagined there would be a time when a Coinbase product would usher the next generation of financial nihilism. From a purely sociological perspective, I love to see it,
To finish this rant I’m writing on a plane, I am well aware that I’m giving NGMI energy. I am also well aware that most of this post is probably incorrect. United’s wifi is not working so I’m just writing off the top of my head. I want clapbacks, I want fact-checkers and as many reply guys as possible because this post aims to celebrate the launch of Untitled, a platform by reply guys, for reply guys.
