Pump and We.Rich are driving the public to issue coins. How many steps are there in total to create a meme with a market value of over one billion?

Author: Frank, PANews

In the bull market where no one picks up the plate, the meme coin track has entered a new stage - mass issuance.

Since April 18th, the daily issuance of tokens on the Solana chain has exceeded 10,000, and Base chain has maintained over 2000 daily trading pairs for several days. The main reason behind this surge in token issuance is the explosive growth of one-click issuance tools represented by Pump.

The rise of Pump creates a wave of mass token issuance

Pump.fun is a meme coin issuance tool and social platform mainly targeting the Solana chain. It supports users in deploying tokens at an extremely low cost (0.02 SOL) without any development experience. Since its launch in January 2024, it has issued over 460,000 tokens. As of May 9th, Pump's cumulative revenue has exceeded $17 million (charging a 1% transaction fee).

Although there have been many one-click issuance products in the industry before, few have achieved the popularity effect of Pump. For ordinary users, Pump has several main advantages:

1. The token issuance process is simple and can be completed in less than 1 minute. To issue a token on Pump, users only need to upload an image, give it a name, write a brief description, and the entire process is extremely simple. Users cannot adjust settings such as issuance quantity and token ownership.

2. Eliminate LP pool fees. Compared to previous one-click issuance products, besides paying a certain deployment cost, ordinary users mainly need to pledge funds in the trading pool. Pump has made an innovation in this regard by not requiring users to deposit funds into the pool during initial deployment. Instead, it automatically sets up an LP pool online worth about $60,000. With the increase in the number of buyers, once the market value reaches $60,000, all buy-in funds will be automatically deposited into the LP pool and Rayium Swap will be launched. This allows some projects to truly have a relatively stable fund pool once the market value exceeds $60,000, rather than relying on the self-awareness and moral standards of the project founder.

3. Concentrated social interaction functions precipitate meme culture. For many meme coins, players may find it most troublesome to understand the community situation and discussion heat about the project (usually requiring active search for communities). On Pump, because a message board-like function is set up, players' discussions about this token can be preserved. This allows latecomers to quickly understand the progress of this meme coin.

Can everyone turn over and become a "sickle"?

In addition to Pump's active performance on Solana, similar products have also begun to appear on other chains. For example, on the Base chain, there are We.rich and FriendTech. We.rich, based on Pump, has more features and UI optimizations, such as keeping the token price extremely low and limited minting in the early fair launch phase. Although the current issuance quantity and active users still have a large gap compared to Pump, for the Base chain, which also has a huge meme market, the emergence of this project may also add a new meme coin battlefield.

Furthermore, many AI-combined products essentially provide similar one-click issuance functions. For example, Spectral, which just released an airdrop plan, writes contract code through a GPT-like text dialogue tool. However, compared to the convenience of one-click issuance, this type of product still has significant differences.

With the emergence of Pump-like products, does this mean that players can turn from being "leeks" to "sickles"? Through PANews' experiments, it was found that although Pump simplifies the token issuance process and costs to the minimum, it may be difficult to achieve the dream of a hundredfold coin. For ordinary users, after the token is issued, it usually only attracts a few automated trading bots to enter, quickly buy and sell a few times, and then there is no more activity. Most of the tokens issued on Pump are in this state, and there are very few that can exceed $60,000 in market value daily.

For token issuers, these passing players will quickly take away liquidity, leaving only the founder's buy-in funds in the pool. Although not likely to incur significant losses, there is still a long way to go for those aiming to profit.

How to create a meme worth over a billion

In fact, there are indeed many successful cases on Pump. The top meme coins by market value also have tokens worth over $100 million. Two typical "cat kings" are michi and Shark Cat.

Next, PANews will analyze based on several high market value cases how these meme coins worth over a billion are born.

The journey of the two cat kings

michi is the meme coin with the highest market value on Pump so far, with a market value of $186 million, created on April 8th.

Shark Cat has a market value of about $160 million, created on March 26th.

Materials:

First of all, the timing and theme of these two tokens are the basic conditions for their early high market value. During the end of March and early April, the meme track was popular with the "cat-dog war" theme. During this time on the Solana chain, everyone liked to find various cat and dog-themed memes for speculation. And these two tokens happen to belong to the Cat camp. It coincided with the hottest theme at that time.

Community:

In addition to the timing being just right, the community foundation is also very important. PANews research found that almost all meme coins ranking high in market value have one common feature: the initiators are not unknown amateurs.

For example, in the case of michi, its founder psykø (@psykogem) is an experienced meme coin player and KOL, with 4,700 fans on X, and is very active on both X and Telegram, with tweets maintaining a high reading volume. Before michi was released, he had also preheated on social media several times.

The founder of Shark Cat is also a KOL, named 0xWinged (@0xWinged), who had successfully launched the CopyCat project before Shark Cat, which also had a good effect. His personal fan base on X exceeds 10,000 people.

Promotional Ability:

Of course, having a certain number of fans alone cannot guarantee the token's issuance to be successful. The topicality during the issuance process is also an important element driving price speculation. The founder of michi played the sincerity card. In the early stages of issuance, he personally bought $40 worth of michi tokens and destroyed them. This move not only helped michi quickly reach the $60,000 market value curve progress bar but also gave later users a sense of "I did it first, you can do as you please." This also gave many people confidence in the development of this token. In the end, psykø also earned over $2.5 million through this bold move.

Subsequently, in the development of michi, psykø continued to promote the token through a 1% airdrop; advertising in Times Square, New York; and paying artists to create related emoji material.

0xWinged used a different approach when issuing Shark Cat, through a Space event on X. Early buyers were mostly attracted through this Space event.

Funds:

The frenzy of memes has never been a one-person party. Real support for price increases cannot be separated from financial support. The third project in market value on Pump is a project called TEH EPIK DUCK (EPIK). In the first half-hour of its initial issuance, a user with the address GE4LX5DcEAfgVD1MZ1ahiUJboL3G3X4yuh2gcRytjvL5 directly purchased $30 worth of EPIK tokens, directly pulling the token's curve progress to the maximum. This user eventually profited 1,369 SOL through EPIK. Although we do not know why this user dared to have a gambling spirit in the early stages, from the user's trading records, on April 3rd, the user had bought multiple similar-themed rubber duck tokens, each time investing over 10 SOL. Behind this coincidence may lie the funding routine of batch meme speculation. In the early trading of other high market value projects, there were also similar large speculators.

Through the above analysis, we may roughly glimpse some necessary elements in the promotion process of popular meme coins. These are materials, community, promotional ability, and funds. These four elements are indispensable for the success of a meme coin, although not every meme coin needs to become a quadrilateral warrior, at least it needs to have certain strengths in several aspects to make up for shortcomings in other areas.