Just a few months ago, memecoins were a big thing. Like, really big. A lot of liquidity was flowing into it, there was sustained media activity, a consistent narrative, all in all, a real asset type.
From dogs (Dogecoin, ShibaInu) to squirrels (Peanut) the entire spectrum of potentially cute stories was covered. People were buying into this toy tokens like crazy. A lot of money was made. Even more was lost, of course.
Crypto Waves
Memecoins mania was not a singular event. Every couple of years a new phenomenon that concentrates attention and value into a consistent vertical emerges in the crypto world.
Before memecoins, we had the "DeFi summer". People were into liquidity pools like they were into ShibaInu. I would say they were even more into liquidity pools, lending, shorting, and so on, than they are into memecoins now.
And even before that, we had ICOs, Initial Coin Offerings. One of them even made 4 billion USD. I'm talking about EOS, of course. If any of the readers here still remember the EOS days.
Where am I going with this?
This world of crypto works not only in cycles, like the 3 years Bitcoin halving cycle. It also works on waves, which may, or may not be overlapping with the halving cycles.
The crypto waves are a peculiar beast. They are a combination of mass hysteria (fueled by collective hallucination), enormous gains (at least in the initial stages) and reinforced story telling. I don't know of anything similar in the fiat world. The tulip mania is probably the closest one, because it kinda ticks all 3 checkboxes. But, in general, the fiat "waves" are way more gentle than the crypto waves.
Next Wave?
As I was saying in the beginning of this post, memecoins are a thing of the past. They peaked a few months ago and now, even though, the narrative is not completely dead, they're slowly fading away.
What's coming in their place?
That's literally a billion dollar question. If someone will know now what is the next crypto wave, they will make billions.
For a while, we thought it was AI agents, with truth_terminal, ElizaOS and zerebro. But that looked like a fake breakout, the wave died before it was even picking up.
Lucikly, nobody really knows what the next crypto wave will be. All is left is to ride as much as you can of it, once the wave is up.