Who remembers the Uniswap Airdrop? 🖐
The Uniswap airdrop of DEFI September 2020 was undeniably a huge milestone in crypto. Many of us, including yours truly, woke up that day and realized we had been gifted over $1000 worth of free tokens; conjured out of thin air as it were. It was an incredible feeling. Anyone who had multiple wallets interacting with Uniswap got this airdrop multiple times. Actually I'm still a bit salty that I went through a router on an alt-wallet and picked an option with fee of 10 less cents than Uniswap. That 10 cents cost me 400 UNI.
Yikes. 🤦♂
But since then there's been nothing but degeneracy in the space. People in crypto for a time made it a full time job to "farm" airdrops. Of course "farming" in this case is a Sybil attack designed solely for the purpose of extracting value from new communities. It is unacceptable dishonorable unethical behavior that, at the time, was seen as completely standard practice. Honestly we should be tracking the people who did this and putting a black star on their permanent record, but we won't. In fact many of the people reading this surely have done it, or at least attempted to do it.
So it becomes clear that we need a new way of going about this airdrop business because people are greedy goblins and must be treated as such. Standard practice in the memecoin era is to force anyone who wants to participate in the airdrop to provide locked liquidity to the market.
Taking Solana for example:
This is a potentially contentious example because The Swarm here on Hive doesn't have a lot of love for this VC funded hunk of centralized garbage. It's also the best example to give because Solana is at the heart of the shitcoin casino and where all the billion-dollar memes are being cranked out like hotcakes.
LP airdrop
The liquidity pool template is simple enough. Let's say I want to launch a token on Solana but I actually want it to be a decent deal. This means a premine for myself is out of the question. No problem. Fair launches exist where I can provide the airdrop in the LP 1000:1 or whatever other ratio I want.
Let's say I personally lock 10 SOL into my airdrop contract. At 1000:1 this would print 10k memecoins out of thin air and pair those tokens in a liquidity pool 10000:10. This creates a floor value of the token using SOL as the unit of account. So at the ground floor the memecoin is worth one-thousandth of a SOL. If the meme gets dumped it will be less and if it gets bought it will be worth more.
But it can't be dumped...
Coins in the LP have to be locked for a certain amount of time. Could be a week, month, year, or permanently. Personally I like the idea of permanent liquidity. This would mean my 10 SOL would get locked in the contract forever and 20k memecoins would be printed; 10k also locked permanently and 10k liquid in my wallet (or timelocked depending on preference).
This is what makes the airdrop and distribution much more fair than others because the only way to mint coins is by putting the parent token (SOL) at risk in the LP. Forcing users to have skin in the game completely negates the Sybil attack. The bonus is exponential liquidity in the AMM. Money talks and bullshit walks.
So while memecoins may seem stupid and idiotic at face value, there is a very good reason why billions of dollars are pouring into them. This is a convergence of multiple technologies over multiple crypto cycles. We have ICO tech that allows the token itself to exist. We have AMM liquidity pools which create exponential liquidity. And now we have fairdrop mechanics that allow all three to come together in a perfect storm.
We might try to make the argument that memecoins have zero usecase... they actually have a ton of usecase. This should make sense because the technology they inherit from the work we've done over the last decade is already good enough to make these memecoins a standalone asset.
Because there is no dev team to pay tribute to all that money can be recycled back into the community. Is this how it works out all the time? No, but some of them do. Maybe I should make my own to prove it... or maybe not lol. The main issue of contention is: what's the point of spinning up a new asset when we could just as easily use an old asset with an existing community?
Usually the answer is: degens gambling on shiny new volatile things that can pump harder. That's not the fault of the supplier: it's the fault of the greedy goblins who demand x1000 opportunities. We are doing what we always do and blaming the sellers instead of the buyers. Ironically this is an inherently centralized tactic of enforcement, very similar to "the war on drugs" or demonizing sex-workers. We love to blame the centralized supply while giving the decentralized demand a free pass.
Especially now with the Trump admin and recent memecoin launch nonsense it seems that now more than ever memecoins are becoming the ultimate smokescreen for crypto. How can the judicial branch possibly go after any of these legitimate tokens with 10000 memes running around in a lawless jungle? It actually kind of reminds me of the Streisand Effect. When you try to hide information it makes people look to uncover it even harder, but if you flood the space with information it is exponentially better at hiding the stuff you don't want found.
In a way memecoins are the flood or moat that currently protect the crypto castle. Of course many of us are upset that all these noobs and no-coiners are going to fall into the moat and drown, but that is just the cost of doing business. These memecoins are not securities, and we don't get a vote as to whether the moat full of toxic sludge exists or not. Such is the cost of a permissionless ecosystem.
They aren't even scams.
A beanie baby does not become an investment contract because the public decides that they might be collectibles. Memecoins are not investment contracts just because sometimes they go 1000x and attract a ton of attention. If I tell you to give me your money and you do, that's not a scam. I haven't promised you anything.
Conclusion
Oddly enough this post was supposed to be about a completely different topic, but apparently that topic has prerequisite reading (this post). Tomorrow I'll be discussing a new type of airdrop template that is potentially only something that can be done on Hive (or anywhere else that user accounts have actual community reputation attached to them, IE nowhere else).
During the next four years we are going to experience an extreme snapback effect in terms of regulations. We're going from Operation Chokepoint 2.0 to complete lawless anarchy. It seems like many crypto users would rather have a happy medium, but I think I'm going to enjoy the next four years of anarchy, and I also doubt that a happy medium will ever be achieved. Embrace the chaos while it lasts.
Interesting this idea of flooding the space to protect the crypto castle. 🧐
Ive basically just ignored the meme trend as i saw it as this bulls shiny thing. after 2017 and ICO buzz and next bull the nft hype.
but this is the second interesting argument I’ve heard this week about memes. as i was in a discussion about meme coins basically spitting in the face of ‘all about the tech’ coins. That memes were more about demonstrating that it’s not about what the coin can do. It’s about what the community around the token can do. lol, i guess in the case of meme coins its pump that shit! borrowing a bit of the GameStop momentum and stick it to the man mentality.
so i was convinced and went and invested my life saving in Fart coin 🤣 and missed out on getting in early on Melania Official. 😢
I sometimes think we lose track of our community strength on Hive. We really need to figure out how to harness it more effectively. Because whether a token has all the bells and whistles of utility or is the next breed of weird dog to 1000x …. Community is either the backbone of any tokens success or the weak sauce leading to oblivion
As we all know the problem is what comes after.
I view memes as less about what community can do, because these meme communities aren't doing anything. I view it more about the failure of "utility" and all the empty promises we've received and all the vaporware that's been rugged.
But everyone knows all this garbage is going to crash to zero within a year or two. None of these communities are real. They aren't talking with each other and they don't care about each other. The only one we can make an argument for at this point is DOGE because that community has survived multiple bear markets and is not some token on another chain; Doge itself is a layer one POW which makes it a lot more robust and secure.
Well I’m certainly not buying any meme coins. 🤣
But yeah, my main takeaway from these recent discussions was Hive needs to figure out how to leverage its community more effectively. As in my eyes Hive has one of the stronger and larger communities in terms of blockchain communities.
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I missed the uniswap airdrop by less than an hour. They backdated to any wallet that had transacted before the end of August, and my first transaction was like 50 mins into September. Win some, lose some I guess.
wow that is rough and much worse than missing a second airdrop 😢
Everyone loves the anarchy until they personally get scammed.
Yes this is what annoys me.
Everyone is like fuck the gubment and then they go crying to the gubment the second they're wronged in any way... all the while talking trash about people who do the same.
I feel like TRAVALA is kind of doing something like that. They have airdrops that happen frequently, but how much you get is dependent on what you have locked up in their SMART program. It's probably not exactly the same, but it is a first step. Too bad the tokens they have dropped so far haven't really been anything to speak of. I missed out on the Uniswap airdrop.
This is a startling revelation to me.
I didn't know this is how meme coins work and I feel silly now, for not launching dozens of them myself.
If you can't beat them...
Does Solana have a social media platform yet?
Maybe we shold onboard them to Hive?#edicted
This is how they can work and how some of them have gotten so popular with whales entering in size.
Hehe…nice to see
So perhaps Murad was/is right afterall. Time will tell.
Murad is the greediest goblin of them all.
He's not looking to ride any particular meme to zero with "zealous communities".
Guy is a poser looking to exploit literal slave labor of the greater fool.
🤑
Many will disagree with you o lol
Not like I really care about memes like that, but I wouldn’t mind hitting a 1000x in a short time 🤑
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BEER.Fantastic post. I personally hate memecoins. But hey, they're a massive part of this industry, and that's unlikely to change in the near future.
i think about rhe uni swap air drops all the time, it made people instant millionaires and alot of cash for everyone else. I missed out