3.18. The principle of “Humor and Memes”
In 2021, amidst the events surrounding GameStop and AMC stocks, a subculture known as "Apes" emerged a community of retail investors united around the idea of collective action in stock and cryptocurrency markets. These participants often emphasize their independence from complex financial strategies, favoring simpler approaches. This mindset is reflected in their slang and slogans, such as "Apes don’t fight numbers, Apes fight together." Memes play a crucial role in this community, strengthening unity through humor and pop culture references and also helping to maintain a positive spirit, even during challenging times.
Alongside the rise of GameStop, the meme-coin sector began gaining traction on the Binance platform. This sector represents a unique phenomenon in the cryptocurrency space, where humorous or viral projects attract attention and investments on par with serious financial innovations. Despite their humorous origins, meme-coins have demonstrated their ability to influence market trends significantly with attracting mass audiences. Memes remain a vital tool for fostering community spirit, maintaining positivity and lending a light-hearted yet cohesive character to these communities.
The Importance of Memes in the Ape Subculture:
1. Culture of Protest and Irony
Memes often reflect the community’s critical stance towards traditional financial institutions, hedge funds and major market players. Apes position themselves as small, but determined participants capable of standing up to corporate giants. Memes amplify anti-elitist sentiments, mocking the shortcomings of financial elites and institutions in exposing their vulnerabilities. This form of irony serves as a means of protest, fostering emotional solidarity and keeping the community’s morale high in its fight against the pressures of traditional financial structures.
2. Maintaining a Positive Spirit
In markets prone to significant price fluctuations and the risk of losses, memes help sustain motivation and a positive mindset among community members. For example, when the stocks invested in by Apes plummet, memes provide a way to support one another, often using humor to alleviate stress.
3. Simplifying Complex Concepts
Memes are often used to simplify complex financial terms and strategies, making them accessible to a broader audience. In a world where financial markets and investments are typically seen as the domain of professionals, memes empower retail investors by making complex ideas more approachable and less intimidating through jokes and visual representations.
4. Fostering Collective Identity
Memes create a strong sense of belonging among participants. The use of specific language, images, and symbols helps Apes feel like part of a unified movement.
During the meme-coin boom, 99% creators of such cryptocurrencies, in fact, exploited inexperienced investors by selling tokens of unviable and meaningless projects. Investors, subject to the cognitive bias "confirmation error", mistakenly assumed that if many profited from Dogecoin, similar success awaited them with new meme-coins. However, this is a logical error: the success of Dogecoin cannot serve as an indicator for evaluating other projects. In fact, sustainable income can only be obtained on projects with a strong foundation. Moreover, considering Dogecoin as a standard of success is not entirely correct, since a significant part of its popularity is explained by the active support of Elon Musk.
The primary reason meme-coins lose value and result in investor losses is their lack of a strong foundational idea. Meme-coins generally lack technological innovations or solutions to real-world problems, making them unsustainable in the long term.
At the same time, creators of crypto projects with a strong technical foundation also make the mistake of focusing exclusively on technology while overlooking the importance of the human factor. Humor, laughter, and emotions are integral parts of human nature and play a crucial role in how any product is perceived.
For a project to develop successfully, it must give equal attention to both technological aspects and marketing strategy. While "meme-worthiness" should not be the deciding factor in investment decisions, it can serve as an important final touch that adds uniqueness to the project and enhances its appeal.
For the reasons outlined above, DeflationCoin is not limited to becoming merely a technically and economically strong project. One of its key objectives is to evoke emotions and become a truly people-centric cryptocurrency.
The “Humor and Memes” principle will be integrated into all elements of the Deflationary Ecosystem. Combined with the “Attention Capture” mechanism (details provided in Section 3.8), this synergy will create a viral effect, enabling the project to grow organically while minimizing the need for large-scale marketing expenditures.
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