Memes, memes everywhere; since PEPE launched on April 19th, meme season has fully taken hold of crypto. There’s been Etheruem’s WOJAK, BOB, and TURBO, BNB chain’s Ignore Fud/4TOKEN, and of course, Arbitrum’s very own AIDOGE.

And every investor hopes their meme coin of choice becomes the next Doge or Shib.

But there’s a new meme in town, one that has been incredibly popular in the East for a long time. And the Chinese Arbitrum community has now decided to tokenize this meme and share it with the crypto world — enter pogai!

Pogai, or poor guy, according to Google and some people on crypto Twitter, is a Cantonese insult that can be translated into English as ‘drop dead in the street’ or ‘prick’ but more generally seems to be a term to describe someone who is completely useless.

In the crypto context, pogai represents an investor who is down bad, makes all the mistakes, gets hacked, rugged, and picks all the wrong coins. So the self-deprecating element of meme culture transcends both language and culture to be truly international.

The meme images always have a panda body with a face superimposed over the top, often looking pained, creepy, or outright weird; sometimes, it’s even Elon Musk’s face. And again, the similarities with Western meme culture are apparent; look at Wojak and Pepe: pained, creepy, and outright weird.

So on May 1st, this popular Chinese meme got tokenized and launched on Arbitrum. Since then, it has gone on to have a market cap of over $7 million, and now it seems the founder is planning NFT airdrops.

The official pogai Twitter account has over 47K followers. The global and Chinese telegram groups combined have over 13K members, so the pogai community is already vast. And with the website recently updated to include an English section, I expect those numbers to grow.

PEPE and most meme coins have fallen quite considerably since the recent all-time highs, with most having peaked around May 5th. With the ETH meme coins, this made a lot of sense because, by that point, Ethereum had become unusable for anyone bar whales with gas fees at 12-month highs.

However, it has had a knock-on effect on meme coins on other chains like Arbitrum, with pogai following a similar trend.

It’s also worth noting that meme coin charts look remarkably similar to the ETH chart, even if the percentages meme coins have risen and fallen are much more significant.

And it’s no real surprise the ETH price has fallen because, on May 6th, the Ethereum Foundation moved $30 million worth of ETH to Kraken to be sold.

So is this the end of meme season? Possibly.

The number of random low-quality meme coins being released will probably decline from here. But those with a good narrative, a strong community, and, most importantly, incredible memes have already done enough to last the distance.

Tokens like PEPE, WOJAK, and, of course, pogai will come back hard when ETH rises again. And I believe pogai possibly has a stronger case than even PEPE.

Ethereum gas prices, as we all know, can rise to the point where only whales can play, and it’s challenging to build a strong community when most of the crypto community is excluded. But pogai doesn’t have this issue because it’s on Arbitrum, which has all the benefits of Ethereum but with much lower fees, meaning both retail investors and whales can get involved.

Also, Western crypto enthusiasts habitually adopt Eastern elements into the most fun parts of crypto. For instance, the biggest meme coins out there, DOGE and SHIB, are both based on a Japanese dog. So I can see the crypto community steadily embracing this weird, self-deprecating Chinese panda meme.

Then there’s the Chinese crypto community; pogai is a meme they already know and love, so what token are they likely to accumulate and rally behind?

While the end of meme season may set pogai back in the short term, it has too much going for it to keep it down for long. And in the next bull market, it could become one of the top meme coins in crypto.

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*Disclaimer: This is not financial advice. I am not a financial advisor. Do your own research. I am also invested in pogai *