It's hard not to have heard about Vitalik Buterin and CZ calling for support of DeSCI. Related articles and tweets are popping up everywhere. This is reminiscent of the emergence of the 2020 DeFi Summer or earlier IDO waves. People are launching a lot of new assets on a new and previously unexplored meta. Most early adopters believe this DeSCI wave is just beginning, with 2025 set to see a DeSCI explosion.
Unique to this DeSCI wave is the unlikely relationship between Memetics and MEME culture. Several research projects have not launched their own token, instead, the community has created these tokens in a MEME way, calling on buyers of MEMEs to donate to the related DeSCI protocols. The concept of donating MEMEs to real non-profit scientific organizations has created a massive buzz.
We can indeed see many DeSCI teams receiving funding, with a lot of related tickers being created and some of them pumping even 500x in price. Many MEME deployers and early degens are easily profiting tens of thousands of dollars in these cases.
But let me explain why I feel positive about the MEME+donation concept and its future prospects with a simple analysis.
I assume the people participating in this economic activity and incurring financial costs can be divided into three groups:
Pure Donor: They donate purely for charitable purposes. I saw these people on Twitter asking if they could donate $SOL or $USDT, and looking at on-chain wallets, there were actually more $SOL donation transactions than MEME donations. These people even don't buy MEME because they want their funds to reach the DAO without any loss eventually.
Mix-intender: People with mixed intentions. We can easily identify this group's profile - they understand how MEME works and know they can profit from the hype, but are willing to donate part of their profits to the DAO when they make gains. I'm not sure if these people with dual intentions make up the majority of the group.
Pure Gambler: They're purely in it for gambling and actually don't care about donations. They buy MEME and exit with profits when the price goes up. I won't make negative judgments about these people - even though they don't make donations, they still bring attention to the donation event.
For these three groups of people, we can easily create the following table:
Human nature in reality may be far more complex than this, but we can already analyze many facts within this simplified framework. The most important point is that for DAOs, the donations received don't become losses or turn into gamblers' income - gamblers' profits (if any) actually come from other gamblers.
In many real examples, we can see that due to the need for hype, pure gamblers will also donate MEME as a way to create hype, integrate into the community, and stir up others' emotions. They need to build a donation culture because this is actually equivalent to a kind of staking or locking token, creating a deflationary situation that favours speculation.
In traditional charitable fundraising ways, NPOs gather volunteers to distribute flyers, invite donors to participate in events, ask for donations in person, and even pitch to a few whale philanthropists, just like startup fundraising.
Assuming in the Web3 space, it is true that some funds are in the hands of Pure Donors who want to donate to NPO / DAO, using traditional marketing methods such as paid Twitter ads and offline event flyers is not only inefficient, I even doubt whether it could really reach 10% of these people.
The MEME+donation approach, however, creates massive buzz through the participation of gamblers with huge capital in the betting, and this promotion is completely free for the DAO themselves. You should know that gamblers have sufficient motives to create hype for 500x pumps, enough to give DAOs exposure to far more Pure Donors than flyers and paid advertising could ever discover.
All this promotion is free, with gamblers paying for it among themselves. You know some people made 100x while others lost 99%, but they were never the target audience for charitable donations in the first place, were they?