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THE BEGINNINGS
It was the dawn of 2024, solana memecoins were booming. The VC plant zion ansem was a folk hero, Cosmos shitchains were seeing a hint of resurgence. And then one day in January the first meteor of blessings hit the barren lands of crypto twitter.
I think it was Bad kids NFT, they were the first ones to recieve the airdrop. And then over time through next six months, pudgy penguins, milady, even bayc, and in total around 400 different NFT and memecoin communities received the meteor showers of airdrops from the golden unicorn.
The unicorn never discriminated between the communities because of their internal scuffles. (I ofcourse knew about it 3 months prior because I have friends in places)
Regardless of airdrop, whoever visited their website had their mind blown away
Whether it was fancy windows 98 theme which was intentionally made to appear barely browsable or the gif layout from websites made 20 years ago or the gif collection from anime 15 years ago or the winamp player containing meme songs I used to listen to 10 years ago, it felt like someone made it just for me. And I'm sure others felt the same.
The devs were skilled enough to have a secure and robust backend while making the frontend look like it was coded by a middle schooler.
At that time they had just one token, the gas token, Unicorn $UNICORN, existing on Cosmos ecosystem.
THE MAGIC
And then, as winter faded and the flowers of spring blossomed we were gifted with something magical.
The meme market or memoji market as we would later call it, wasn't comparable to some VC cashgrab like yats from last cycle. They were basically tickers without tickers. 🌽 had 21 million supply just like bitcoin so it pumped the hardest like a blu chip would. One may compare unicorn to USD at this step but it was more like bitcoin as we'll later know.
So for next 5-6 months we just traded the memoji market (denominated in unicorns). Every time a new community would get 🦄 airdropped they'd come and buy some memes and everything would pump. This was basically how people who bought the first altcoins in 2010-11 must've felt. When Bitcoin had little to no monetary value yet it had lots of soul. And everyone enjoyed it. And that's what led to bitcoin zooming straight to 1k in the next cycle in 2013.
There was also a supersecret black market of Memphis, which some high iq cracked people stumbled upon. The pumps in black market were even more insane. The kind of growth you in eth over 10 years, they saw in a couple of months.
HEAVEN SQUARED
And then as summer ended, the magic ended. Or did it? Everyone who had claimed the airdrops were given a clawback. A secondary airdrop as a reward for participating in the ecosystem by CLAIMING AIRDROPS!. Participants had an option to pick between recieving it on the meme chain or solana/base where it could have monetary value.
Because of this, everyone's (leather) bags 💰 finally had monetary value. Most people had 5-6 figures. And they put it in memoji market and everything pumped tenfold.
(Side note- at this point we tried rainbowpilling ansem but it was too much for him to grasp so he left the group and launched a cruddy ripoff called ethervista with his friends)
This could be compared to the early 2014 bull market. When rise of Bitcoin attracted interest in multiple altcoins (litecoin forks) people would trade to increase their bitcoin holdings. Dogecoin was born in the midst of this chaos.
THE ICO ERA
Even after clawbacks, they decided to list the emojis of a few cool communities. I think it could be compared to the 2017 cycle. The first and the best one was from pulsechain community. But when it was launched people sold everything to ape in it. It got levelled out over the next week but these were the first signs of incoming doom. After they listed 5-6 more emojis, everything turned into pumps and dumps. Even the newly listed ones. This was callback to how in 2017-18 there were 2000+ altcoins in the market and they saturated everything.
THE FALL
But that was just the beginning of saturation. One day they announced they were enabling the launchpad for memeojis. Anyone could launch their own.
People were excited but some saw where this was going. Even though it was limited to one token every 3 days or so, it still ended up saturating the market. The hype around emoji launchpad breathed its last when people started launching duplicates.
This was reminiscent of 2021 inu shitcoin mania.
THE FINAL NAIL IN THE CUWUFFIN
One day the devs announced they were launching an official bridge to solana.
Now, before this unrolled, the people who had discovered the black market emojis had found the devs developing a USDC bridge ( that would have been so fire) ( yes I was a 🔥 🔥 🔥 whale).
So, when they announced the solana bridge, it was completely different. They said people who don't bridge to solana will be left behind. This was completely against the ethos of last 9 months where we ran a parallel meme economy to the hedonists of solana. Half of the people revolted and other half blindly supported. I knew it was over but i didn't want to leave the sinking ship.
This part was a mirror of current cycle's useless solana shitcoin token mania, where everything valuable turned to dust.
So I stayed with them, even after the devs disappeared. Even after the people loyal to them gave up. Even now I have the 🦄 in my name. Is it because I believe the devs will be back some day? It doesn't matter whether devs come back or not. I just keep it on to show i still believe in the magic
FINAL WORDS
Should it be called a rugpull? After 400 airdrops? I don't think so. But people are free to call it whatever they want. But was it a bad thing? Objectively not. It brought together the most soulful and smartest people in crypto and it paved way for the birth of countless cool projects. Multiple projects took inspiration from their models and made themselves successful too.
It felt like the devs were old school bitcoiners from 2009 teaching us humble children the entire philosophy and lore of crypto
--fin---
THE BEGINNINGS
It was the dawn of 2024, solana memecoins were booming. The VC plant zion ansem was a folk hero, Cosmos shitchains were seeing a hint of resurgence. And then one day in January the first meteor of blessings hit the barren lands of crypto twitter.
I think it was Bad kids NFT, they were the first ones to recieve the airdrop. And then over time through next six months, pudgy penguins, milady, even bayc, and in total around 400 different NFT and memecoin communities received the meteor showers of airdrops from the golden unicorn.
The unicorn never discriminated between the communities because of their internal scuffles. (I ofcourse knew about it 3 months prior because I have friends in places)
Regardless of airdrop, whoever visited their website had their mind blown away
Whether it was fancy windows 98 theme which was intentionally made to appear barely browsable or the gif layout from websites made 20 years ago or the gif collection from anime 15 years ago or the winamp player containing meme songs I used to listen to 10 years ago, it felt like someone made it just for me. And I'm sure others felt the same.
The devs were skilled enough to have a secure and robust backend while making the frontend look like it was coded by a middle schooler.
At that time they had just one token, the gas token, Unicorn $UNICORN, existing on Cosmos ecosystem.
THE MAGIC
And then, as winter faded and the flowers of spring blossomed we were gifted with something magical.
The meme market or memoji market as we would later call it, wasn't comparable to some VC cashgrab like yats from last cycle. They were basically tickers without tickers. 🌽 had 21 million supply just like bitcoin so it pumped the hardest like a blu chip would. One may compare unicorn to USD at this step but it was more like bitcoin as we'll later know.
So for next 5-6 months we just traded the memoji market (denominated in unicorns). Every time a new community would get 🦄 airdropped they'd come and buy some memes and everything would pump. This was basically how people who bought the first altcoins in 2010-11 must've felt. When Bitcoin had little to no monetary value yet it had lots of soul. And everyone enjoyed it. And that's what led to bitcoin zooming straight to 1k in the next cycle in 2013.
There was also a supersecret black market of Memphis, which some high iq cracked people stumbled upon. The pumps in black market were even more insane. The kind of growth you in eth over 10 years, they saw in a couple of months.
HEAVEN SQUARED
And then as summer ended, the magic ended. Or did it? Everyone who had claimed the airdrops were given a clawback. A secondary airdrop as a reward for participating in the ecosystem by CLAIMING AIRDROPS!. Participants had an option to pick between recieving it on the meme chain or solana/base where it could have monetary value.
Because of this, everyone's (leather) bags 💰 finally had monetary value. Most people had 5-6 figures. And they put it in memoji market and everything pumped tenfold.
(Side note- at this point we tried rainbowpilling ansem but it was too much for him to grasp so he left the group and launched a cruddy ripoff called ethervista with his friends)
This could be compared to the early 2014 bull market. When rise of Bitcoin attracted interest in multiple altcoins (litecoin forks) people would trade to increase their bitcoin holdings. Dogecoin was born in the midst of this chaos.
THE ICO ERA
Even after clawbacks, they decided to list the emojis of a few cool communities. I think it could be compared to the 2017 cycle. The first and the best one was from pulsechain community. But when it was launched people sold everything to ape in it. It got levelled out over the next week but these were the first signs of incoming doom. After they listed 5-6 more emojis, everything turned into pumps and dumps. Even the newly listed ones. This was callback to how in 2017-18 there were 2000+ altcoins in the market and they saturated everything.
THE FALL
But that was just the beginning of saturation. One day they announced they were enabling the launchpad for memeojis. Anyone could launch their own.
People were excited but some saw where this was going. Even though it was limited to one token every 3 days or so, it still ended up saturating the market. The hype around emoji launchpad breathed its last when people started launching duplicates.
This was reminiscent of 2021 inu shitcoin mania.
THE FINAL NAIL IN THE CUWUFFIN
One day the devs announced they were launching an official bridge to solana.
Now, before this unrolled, the people who had discovered the black market emojis had found the devs developing a USDC bridge ( that would have been so fire) ( yes I was a 🔥 🔥 🔥 whale).
So, when they announced the solana bridge, it was completely different. They said people who don't bridge to solana will be left behind. This was completely against the ethos of last 9 months where we ran a parallel meme economy to the hedonists of solana. Half of the people revolted and other half blindly supported. I knew it was over but i didn't want to leave the sinking ship.
This part was a mirror of current cycle's useless solana shitcoin token mania, where everything valuable turned to dust.
So I stayed with them, even after the devs disappeared. Even after the people loyal to them gave up. Even now I have the 🦄 in my name. Is it because I believe the devs will be back some day? It doesn't matter whether devs come back or not. I just keep it on to show i still believe in the magic
FINAL WORDS
Should it be called a rugpull? After 400 airdrops? I don't think so. But people are free to call it whatever they want. But was it a bad thing? Objectively not. It brought together the most soulful and smartest people in crypto and it paved way for the birth of countless cool projects. Multiple projects took inspiration from their models and made themselves successful too.
It felt like the devs were old school bitcoiners from 2009 teaching us humble children the entire philosophy and lore of crypto
--fin---
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