Cult Coins
Top Tier Coins in the Crypto Market usually have a cult-like following
TLDR:
Cult coins are a loosely defined term, they generally represent coins with a growing brand or movement that have a cult-like following.
The biggest memecoins are all cult coins. Dogecoin, Pepe, and Trump’s latest coins are huge not because of any utility, but because of the cult around them.
All top cryptocurrencies end up forming lasting cults around them too, it could be easily be argued that Bitcoin is the largest cult coin of them all.
Be wary though of anyone claiming to have found the latest cult coin, most of the time these are bad actors trying to take advantage of you, cult’s are hard to form.
Last week I made my post about the attention economy and how crypto has essentially tokenised attention, creating what I’m now calling the “Attention Market”.
This week I elaborate further on one of the key reasons why some coins in this market tend to stick around while others don’t.
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Cult Coins
Last week my post was on $TRUMP and the tokenisation of the attention economy, where I essentially explained the following:
The abundance of information online has made our attention scarce, which has consequently created the attention economy that we live in. With the rise of platforms like pump.fun that allow anyone to create new coins trivially, a big part of the crypto market is now a constant flow of new memecoins around the latest news and trends.
Memecoins like $TRUMP are an example of this and have evolved in such a way that I believe they now represent tokenised attention, and for the sake of giving this new market a name, I’m calling this the “Attention Market”.
Now some 99% of the tokens in the attention market don’t even last a week, let alone a few hours. However, some of them survive for much longer and end up building somewhat of a cult-like following.
Some loosely call these “Cult Coins”.
Murad, a crypto influencer on X, gave a particularly relevant talk at Token 2049 in Singapore last Semptember, where he gave a controversial take on how crypto is essentially a speculative industry focused on creating new coins, and he suggests that memecoins are purest version of this.
This is a great talk to watch, and while I don’t agree with everything he said a key concept that I do agree with was how the most valuable coins are often those that have a “cult-like following” with a long-lasting shared belief in them.
In fact most people in the space now refer to Murad by his motto: “believe in something”.
While there’s no exact definition on what a “Cult Coin” is, you can imagine that it has some semblance of the points in the slide above. They are coins that are building a brand or movement, where people prefer to hold them for the long-term rather than trade them in the short term, and effectively have a long lasting “cult” around them.
In other words cult coins go beyond just the fleeting fickleness of the great majority of tokens in the attention market and are therefore able to survive and grow for much longer.
Memecoin Examples
Naturally the most obvious examples of “Cult Coins” are the top memecoins.
Dogecoin has been around since 2014 and over time has grown a huge holder-base with hundreds of thousands if not millions of holders.
The coin was based on an already incredibly popular Internet meme of a cute shiba dog called Doge. But it grew even more when Elon Musk began tweeting about it and popularised the meme further, going as far as naming his current government organisation DOGE.
At this point Doge is easily one of the most recognisable memes on the Internet, and with it’s established base of holders the coin has a strong cult-like status ensuring it’s incredibly high market cap of over $50bn.
The price and value accrual of Dogecoin is not related to any specific fundamentals of the coin other than that people like the meme and it’s formed a strong cult around it!
Another hugely popular Internet meme is Pepe the Frog who’s been present on the Internet since 2005, having grown largely in popularity on sites like 4chan.
A memecoin called $PEPE was released on Solana last year celebrating this character and is now one of the largest memecoins in the space, with over $5bn market cap as of today. Much like Doge, Pepe’s had an ever-growing cult-like following on the Internet, and in retrospect the rise of this memecoin seems really obvious now.
And just last week we saw the release of Trump’s own memecoin. Whether you like him or not Trump is one of the most “meme’d” people on the Internet, and has a huge cult-like following too.
Under the lense of having a lot of attention and a cult-like following it was therefore actually pretty obvious that an official $TRUMP coin would transcend into a cult coin and command a very high market-cap.
Bitcoin and Altcoins
Cult Coins don’t necessarily just have to be memecoins though, and I’d personally argue that many of the largest cult coins in crypto are not memecoins at all.
You don’t have to look too far to see that Bitcoin is cult coin in itself!
Sure, Bitcoin has an incredibly strong value proposition as I’ve covered before in several of my posts including my comparison of Bitcoin to digital gold. However, there’s no denying Bitcoin’s also built up a huge cult around it.
Bitcoiners generally have strong libertarian views, or at the very least agree that the traditional financial system is incredibly corrupt, and rally around the idea of a decentralised currency with no single leader, since Satoshi Nakamoto disappeared and nobody knows who he really is.
I’d argue in fact that there’s no bigger cult coin in crypto than Bitcoin! And this is a genuinely important reason (alongside its incredibly strong fundamentals) that have made it the most valuable coin of all!
Similarly, there are also many altcoins, that aren’t memecoins, that have huge cult-like followings. Most of the major altcoins have formed massive cults around them with obvious examples being Ethereum, Solana, Ripple, and Cardano.
Ripple has what’s known as the “XRP army”, who’ve been banging on about how Ripple will change traditional finance from the inside out for a decade now.
Meanwhile Cardano to this day still hasn’t become very widely used, but it’s massive cult-like following and cult of personality around its creator Charles Hoskinson maintain it as one of the top 10 largest coins by market cap in the space.
Similarly, Ethereum and Solana also have incredibly strong cults around them, who are often seen battling for cultural supremacy over on crypto-twitter. With their respective leaders Vitalik and Anatoly both having formed a huge cult of personality around each of them too.
Cult coins are everywhere in this space!
But don’t think this behaviour is exclusive to crypto markets though, it also appears in traditional stock markets. For example companies like Apple have clearly intentionally created a strong cult-like culture, and are therefore able to continuously charge exorbitantly high prices from their loyal customers.
And guess what, Apple just happen to be the single most valuable company in the entire world today!
Stay Safe
I personally think we’ll see a growing number of successful memecoins like $TRUMP and $PEPE get launched in the coming years. And just like the examples we’ve seen above, these new coins will baloon to huge valuations and become long-lasting cult coins within the attention market and wider crypto space.
But while you now understand the loosely defined term “Cult Coin”, be very wary of the way people use it. The truth is, as I said earlier in this post, the great majority of coins in crypto trend to zero.
If someone says they’ve found a new cult, I’d say that 99% of the time they are likely to be a charlatan who’s trying to sell you snake oil!
Sure there are endless cults abound, and new ones forming around different ideas all the time. But cults usually take a long time to form, as an idea or “meme” needs time to propagate strongly before it can settle and grow into cult-like status.
So be wary, these opportunities are not frequent, and just because you think you’ve found the latest cult coin it doesn’t mean it’s not going to be gamed by bad actors.
Remember never risk more than you can afford to lose, this space is full of people who will try to take advantage of your naivety - don’t let them, stay safe out there!
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