Original author: Frank, PANews
Recently, the MEME market seems to have entered a cooling-off period. As the market and hot money flowed to mainstream coins, there were no particularly outstanding MEME coins in the first half of December. Against this backdrop, a MEME coin called Fartcoin rose against the trend, breaking through $1 billion on December 18, becoming the king of the AI agent series MEME.
Unlike the previous hot social hot spots such as GOAT and Pnut, Fartcoins rise seems to lack celebrity endorsements and social hot spots. This absurd cultural core is also difficult for many people to understand. PANews analyzed Fartcoins social media popularity and the top 1,000 coin holding addresses, trying to explain how Fartcoin rose from zero to $1 billion.
The road to rise is off track with social media popularity
The birth of Fartcoin and GOAT have the same origin, both from the artificial agent model of terminal of truths. During the conversation between the goat model and opus, it was mentioned that Musk liked the sound of farting, so the AI model proposed to issue a token called Fartcoin and designed a series of promotion methods and gameplay. Fartcoin was thus born on October 18, slightly later than GOAT (October 11). Judging from the focus of social media, Fartcoin has hit the cusp of AI agent popularity. October 18 was the climax of GOATs social discussion. While people were surprised by the crazy trend of GOAT, they turned their attention to the same type of tokens. Therefore, Fartcoin gained natural attention during this period.
According to cryptohunt.ai data, in terms of total followers, Fartcoins official account has only 22,000 followers, while GOATs Twitter followers are 214,000. The difference between the two is nearly 10 times. Among them, the main change in Fartcoins social media data is that from 3:00 to 11:00 on November 16, the number of Twitter followers doubled, from 7,634 followers to 13,294 followers in an instant. The price change during this period increased by about 15%, which is not a significant increase. There is not much discussion about the token on social media, and there is something strange about the increase in the number of followers.
In addition, is the celebrity effect the main driving force of Fartcoin? In fact, there were almost no celebrity mentions of Fartcoin in the early days. It was not until the market value exceeded 300 million US dollars that some media began to report on it. Marc Andreessen, the founder of the well-known venture capital firm a16z, retweeted a tweet about Fartcoin on December 13. This tweet had 2.5 million views, but the price of the token did not surge as a result.
In terms of relevant tweets, at 23:43 on December 13, Solana Daily published a post about the top five AI MEME coins currently in the spotlight, with Fartcoin ranking first. This tweet received 525,000 views, and the price subsequently rose by about 10%, with a market value of nearly $800 million. However, this cannot be considered as the medias publicity that drove the rise of the token.
In addition, the account with the most tweets and the highest overall views is DEGEN NEWS, which reported the changes in Fartcoins market value many times from December 12 to 16, with each tweet having about 150,000 views and about 1,000 likes. The content of the GOAT official account can easily exceed 100,000 views. In contrast, the discussion of Fartcoin on social media can almost be called deserted. Therefore, the main driving force behind Fartcoins rise may not come from the popularity and discussion on social media.
Sigil Fund may be the real driving force behind this
Among the AI tokens with a market value of more than $100 million, only GOAT and GRIFFAIN were born before Fartcoin. Therefore, Fartcoin has a certain advantage in terms of time. In the process of development, Fartcoins rise can be divided into several waves:
Wave 1: From October 18 to October 24, the market value rose to around 76 million, and then fell back to around 20 million US dollars.
Second wave: From November 3 to November 22, the market value rose to around US$400 million, and then fell back to around US$160 million.
The third wave: From December 8 to December 18, the market value exceeded 1 billion US dollars, becoming the AI MEME token with the highest market value.
From the above media heat analysis, it can be found that during these rising stages, the social media craze of Fartcoin did not appear simultaneously. Therefore, the main driving force of Fartcoin is most likely some major funds.
PANews analyzed the initial buying and selling transactions of the top 1,000 Fartcoin holding addresses and found that an investment institution was suspected to have appeared among the earliest buying addresses.
During the investigation, PANews noticed that the address 4DPxYoJ5DgjvXPUtZdT3CYUZ3EEbSPj4zMNEVFJTd1Ts (hereinafter referred to as: 4 DPxY) had 700 Fartcoin purchases within a few days starting from October 18. A total of $191,000 was spent to buy 12.02 million Fartcoin tokens.
Among the 4 DPxY tokens, 7.4 million came from another address: FEeSRuEDk8ENZbpzXjn4uHPz3LQijbeKRzhqVr5zPSJ9 (hereinafter referred to as: FEeSR). The FEeSR address also used 400 purchase operations to acquire a large number of tokens and eventually transferred the tokens to the 4 DPxY address.
The Binance deposit address of FEeSR is 4 FM 7 D. The initial funds of this address come from EsqEkirkY6s1RPsb3YaJZcP4APQz77BWmBAVCsbNNhpj (hereinafter referred to as: EsqEki). The EsqEki address is marked as the wallet address of Sigil Fund on social media.
It is reported that Sigil Fund is a fully regulated investor fund focusing on cryptocurrencies, decentralized projects and digital assets. Founded in 2018, it is an all-weather fund operated by crypto insiders.
In addition to the address association, Sigil Fund founder MrKvak has repeatedly expressed his optimism about the AI token MEME on Twitter, and on December 13 he proactively retweeted a tweet asking whether Sigil Fund holds $30 million in Fartcoin.
At this point, we can roughly judge that Sigil Fund is very likely to be the earliest layout capital of Fartcoin. From the time point of view, the initial purchase time of Sigil Fund was 10-18-2024 11:50:34, just 5 hours after Fartcoin went online, and the market value was only about 2 million US dollars. Sigil Funds initial investment accounted for about one-tenth of the market value at that time. As of December 19, Sigil Fund has sold more than 3 million US dollars of tokens, and 4 DPxY addresses still hold a balance of 6.09 million US dollars in tokens.
In addition, there are some other large addresses that have also used the method of allocating a fixed amount to buy in large quantities recently, which are not listed here one by one.
Dt51tQyWGNGp1eg8MDXK1tukJEDV9JfDE6f5PuBQaoAN
The earliest purchase started at 08:20:53 on October 18, 2024, spending 3.2 SOL and buying 494,000 SOL. This address is suspected to be the income address of a sandwich attack address.
Large investors mostly bought at low points, and recently large investors have flocked into the market
Through the overall data analysis, we can see that the main address of Fartcoin did not enter the market in the early stage as PNUT previously analyzed. Most of the main buying time is still concentrated in the beginning of this month. Especially in the past week, the willingness of large investors to enter the market is strong.
In addition, from the timing of the entry of large investors, we can see that the peak entry periods of these main players are basically in the stage of token callback, such as November 1st to 3rd, 18th to 20th, December 1st to 3rd, etc. These peak entry periods are all when the token callback reaches the low point. From this, we can also see that the real smart money may always practice the saying, I enter the market when others are panicking.
In terms of the purchase costs of these large holders, the average initial purchase cost of the top 1,000 addresses was $0.48, and the average initial sale cost was $0.53. Of course, the statistics here only show the first purchase and sale, which does not mean that this is the total holding cost and profit of the large holders. However, judging from this first entry average, the market value of Fartcoin at that time had reached nearly $500 million. For retail investors, this price range does not seem to be an ideal investment space.
As of press time on December 20, Fartcoin’s highest market value has exceeded $1.1 billion. Related theme tokens also seem to have begun to show a radiation effect. On December 19, a gold and silver supporter (boomer) created the MEME coin UFD, which is called Unicorn Fart Dust (meaning: viewing cryptocurrency as fart dust), after hearing the success story of Fartcoin. As a social experiment, he intended to prove that cryptocurrency is worthless. Unexpectedly, the market value of this token exceeded $250 million on the same day. This incident added fuel to the popularity of Fartcoin, and this incident seems to have become an accelerated version of the story of Fartcoins rise.
Looking back at the rise of Fartcoin, it seems that we have seen that MEME coins have begun to transform from being triggered by social hot spots to being mainly driven by capital. For players who are bent on finding angles, such angles seem to be increasingly difficult to find and will become more elusive. In general, from obscurity to fame, the development process of Fartcoin seems to revolve around the word pull the market. Of course, after the market value reached 1 billion US dollars, Fartcoin finally ushered in the social media boom, but the boom at this time may no longer mean opportunities.
