(I wrote this some time back as a way to help friends figure out of projects they were considering had any stickiness potential, but never posted it here at the time - adding for future reference.)
Let’s face it - most tokens are meme coins. But some are more “meme coinier” than others.
A few factors to help determine a token’s memecoininess:
- Meaningful differentiation with other projects;
- Connection between value appreciation and a meaningful business; and
- Governance multiplier.
Differentiation
Projects need to be differentiated in a way other than flavor, vibes, or something that can easily flee like mercenary TVL.
Consider Pepsi vs. Coke, or champagne vs. cava - while there are differences in the ingredients, the main differentiator between them are narratives, personal preferences, and people choosing sides on memetic warfare. You may not like MacDonald’s or Pizza Hutt, but there is clear differentiation between their products.
As an example with crypto projects:
- there is little meaningful differentiation between Kamino or Solend, other than TVL or some easy-to-duplicate UX;
- there is more project differentiation between Jito and Marinade;
- there is significant differentiation between Ethereum and Solana;
Therefore, using the differentiation criteria, KMNO and SLND are memecoinier than JTO and MNDE, which are in turn memecoinier than ETH and SOL.
Value appreciation
Is there a business model? Can you see a clear path to one, and a high chance it’ll get executed on? Is there a reason that this token should increase in price, other than purely vibes?
The lower you score the project on this criteria, the higher the memecoininess rating of the token.
Governance multiplier
In practice, a governance token only has a right to be as valuable as the thing it governs. This means that the higher delta between a project’s treasury (or the value it otherwise manages) and the token’s FDV, the higher on the memecoininess scale the token will rank.
If a token governs nothing, it gets the highest possible rating on this criteria. It gets fuzzier when it does have some control (eg. treasury or project parameters), but control power is concentrated on insiders. At that point it’s up to the person to set their own criteria and decide how much that detracts.