Yesterday I was conflicted. What will I write about tomorrow? I had two topics I was particularly keen on covering, but wasn’t sure which to write about first. They didn’t deserve to be jammed into one combined piece. I left it up to X to decide for me (I also posted on Warpcast but no one replied, not cool enough I guess):
WIF it is! I’ll cover the Blast incentive structure next week.
Before we dive in
I want to set a few things straight so we don’t get it twisted:
- I purchased WIF a few months ago and still hold it. It’s not a life-changing amount and I don’t expect it to be.
- I’m writing about WIF because I think there are unique lessons to be learned about the meme behind the memecoin, not because I want you to buy some.
- I won’t be able to cover everything about WIF and will miss some details. The goal is to cover the meat and potatoes, not the 10-course meal.
- I’ve covered memes and PEPE before, and I believe that understanding memes is important and will only increase in importance as it pertains to society, culture, and growth/marketing strategies. Memes aren’t for everybody, but it’s helpful to know people who get them.
- I initially considered writing about WIF over a month ago, but decided to hold off because it didn’t feel compelling enough. As memecoins have blown up over the past couple of weeks and taken up more mindshare in the space, I figured it would be worth covering as a topic that deserves to be understood better vs. looked down upon. It’s ok to have the conflicting views of ‘I think memecoins are dumb and they’ll go to 0’ and ‘a lot of people enjoy owning and buying memecoins’.
With that said, what does the state of memes and memecoins look like? There are currently 6 memecoins in the top 100 coins by market cap, and 3 of them are from this cycle.
This is remarkable no matter how you slice it. The memecoin darlings of last cycle, DOGE and SHIB, round out the top 10 🤯
So with the backdrop set, how did WIF get to where it is today?
The origins of WIF and how meme templates work
Dogwifhat started in 2019 from a viral photo of a Shiba Inu wearing a beanie, literally a dog with (or ‘wif’ in dog speak I guess) a hat.
The gaming community adopted the picture and created different variations of the meme template, particularly the hat. We see this with many other popular memes that have become templatized. A simple example of this is Drake’s iconic Hotline Bling music video scene which is a popular meme template still used today:
Memes typically have a visual component and/or text component. With the Drake meme, the static component is Drake on the lefthand side. The ‘canvas’ is on the right-hand side, which can be either text or image.
Basic, right? We have seen hundreds if not thousands of memes in our lives at this point.
Why WIF is a unique meme
What makes WIF special? The meme has the same image + text components, but has different layers to it, which are manifested in different ways. Let’s start by literally breaking down dogwifhat into its separate parts:
Another way to think about it is the dogwifhat meme is composable…just like tokens! People can reuse and recombine the meme in different contexts, amplifying virality, creativity, and influence. The dog, word, and hat are separate Lego blocks that can be used in various ways.
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