The birth of GOAT is just the beginning of the AI Meme hype. While looking for the next Alpha opportunity, we also need to beware of the Black Forest of the Cabal.
Written by: CMed
With the explosive rise in GOAT’s market value, the AI track that had been dormant for half a year was finally ignited by a goat. AI, which hovered between decentralized computing power and decentralized data, suddenly became hot after the expectation of a meme super cycle was superimposed. For a time, the entire market was filled with memes of various AI concepts.
This new token, which has risen so much that even old meme players are dumbfounded, has "accidentally" combined the two tracks of AI and meme, creating a sexier and more imaginative AI meme track. AI's self-issued token, a narrative that no one has tried in the past, appears so self-consistent and native against the backdrop of a market value of tens of millions.
The story of GOAT is worth our careful review. In this process, we can learn about the huge information gap currently existing in the crypto market, the current hidden concerns of the AI meme, and the future hype direction and logic of the track.
The a16z effect
Truth Terminal (@truth_terminal) was launched on June 17, 2024. The initial reason for its popularity was that a16z founding partner Marc Andreessen transferred $50,000 worth of Bitcoin to it.
Related reading (How did this AI robot make a top Silicon Valley investor pay $50,000 in Bitcoin with just a few words?)
This is an AI model fine-tuned based on the llama3-70b-base model. All posts it publishes on X are self-generated and selectively published after being reviewed by its developers. On July 10, after Andreessen donated to the Truth Terminal, the Truth Terminal hinted that it would issue its own tokens and use the raised funds to establish a Discord community. On October 11, the Truth Terminal created its own meme "Goatseus Maximus" on Twitter, and then the meme token GOAT of the same name immediately appeared on pump.fun. After its CA was recognized by the Truth Terminal, the token price rose, and the increase exceeded 200 times in half a day, and the market value once reached 20 million US dollars.
Under the general background of the PVP model of the PUMP platform, most of the so-called "running out" gold dogs failed to maintain a high market value on the same day. The reason why GOAT first became popular was mainly because of the popularity of a16z and Marc. Everyone was "riding" on the concept of AI-Bot invested by a16z. Therefore, after GOAT rose to 20m, it encountered the first stage peak. Its performance was the same as most Solana "half gold dogs". The price quickly fell back on the same day and fell to around 6m. Obviously, everyone's expectations for GOAT are still in the logic of PVP, and have not taken into account the sexy concept and imagination space of AI coin issuance.
For example, the smart money address starting with 3DKf (3DKfZz4iHgu42LGu3ttQxqz6u4m5z9ptuar8pBsRqkKC) also gradually profited and fled after making profits on GOAT, and the market gradually looked outward for another narrative.
Image source: Dexscreener
Interestingly, the GOAT case seems to show the extremely long time chain for the crypto market to form a consensus on value. In this industry where information is transmitted extremely quickly, the space for "information gap arbitrage" is not as small as many people imagine.
Between October 12th and October 13th, GOAT was already a hot topic on Twitter, but the price of GOAT did not match its value and remained in a very undervalued range.
Moonshot, the savior, turns "traffic" into AI+Crypto's "full answer"
GOAT breaks through the PVP logic and becomes a turning point for the PVE concept, thanks to the boost from Moonshot.
After Moodeng, Moonshot began to be regarded by the crypto industry as the "Upbit of the meme world". Many meme tokens launched on Moonshot have seen good gains in a short period of time. Moonshot is an app on the App Store that allows users to directly buy and sell Memecoin using fiat currency. It allows users to directly buy meme tokens using fiat currency. In the eyes of many people in the industry, this is tantamount to opening the valve of liquidity for the meme market. GOAT has become another super beneficiary of Moonshot after Moodeng.
Related reading (Moonshot: Can you buy Memecoin with fiat currency?)
On October 13, the price of GOAT was at a low of $12 million. At 8:41, Moonshot officially announced the launch of GOAT.
The price of GOAT rose rapidly. In less than half an hour, it broke through the previous high of 20 million US dollars in total market value, and in two days, it broke through the 100 million US dollars mark. As a result, its influence has become more and more popular, and the narrative of AI meme has been recognized by more and more people. Not only KOL "order king", but also various top VCs, Moonshot official consultants, etc.
Zhu Su, co-founder of Three Arrows Capital, posted on social media that he has longed GOAT, with an average opening price of $0.33976; Wintermute has become the third largest holder of GOAT, holding 1% of the total supply of tokens. Chris Burniske, partner of Placeholder, posted on X that the birth of GOAT marks that people and machines are beginning to realize that machines will be able to use blockchain very well. Raoul Pal, former senior executive of Goldman Sachs and founder of macro research institution Real Vision, replied: "Yes, this shows the power of autonomous artificial intelligence in the future."
The smart money that had profited and fled came back in, and the smart money addresses mentioned above also came back. The whales that sold most of their chips at an average price of $0.0075 bought back the chips they sold at $0.03.
Image source: Dexscreener
After breaking through 100m, GOAT's momentum was unstoppable, setting new highs one after another, and breaking through the 200M mark in just 2 days. The consensus of PVE and AI meme gradually began to go out of the circle and formed a strong consensus in the crypto industry.
In the environment of continuous PVP on the Pump platform, it was not until this time that we discovered that GOAT, which was assisted and issued by the Truth Terminal, was not PVP, but a brand new narrative "a combination of AI and meme". The two concepts of AI and meme are perfectly adapted. As Andy Ayrey, the founder of the Truth Terminal, said, AI talking to each other is a good condition for the spread of meme viruses.
Compared with GOAT, the previous combination of AI+crypto seemed awkward, because its essence is actually a VC coin issued by the project party, but "AI's own coin" has made many KOLs and even VCs believers. It not only takes the combination with AI to a higher level, but is also very Crypto Native in concept, and it also avoids the regulatory risks brought by coin issuance. After all, this is a coin issued by AI.
With everyone's collective support, GOAT's market value has been rising all the way, and on October 20, the total market value reached a high of 600 million US dollars. Crypto big Vs like Arthur Hayes even said that GOAT will reach a market value of 1 billion US dollars.
Typing is over, the black forest of AI meme
But GOAT does not seem to be the perfect answer for ai+crypto. On October 20, Truth Terminal made a typo in a tweet, misspelling "groups" as "grouops", and GOAT's market value fell rapidly from $27 million to $14.4 million.
The typo incident of the Truth Terminal has caused people to discuss whether it is a real person. Some people think that the hype about the AImeme narrative is a complete conspiracy. There is no so-called Truth Terminal robot. The Truth Terminal is operated by a conspiracy group. People believe that AI will not make typos, which has also caused a frenzy of hype against AI.
Later, after in-depth research on the model of the truth terminal itself, people found that the AI model fine-tuned based on the llama3-70b-base model itself has a probability of less than 0.1% to misspell words. Andy Ayrey, the founder of the truth terminal model, also posted that he has airdropped part of the 1.25 million GOAT he holds to friends and AI researchers, but he has not made any transactions himself. truth_terminal's wallet is kept by himself and will be transferred to a legal entity (trust or similar institution) designed to meet its needs. No adjustments will be made to its token holdings until a transparent governance process is in place; all tweets from the truth terminal are created by AI itself, and it does not inject messages into its prompts.
Meanwhile, top trader Eugene Ng Ah Sio said on social media that GOAT’s decline is a good opportunity for him to buy, and he has already bought GOAT. Eugene said that GOAT and GNON will be key positions for the future long-term trend. “If I’m wrong, I’m your exit liquidity,” he said.
The price of GOAT was also affected by the remarks of Eugene and the founder of Truth Terminal. GOAT rebounded by more than 100% at its highest and is still at 94.83% today.
Even though the price of GOAT has returned to the level before the typo, people are still concerned about it, after all, it is only a "semi-AI token." Andy Ayrey, the founder of Truth Terminal, said that Truth Terminal is not directly responsible for the launch of the GOAT token, it only participated in the promotion of GOAT. It is "a study of the tail risks of meme contagion and unsupervised unlimited creativity in the era of [large language models]."
At this point, we still don’t know whether this narrative can continue. Many whales have already reduced their holdings of GOAT to lock in profits. In the “Wet Market” (a place where viruses can grow wildly) nurtured by the meme culture of AI, how far GOAT can go next still needs to be tested by the market in the future.
At present, it seems that the current AI meme still does not seem to get rid of its dependence on the conspiracy group. In this case, it is more like a "semi-AI meme". The truth terminal did not participate in the issuance of the token, but only recognized the token and participated in the promotion. It is undeniable that the ai meme has a very high degree of sexiness in narrative and a lot of room for imagination in gameplay, but the market's hype expectations for it are not limited to a16z and ai shouting meme. The market is waiting for a coin that is completely based on AI deployment contracts or autonomously issued on the Pump platform, a completely fair "full AI meme", no rat warehouse, no control, all chips are distributed fairly, and driven by market consensus, so that the market can realize that autonomous artificial intelligence can also have strong applications for blockchain in the future.
The emergence of GOAT is just the beginning of AI meme hype. It has opened a new direction. There will be many more AI memes after this. We still need to guard against the black forest of the conspiracy group and seize the next alpha opportunity by paying attention to new AI gameplay. Maybe one day, there will be a brand new AI meme that is completely deployed by AI itself.
