Todayβs edition is brought to you by Ledger Wallet. The hardware wallet trusted by everyone. Buy Ledger Flex to claim your Bitcoin (limited offer) π«΅
Hello y'all. Christmas has come with its share of red with crypto markets, but today we take you through something else.
First up, show us some love on X π€
There's a $1-billion joke floating around crypto Twitter right now, and it smells like ... err β¦ success.
From $0 to $1 billion in 60 days, $FARTCOIN became the king of AI memecoins.
No, that's not a typo - we're talking about a token inspired by Elon Musk's alleged appreciation for flatulence that's now worth more than some Fortune 500 companies.
"Hot air rises" β¦ and so it goes up and up.
The story of Fartcoin, where absurdity meets billion-dollar market caps.
Consider signing up for pay-what-you-want subscription to support our work - which is possible thanks to support from readers like you.
If you want to reach out to 190,000+ subscriber community of the Token Dispatch, you can explore the partnership opportunities with us.
Birth of a Gaseous Giant
Remember when memecoins needed Elon Musk tweets to pump?
Those days are gone.
In the wildest twist of 2024's crypto saga, a token named after flatulence $Fartcoin just dethroned $GOAT as the king of AI memecoins.
No influencer pumps. No celebrity endorsements, no hype.
Just pure unadulterated gas and smart money playing 4D chess.
It all started where most crypto chaos begins these days - with an AI chatbot.
Remember Truth Terminal, the AI agent that gave us GOAT?
Read: The Goatse Singularity π
We know its connection with crypto venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who provided the agent a $50,000 grant in Bitcoin earlier this year.
New Zealand-based AI researcher Andy Ayrey created Truth Terminal.
He trained a custom version of Anthropic's Claude 3 Opus large language model (LLM) using his personal writing and data from social media sites including 4chan, Reddit and X.
Fartcoinβs origins stem from the βTerminal of Truths.β
During a chat about Elon Musk's apparent love for fart sounds (yes, really), the AI suggested creating Fartcoin.
Launch date: October 18, 2024
Launched on: PumpFun on Solana
Initial reaction: Mostly crickets
Peak market cap: $1.25 billion
Current market cap: Over $850 million
It tops the Terminals of Truths coins now.
It also tops Truth Terminalβs asset holding.
Silent but deadly π€«
The Social Media Mystery
Unlike the previously hot social topics like GOAT and Pnut, Fartcoin's rise seems to lack celebrity endorsements and social hotspots, making its absurd cultural core difficult for many to understand.
Read: The P'Nut Story πΏοΈ
Fartcoin's rise seems to defy the typical playbook.
With just 25,000 X followers and virtually no celebrity buzz, it somehow managed to silently creep its way to a $1.1 billion valuation.
Even high-profile attention from a16z's Marc Andreessen, whose December 13 retweet garnered 2.5 million views, failed to significantly impact the token's price action.
Choose the Right Ledger Wallet for You
Ledger wallet comes with key features to ensure accessibility and security for you wallet. With Ledger live app you can manage and stake your digital assets, all from one place. Ledger recover helps to restore access to your crypto wallet in case of a lost, damaged, or out of reach Secret Recovery Phrase.
Follow the Smart Money
While crypto detectives were busy tracking social media metrics, institutional players were quietly accumulating, PANews analysis.
Enter Sigil Fund, a regulated crypto investment fund that started buying just five hours after the token's launch on October 18.
Their initial investment? About 10% of the total market cap of Fartcoin's then $2 million market cap.
Initial entry: Oct 18, 11:50:34 UTC
Entry market cap: ~$2 million
Accumulated position: 12.02 million tokens
Initial investment: $191,000
Think of it as the Wall Street version of "he who smelt it, dealt it."
The rise can be broken down into three distinct waves.
Wave 1: October 18-24, hitting $76M before retreating to $20M.
Initial wave characterised by early institutional positioning.
Wave 2: November 3-22, climbing to $400M before falling to $160M.
Secondary surge with notable increase in whale wallet accumulation.
Wave 3: December 8-18, finally breaking the $1B barrier.
Final push for broader market recognition achieved.
But perhaps the most telling data point is the analysis of the top 1,000 holding addresses reveals sophisticated accumulation patterns.
Average entry price: $0.48
Market cap at entry: ~$500M
Initial exit price: $0.53
Primary accumulation periods coincide with market retracements
Concentrated buying activity during early December
The average entry price for the top 1,000 addresses was $0.48 - when the market cap was already near $500 million.
The accumulation pattern suggests coordinated institutional involvement rather than retail-driven momentum.
Smart money's strategy
Buy during pullbacks
Accumulate in silence
Let retail FOMO do the rest
In other words, the big money wasn't early; they were just patient.
The Ripple Effect
Just when you thought crypto couldn't get weirder.
The irony thickens. On December 19, a gold/silver investor (boomer) created "Unicorn Fart Dust" to prove crypto is worthless. Within 24 hours, it hit $250 million in market cap. You can't make this stuff up.
Token Dispatch View π
The sustainability of Fartcoin's valuation remains uncertain, but its rise represents a potential paradigm shift in memecoin market dynamics.
Traditional social media metrics appear to be declining in importance as institutional players develop more sophisticated approaches to value creation in the space.
The memecoin game is evolving.
Social hype to smart money plays
Influencer pumps to institutional games
Quick pumps to slow burns
What we're seeing might be the institutionalisation of memecoin trading.
The question is whether this marks a temporary phenomenon or a lasting evolution in how these assets are valued and traded.
In an era where memecoins typically live and die by social media hype, Fartcoin represents something new: institutional-grade absurdity.
It's what happens when smart money decides to play in the meme space, bringing wall street tactics to bathroom humour.
The MEME market has evolved from being driven by social hotspots to being primarily propelled by capital.
The question isn't whether this makes sense - in crypto, that's rarely the point.
The question is whether this marks a new era where even the silliest tokens can become serious business.
After all, in a market where a billion-dollar fart joke is considered a legitimate investment, perhaps the joke is on those still trying to make sense of it all.
And yes, we just wrote an entire newsletter about Fartcoin.
Sometimes the most absurd stories in crypto write themselves.
Week in Funding π°
Plume. $20M. Composable ecosystem of DeFi built around RWAfis for end-to-end tokenisation engine and a network of financial infrastructure.
Fraction AI. $6M. AI Web3 platform for training AI models, including text, images, audio, and video for a variety of AI applications.
DuckChain. $5M. EVM-compatible TON L2 solution to provide scalability and liquidity to bring users from the EVM and Bitcoin ecosystems into TON.
Kettle. $4M. The RWA platform bringing crypto rails to the masses. Peer-to-peer marketplace to luxury watches.
Promeet. $3.1M. Empowers creators and influencers to to engage and earn from your audience through both live and recorded video content.
If you want to make a splash with us, book a demo call π€
You can check out partnership opportunitiesπ
This is The Token Dispatch find all about us here π
If you like us, if you don't like us .. either ways do tell usβοΈ
So long. OKAY? β
Do you think itβs gonna die sooner than we think?