tldr; Cat memecoins are entering a secular meta. TOSHI has more upside than BONK.
Reinventing money, of course.
Money has no essence. It's not "really" anything; therefore, its nature has always been and presumably always will be a matter of political contention.
-David Graeber, Debt: The First 5000 Years
If all money is a meme, then the best money will have the strongest combination of properties; technical, social, and cultural.
The crypto revolution was built around the idea that the world needs sound money with transparent and predictable low, non, or net-negative issuance—existing outside of state control over these supply levers. Capped or predictable supply is a shelling point around which emerging crypto money networks are aggregating users and premia, differentiating through technical (ETH’s supply burn, validator yield), social (BTC’s low policy velocity), and cultural (cats, dogs, Pepe) memes.
While BTC, ETH and smart contract platforms have managed to earn the largest monetary premia amongst cryptoassets today, the next largest category of money challengers has been so-called “memecoins” (affectionately, “shitcoins”) like Dogecoin ($DOGE), Shiba Inu ($SHIBA) and recently, BONK ($BONK), among others.
Memecoins have an advantage in aggregating early liquidity. Assets in this class can swiftly ascend to dizzying price levels given their “valuation” or “market capitalization” is not tethered to constructs like earnings multiples or other traditional comps. Reflexivity in the price of emergent money instruments creates feedback loops whereby the higher the price rises, the more liquid and money-like the asset becomes, paradoxically drawing even more flows and higher prices (warning: this can work both ways).
In most cases, memecoins have relatively undifferentiated monetary characteristics and operate as technical commodities which trade on cultural significance. The winners are those that generate attention velocity and have strong emotional hooks.
You may have noticed that the top memecoins to date all have a similar quality—they are represented by a dog. Dog money has been the dominant player in the memecoin space. It’s no surprise why. Dogs are one of the most beloved totems that exist in our world today. They are recognizable and loved across the globe, and few competitors exist to their popularity.
One possible challenger is dog’s natural rival, cat.
Enter cat money. Sorry dogs, cats are the internet native pet. So, naturally, cat coins are poised to dominate internet-native emergent meme money. It may be less apparent to a North American audience, but cats are more popular (91 countries vs 76 for dogs) across the globe including in much of Asia. The most popular cat posts get almost 4x the traffic of the most-clicked dog posts.
Metaphorically, cats are more intuitive as non-sovereign money because they represent independence and rebellion while dogs are subservient and loyal to their owners (e.g. the state).
TOSHI, a memecoin launched in August on Base, and the name of Brian Armstrong’s pet cat, has emerged as the first mover in the cat coin space.
Was it the first-ever cat coin? Probably not, but who cares—It is first to gain and sustain critical attention mass and has mattered where others didn’t. Its first-mover status is cemented by the fact that it birthed a meta of Ethereum L2 founder’s cat tokens (NOLA on Arbitrum, TUX on Optimism, etc).
Toshi, sitting at ~$50m market cap, is also the first major memecoin to establish relevance on an L2, and doing so on Base is notable.
Base, Coinbase’s L2, presents several unique opportunities:
Ability to onboard its tens of millions of (normie) users to Base and to Base-native assets. The Base team deeply understands onchain and gtm as evidenced by launch and traction. When Coinbase figures out the secret sauce to onboard users onchain, Base is positioned to win big.
No native Base token → Toshi could conceivably be the native token of Base or the best way to play Base exposure
Hear Qiao Wang discuss the Toshi and Base opportunity (at ~24m mark) on the Pomp show:
1 Toshi = 1 Toshi
You want fundamentals? Let’s do fundamentals.
First, it’s useful to examine the relative position of dog-coin competitors. Here, we see BONK, the current memecoin leader, still has considerable upside if it were to trade in the realms of current leadership.
When we look at Bonk’s upside against those leaders' all-time highs, it becomes even more attractive. The question then becomes, can Bonk flip Doge?
Ultimately, on some level, Bonk is a derivative of DOGE. The answer comes down to whether a derivative coin could ever surpass the original.
Our belief is that TOSHI has a superior chance of catching and surpassing DOGE over the coming cycle due to the originality of its meme.
Because it is a first mover, I believe that TOSHI uniquely has a chance to flip not only DOGE (239x) and DOGE’s ATH (1,559x) but also DOGE’s future ATH (10,000x+).
Toshi is also manned by a capable dev team who have capitalized on their success by launching several developer tools on Base’s nascent chain. In this sense, they are becoming more of Base’s mascot than a memecoin.
In a recent Lightspeed episode, Ansem eloquently described the difference between a mascot and a memecoin:
There are mascots for a chain and there are memecoins…mascots are organized in a way that they have a team behind them and they’re…contributing value to the ecosystem and building out actual products
Like Bonk on Solana, the team could create apps like a dex or trading bot and become a staple on Base in terms of users, transactions, and revenue. This would also create a sustainable way to generate and direct treasury revenue towards mechanics like buyback and burn.
Toshi holders will also accrue yield in the form of airdrops. Given the proliferation of behavior-driven airdrop mechanics, holders from top communities can expect to (hilariously) compound their wins by drawing payment-for-attention from new token launches. This is effectively yield to Toshi holders.
âś“ Culturally Embedded (mascot, derivatives)
âś“ Distribution (base, Coinbase)
âś“ Strong Meme (cat)
âś“ Upside (DOGE, BONK)
âś“ Fundamentals (revenue, yield)
Bid the blue cat.
Disclaimer: I am talking my book. I’m a top 100 individual holder, owner since TOSHI’s first day, and have never sold, only added. This post is written for myself and how I’m personally reasoning through Toshi’s upside.
How to Buy (alpha in the difficulty):
Sushiswap on Base (Note: set slippage to 3% + necessary trade slippage to account for 3/3 tax)
Toshi is money. Based Cat money.
♥️🧶KittyHayek