The Journey of Decrypting Fartcoin's $1 Billion: Institutional Early Adoption as a Catalyst, Cold Wallet Minting Crowns MEME New King

Original Article Title: "Deciphering Fartcoin's $1 Billion Journey: Institutional Early Layout or Catalyst, Cold Fermentation Casting MEME New King"

Original Article Author: Frank, PANews

Recently, the MEME market seems to have entered a period of calm. With the market and hot money flowing to mainstream coins, there was no particularly outstanding token in the first half of December for MEME coins. Against this backdrop, a MEME coin named Fartcoin defied the trend and surged, breaking through $1 billion on December 18, becoming the king of the AI agent series MEME.

Unlike the previous hot topics like GOAT and Pnut, Fartcoin's rise seems to lack celebrity endorsements and social hotspots, making it difficult for many to understand this absurd cultural core. PANews conducted an analysis of Fartcoin's social media heat and the top 1000 holding addresses, attempting to explain how Fartcoin rose from zero to $1 billion.

Rise to Prominence and Social Media Heat Dissociation

Fartcoin's birth shares the same origin as GOAT, both stemming from the terminal of truths artificial agent model. In the dialogue between the goat model and Opus, it was mentioned that Musk likes the sound of farting, so this AI model proposed to issue a token named Fartcoin and designed a series of promotion methods and gameplay. Therefore, Fartcoin was born on October 18, slightly later than GOAT (October 11). From the focus of social media attention, Fartcoin can be considered to have caught the wave of AI agent popularity. October 18 was the peak of social discussion about GOAT, and as people were amazed by GOAT's crazy trend, they turned their attention to similar tokens. Fartcoin thus naturally gained attention during this period.

According to cryptohunt.ai data, in terms of total followers, Fartcoin's official account had only 22,000 followers, while GOAT's Twitter followers numbered 214,000, nearly 10 times the difference. The main change in Fartcoin's social media data was a doubling of Twitter followers from 7,634 to 13,294 between 3:00 and 11:00 on November 16. The price change during this period increased by about 15%, which was not significant. There wasn't much discussion about this token on social media, and the growth in followers during this time frame is somewhat suspicious.

Furthermore, was the celebrity effect the main driver of Fartcoin? In fact, Fartcoin had almost no celebrity mentions in the early stages, until its market cap surpassed 3 billion dollars, after which some media outlets started reporting on it. Marc Andreessen, the founder of the prominent venture capital firm a16z, retweeted a tweet about Fartcoin on December 13, which had 2.5 million views, but the token's price did not skyrocket as a result.

In terms of related tweets, on December 13 at 23:43, Solana Daily posted about the top five AI MEME coins currently trending, with Fartcoin ranking first. This tweet received 525,000 views, and subsequently, the price rose by approximately 10%, reaching a market cap of nearly 8 billion dollars. However, this could not be considered as media hype driving the token's surge.

Moreover, the account with the most tweets and overall highest views is DEGEN NEWS, which reported multiple times on Fartcoin's market cap changes from December 12 to 16, with each tweet receiving around 150,000 views and roughly 1,000 likes. On the other hand, the GOAT official account's content easily garnered over 100,000 reads. Comparatively, Fartcoin's social media buzz could almost be described as lackluster. Therefore, the main driving force behind Fartcoin's surge may not have come from social media hype and discussion.

Sigil Fund Might Be the True Force Behind

Out of the AI tokens with a market cap exceeding 1 billion dollars, only GOAT and GRIFFAIN were born before Fartcoin, thus, Fartcoin had a certain advantage in terms of timing. Throughout its development, Fartcoin's surge can be broken down into several waves:

First wave: from October 18 to October 24, the market cap rose to around 76 million, then fell to around 20 million dollars.

Second wave: from November 3 to November 22, the market cap rose to around 400 million dollars, then dropped to around 160 million dollars.

Third wave: from December 8 to December 18, the market cap surpassed 1 billion dollars, making it the highest valued AI MEME token.

However, in the above media hype analysis, it can be observed that during these price surge phases, Fartcoin did not experience a simultaneous social media frenzy. Therefore, the driving force behind Fartcoin's rise is highly likely to be some form of institutional capital.

PANews conducted an analysis of the initial buy/sell transactions of the top 1000 addresses holding Fartcoin and found that among the earliest buy addresses, there appeared to be the involvement of a certain investment institution.

During the investigation, PANews noted that the address 4DPxYoJ5DgjvXPUtZdT3CYUZ3EEbSPj4zMNEVFJTd1Ts (hereinafter referred to as 4DPxY) started buying Fartcoin in several transactions over a few days starting from October 18, spending a total of $191,000 to acquire 12.02 million Fartcoin tokens.

Within 4DPxY's tokens, 7.4 million came from another address: FEeSRuEDk8ENZbpzXjn4uHPz3LQijbeKRzhqVr5zPSJ9 (hereinafter referred to as FEeSR). The FEeSR address also conducted 400 buy transactions, acquiring a large number of tokens and eventually transferring the tokens to the 4DPxY address.

The Binance deposit address of FEeSR is 4FM7D, and the initial funds for this address came from EsqEkirkY6s1RPsb3YaJZcP4APQz77BWmBAVCsbNNhpj (hereinafter referred to as EsqEki), which is identified on social media as the wallet address of the Sigil Fund.

It is reported that Sigil Fund is a fully regulated investor's fund focusing on cryptocurrency, decentralized projects, and digital assets. Established in 2018, it is an all-weather fund operated by crypto insiders.

In addition to address associations, Sigil Fund's founder, MrKvak, has expressed optimism about the AI token MEME coin on Twitter multiple times, and even on December 13, he proactively retweeted a post inquiring whether Sigil Fund holds $30 million worth of Fartcoin.

At this point, we can probably conclude that the Sigil Fund is very likely the early-stage capital arrangement for Fartcoin. Looking at the timeline, the initial purchase by the Sigil Fund was on 10-18-2024 11:50:34, just 5 hours after Fartcoin went live with a market cap of around 2 million USD. The Sigil Fund's initial investment amounted to approximately one-tenth of the market cap at that time. As of December 19, the Sigil Fund has sold over 3 million USD worth of tokens, with the 4DPxY address still holding a balance of 6.09 million USD worth of tokens.

In addition, there are also some other whale addresses that have been accumulating in large quantities recently through structured purchases, but they are not listed here.

Dt51tQyWGNGp1eg8MDXK1tukJEDV9JfDE6f5PuBQaoAN

This address started buying as early as October 18, 2024, at 08:20:53, spending 3.2 SOL to acquire 494,000 tokens. The address appears to be a sandwich attack address's profit-taking address.

Whales Mostly Bought During Dips, Recent Whale Influx

By analyzing the overall data, we can see that Fartcoin's whale addresses, in fact, did not enter early as analyzed by PNUT. Most of the whale purchases are still concentrated in early this month. Especially in the recent week, there has been a strong willingness for whales to enter the market.

Moreover, looking at the timing of whale entries, the peak entry periods of these whales are mostly during token retracements, such as November 1 to 3, 18 to 20, December 1 to 3, etc., which are all periods where the token retraced to lows. From this, it can also be seen that the smart money is perhaps always practicing the saying, "Be fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful."

Looking at the entry costs of these whales, the average initial buy-in cost for the top 1000 addresses is 0.48 USD, and the average initial sell cost is 0.53 USD. Of course, these statistics only represent the first-time purchases and sales, not the entire cost basis and profits of the whales. However, based on this average initial entry line, Fartcoin's market cap had already reached close to 5 billion USD. For retail investors, this price range seems to be less than an ideal investment space.

As of the time of writing on December 20, Fartcoin's market capitalization has surpassed 1.1 billion USD. Related theme tokens also seem to be experiencing a ripple effect. On December 19, a gold and silver supporter (boomer) created "Unicorn Fart Dust" (meaning: viewing cryptocurrency as "fart dust") MEME coin UFD after hearing about Fartcoin's success, as a social experiment. His original intention was to prove the worthlessness of cryptocurrency, but surprisingly, the token's market cap exceeded 250 million USD on the same day. This event further fueled the hype around Fartcoin, seeming to accelerate Fartcoin's rise story.

Looking back at Fartcoin's rise, it appears that we are witnessing a shift from MEME coins being primarily triggered by social trends to being primarily capital-driven. For players always looking for an angle, such angles seem increasingly hard to find and grasp. In general, from obscurity to fame, Fartcoin's development process seems to revolve around the word "pump." Of course, after reaching a market cap of 1 billion USD, Fartcoin has finally embraced the social media frenzy, but this frenzy may no longer signify an opportunity.

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