Fantom Meme Season: Will it work as intended?
Memecoins are real users
We all love a good memecoin. What's not to like?
Everything on Solana (TVL, total fees, transactions, users) has boomed due to the explosion in memecoins in the ecosystem.
Memecoins represent an attractive prospect for blockchains because they are largely bot and airdrop farmer free.
Whilst newer blockchains frequently see millions of wallets active they frequently have real user counts in the low thousands. Sometimes even low hundreds.
The impacts of industrial scale airdrop farming cannot be understated: It will doom the crypto industry if it's not stamped out.
No one wants to invest in funding such blatant scamming of the system.
But memecoins don't have this problem. You have to buy them and there's zero advantage to holding 100 wallets with 10 $WIF as opposed to holding 1 wallet with 1000 $WIF. In fact fewer transactions is actually cheaper.
Of the airdrops that do occur these always go to non-airdrop farmer wallets anyway (prominent NFT collections, large holders of other memecoins etc..) as memecoin projects want people who aren't simply going to dump the token.
How does one "meme-coin" exactly?
So with all this in mind it's no wonder so many blockchains are eager to see memecoins flourish in their ecosystems to attract real users and offset the number of fake wallets that traditional usage based incentive schemes have attracted.
But this is a tricky thing: How do you encourage memecoins?
No one really knows. It's like trying to manufacture viral memes.
Plenty of top web and social media marketing agencies have tried to come up with formulas for viral content and to date no one has actually solved for that (even though plenty will tell you they have...).
There's been a few approaches so far.
Avalanche
The Avalanche Foundation launched an investment program for culturally significant memecoins on the blockchain.
And they've funded a number of incentive programs across the network targeting memecoins
Near
The Near Foundation have taken a slightly different approach in that they, in conjunction with the main DEX on Near, Ref Finance, provided rewards for the 4 largest existing memecoins in the ecosystem
And they've run one season already with at least one more lined up
Criticisms and comparison to Solana memecoins
A clear criticism of both these programs is they aren't organic. They're picking winners and, in both cases, it's existing memecoins meaning that they aren't actually incentivising for new tokens to be created, instead they're just trying to get traders across for the tokens that already exist.
In Avalanche's case it's unclear what the requirements are for the Foundation to invest or even what they're investing in (though on chain sleuths have been able to figure it out).
In Near's case it's literally only 4 tokens. But Near does have the real issue of poor liquidity so it is doubtful exactly how many new tokens they could feasibly sustain.
The biggest criticism however none of this is practically any different to the token incentives that caused the explosion in airdrop farming and fake users. At least these are linear rewards so there's little incentive to create millions of new wallets. But once the rewards end there's a very real chance that the users who came to the blockchain to participate in these memecoin promotions leave in search of new rewards.
The hope is that seeing as memecoin projects tend to be 'sticker' in terms of user loyalty there is a higher chance of retaining these users than what you'd see from a copy paste defi app on (e.g., Uniswap/GMX clones).
The Solana Foundation hasn't had to intervene in the markets in such a direct way in comparison. On Solana the ecosystem has developed the tooling and liquidity in order to allow a million different memecoins to flourish meaning that there really is something for everyone and for projects looking to launch a new memecoin there is a clear choice in terms of UX for users and builders alike.
So Solana continues to see the lion's share of new projects launch which further extends their lead in this industry sector.
Enter Fantom and the Sonic Upgrade
Fantom are gearing up to undertake their largest engineering project since launching the blockchain: The Sonic upgrade.
The Fantom Foundation, as a lead into the Sonic upgrade which will bring it closer to Solana speeds and transaction cost, has kicked off a massive memecoin incentive program.
All the details are laid out in the following blog post
https://blog.fantom.foundation/introducing-meme-season-competition-up-to-10-million-sftmx-in-prizes/
The idea is to incentivise both trading memecoins and new memecoin creations with Fantom detailing the process clearly for new memecoins to become part of the promotion.
And the scope is impressive.
The promotion is slated to run for 10 months. With 1 million in sFTMx being paid each month to both token projects as well as holders there's a nod to longevity as you're both incentivising teams AND their users at the same time.
There's no reason why a team wouldn't take a portion of their rewards at the end of the promotion and then spin up their own incentive programs to help retain their user base. By putting a good chunk of these rewards into the hands of those with the most to lose from users leaving Fantom after the incentives end means Fantom is trying to gear this towards long term growth not a short term TVL spike.
Rewards paid in sFTMx is also a further nod to the intention of the Fantom Foundation to try and encourage this to have long term positive effects on the network (staking yield) rather than be airdrop/yield farmed to death.
So how does it work?
If you're a memecoin project you can apply directly to the Fantom Foundation to be considered for the program here https://forms.gle/z3dbwPCDawZSDVCw9
If you're a user (read: token holder) you'll just need to hold the tokens. See all the details in the Fantom Foundation blog post above.
The official leaderboard is here
You can find the token details by clicking on each of them in the leaderboard.
Go to the URL to get the full contract address (really could've done with a copy button beside the address on the webpage..)
There's also a Dune Dashboard https://dune.com/0xkhmer/memeseason2024
Now unfortunately despite a CoinGecko listing being in Fantom's own T&Cs... three of these tokens aren't currently listed. 
I've set up a CoinGecko Portfolio to track my holdings, and I'd encourage you to do the same if you're thinking of participating as you can accurately track your returns over time.
Here's my dashboard with all the CoinGecko listed tokens: 
For the 3 non listed tokens I'm using a GeckoTerminal watchlist
Unfortunately the data display is limited and you can't track your individual positions like you can with the tokens themselves.
For this reason I'm only holding those tokens I can track fully.
You would hope the CoinGecko listing for these tokens aren't too far away.
Swapping for tokens
If you're used to Solana and using Jupiter you're going to be disappointed with Fantom. Whilst there are some really good DEXs on the chain, there is no aggregator experience like Jupiter and the liquidity is far less than what is on Solana.
Be prepared to have slippage rates much higher than you'd generally accept for Solana transactions.
You can use DeFi Llama's DEX aggregator, LlamaSwap to find the best places for each token swap. If you can't find a token in the list just paste the token contract address in and it'll come up.
Stay up to date
Don't forget to subscribe to the Fantom Foundation blog https://blog.fantom.foundation/ and follow them on X https://x.com/FantomFDN to stay up to date with all the latest developments
sFTMx incentives
You'll have noticed there are non-memecoins in my CoinGecko Portfolio tracker. Running in parallel to the meme season is the sFTMx incentive program. sFTMx is the main LST on Fantom: https://beets.fi/sftmx
Recently it was taken over by core DEX Beethoven X from Stader.
They have kicked off an incentive program, in conjunction with the Fantom Foundation, aimed at increasing usage of sFTMx and thus staking on the network.
I'm personally providing liquidity via this to another core Fantom protocol, Equalizer (thus why EQUAL is being tracked alongside sFTMx).
Will this work as Fantom is hoping?
The biggest question here is: Is this a good use of the Fantom Foundation's resources?
Fantom have a history of these ecosystem wide incentive programs with their gas monetisation program having been very successful
https://blog.fantom.foundation/gas-monetization-sustainable-income-for-developers/
But this is another kettle of fish entirely. There is no doubt that simply providing usage rewards for dapps on Fantom would fail as they'd be farmed to death by a handful of farming operations resulting in little to no real user growth.
Memecoins are not as attractive to farmers due to their volatility affecting potential profits and there being no advantage to more wallets as opposed to less.
But that all said, this is still an airdrop program and that attracts non-sticky users.
If Fantom manage to onboard a considerable number of new tokens and communities via this it will be a big win for the overall ecosystem. More tokens and more users means more DEX listings and transaction volumes and opportunities to direct that capital to other dapps on the chain.
As prelude to the Sonic upgrade it offers a nice battle test for the throughput capabilities of Sonic should they see significant memecoin trading volumes be ported across from Opera to Sonic.
I'm a big fan of Fantom and a fan of memecoins so I'm definitely participating. It'll be interesting, but the jury is out on whether it'll be profitable.
So ape with caution.
Over to you
Are you on Fantom now?
Which are your favourite memecoins on Fantom?
Would you consider going to Fantom for this campaign?
Let me know in the comments!
