When foreigners start playing with Chinese meme tokens: A Polish trader's perspective on the migration of Meme coin culture

The European group is in an uproar

“Wait, this coin has risen to 60 million dollars? What does the Chinese written above mean?”

Polish trader Barry stared at the screen, and his community of hundreds was in chaos. The European guys were frantically pouring money into the BSC chain, yet they couldn't figure out why a bunch of Chinese tickers suddenly took off.

“I was shocked the first time I saw a cryptocurrency with a Chinese label break 20 million dollars,” Barry recalled, “How can this scam coin still be played like this?” As the price continued to soar to 100 million dollars, the entire community was stunned—everyone's accustomed American meme playbook completely fell apart.

On-chain data is even more exaggerated: On October 8th, the trading volume on BSC surged to $6.05 billion, directly matching the frenzy of 2021. Over 100,000 new wallets flooded in, with nearly 70% of them surprisingly making a profit. The number of active addresses skyrocketed by 1 million compared to last month.

This Chinese-led carnival caught Western players, who are used to the gameplay of Pepe and Doge, off guard for the first time.

The Rules of the Game in Two Worlds

“In the past, we played memes following American internet culture,” Barry said, “self-deprecation, rebellion, and dark humor. Now suddenly a bunch of Chinese memes have popped up, and I can't understand them at all.”

Fortunately, Barry had worked on projects with the Chinese team in his early years, and he started to “give lessons” to everyone in the group:

In Europe, people prefer to play conspiracy games. Several major KOLs or teams control the market, slowly building communities within the Ethereum ecosystem, and their methods for driving up prices are quite mature. The risks are obviously significant—whales can dump at any time, making it difficult to hold long positions.

The Chinese community is completely different. They emphasize “emotional resonance,” telling stories, creating memes, and binding IPs in WeChat groups. Theoretically, it is somewhat more “fair,” driven by emotions rather than pure control. In this round of cycles, as long as you buy the right hot IP or coins issued by opinion leaders, you might be able to “print money at will.”

Barry mentioned a case: a retail investor swapped 65 Chinese Meme coins on the BNB chain within 7 days, initially investing $100-300 each to test the waters, and increased the investment if the trend looked good. After a week, he made a net profit of $87,000. This kind of high-frequency net-casting strategy is rarely seen in the European and American markets.

Players in Europe and the United States have now started to abandon small-cap coins below $500,000, directly targeting assets starting from $5 million – what everyone wants is “certainty”.

From Doge to “Binance Life”: The Cultural Evolution of Memes

Looking back, the ancestor of Western meme coins is Dogecoin from 2013. It was a joke created by two programmers, mocking Bitcoin for being too serious. As a result, with Musk promoting it, its market value surged to $88.8 billion in May 2021.

Pepe Coin is similar, a cultural meme incubated by the 4chan community, which quickly surpassed a market value of $1 billion after its launch in 2023. The project team stated: “There is no intrinsic value, purely entertainment.”

This nihilism has dominated a wave of Meme coins on Solana—names like Fartcoin and Uselesscoin are pure rebellion and dark humor. Western internet culture thrives on this.

But Chinese Meme coins are taking a different path: resonance and identity projection.

“Lowly Xiao He” and “Customer Service Xiao He” are self-deprecating terms for workers; the “Cultivation” series reflects fantasies of escaping reality; “Binance Life” directly embodies the dream of getting rich overnight. The key is that they are all related to the “official”.

In the Chinese community, this is called “widening the road”—when a ticker is recognized by enough people, it becomes bound in the system. The authorities “have to pump it up”, otherwise it would be a slap in the face for themselves. This is also why many people can still hold on after a washout.

Western players feel that this is “the ceiling being controlled” - whether your coin can rise depends on whether the “system” is willing to pump it. The two ways of thinking are completely different.

The Exchange's PR Battle: From Fighting to “Breaking the Ice”

This wave of market trends has also triggered intense competition among exchanges.

On October 11, Jesse tweeted calling for everyone to boycott centralized exchanges that charge a 2%-9% listing fee. Three days later, CJ Hetherington, the founder of Limitless Labs, revealed that a certain exchange required project parties to stake 2 million BNB, airdrop 8% of tokens, and also pay a $250,000 security deposit to go live.

The exchange immediately denied, emphasizing that “it never charges listing fees” and even threatened to sue CJ for leaking internal conversations.

Coinbase quickly followed up, with Base head Jesse Pollak publicly stating: “There should be zero fees for the project launch.” Then they announced support for BNB—this is the token of a competitor's mainnet, unprecedented.

CZ “welcomed” Coinbase's listing of more BSC projects on social media. Jesse's attitude also took a 180-degree turn; he posted a demo video of the Base App, and the example token surprisingly used “Binance Life,” even joking in Chinese “turn on Binance Life mode in the Base App.”

Industry interpretation sees this as “the breaking of the ice between the China-U.S. crypto camps.” In simple terms, when the trading volume and attention in the Asian market reach a certain scale, Western exchanges have to actively approach the Chinese community.

Language is Opportunity

Mainstream media in Europe and the United States have given high attention to this matter. Western retail investors in the group lamented: “We don't understand the rise in coin prices.” Even communities like Barry, which have deep communication with the Chinese system, often encounter the problem of “knowing its meaning but not its significance.”

Some foreigners have even developed a dog tool for Chinese to English translation, and some have created a video series “Learn Chinese to Buy Meme Coins”. For the crypto world, the cultural emotional information behind different languages is itself a layer of valuable resources. This is “the first time that European and American investors need to understand Chinese culture to participate in the feast”.

Barry judged: “I think the Chinese Meme market is nearing its end. The longer it lasts, the more severe the traders' PTSD will become. It has now started to evolve towards smaller market caps and faster sectors.”

But he also admits: “English and Chinese have already become the main components of the Meme market, and this situation will not change in the short term. The Chinese market is larger and more easily driven by emotions. The European market often lags behind, but I believe English tickers will return—only they will become more integrated with Asian culture. Inspired by this round of Chinese Memes, they will become more Chinese: humor, symbolism, and aesthetics.”

To capture the next wave of Meme opportunities in the future, relying solely on luck is not enough. You need to deeply understand the language and culture of different regional communities. AI can help translate meme images and share updates, but it cannot replace a deep understanding of cultural context.

We may see a more multipolar crypto world - with more and more Chinese tickers like “Golden Dog” appearing on Base and Solana, where Eastern and Western communities might both integrate and learn from each other, but could also act independently. And within these cultural differences, there may lie new opportunities.