Meme Or Social Experiment? Here Comes the Nova!
The Story of Meme Coins
What Are Meme Coins?
Before we talk about meme coins, let's talk about memes first. The term "meme" first appeared in Richard Dawkins' book "The Selfish Gene" in 1976. The word comes from the ancient Greek "mīmēma", meaning "imitated thing". In Dawkins' book, a meme is defined as a unit that carries culture, ideas, concepts, or behavior patterns, which can include but are not limited to slogans, proverbs, gestures, habits, images, or any other specific and imitable form that is easy to spread. On the internet, there are some very easily spread forms of expression, such as images, emoji, and short videos. They are usually repeatable images or text used to convey humor, criticism, or satire. These memes that were born on the internet can spread like a virus across the internet. For example, if I blank out half the words in the following sentence, most readers of my article can still tell where the sentence came from and what it means:
If ___ has ____ fans, then I'm __ _ __. If ___ has __ fan, then I'm __ __. If ___ has _ fans, that means _ __.
The History of Meme Coins
Speaking of meme coins, their origin can be traced back to 2013, when some of the earliest meme coins appeared. They were created by folking Bitcoin network and issued their own native coins, such as Catcoin and Dogecoin. Dogecoin, was launched as a joke by software engineers Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer in 2013, aiming to mock people's crazy speculation behavior towards cryptocurrencies at that time. The prototype of Dogecoin came from the popular internet meme "Doge", which was a widely circulated photo of a Japanese Shiba Inu.
However, Dogecoin's development later went against the founders' idea, and it quickly became popular on the social platform Reddit with its already popular Doge meme image and internet meme-style. With the popularity of Dogecoin, a large number of memecoins with dog elements emerged. During this period, most memecoins had no specific goals or uses and attracted users mainly by social media promotion.
With the improvement of blockchain infrastructure and the introduction of smart contracts, a developer named Ryoshi issued $SHIB on Ethereum, which also used a Japanese Shiba Inu as its element. However, unlike Dogecoin, $SHIB hitched a ride on smart contracts. 50% of the total supply of $SHIB was used to provide liquidity in Uniswap AMM, and the other 50% was sent to Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin. Buterin burned 90% of it and donated the remaining 10% to the India Covid Relief Fund. During this period, memecoins began to have a celebrity effect. In 2021, Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla, supported Dogecoin, once again pushing memecoins to the forefront of the times.
With the development of the crypto industry, some memecoins have been born that are built on popular culture and native to crypto, and ArbDoge is one of them. ArbDoge was issued on the Ethereum Layer2 network Arbitrum and adopted a design that empowers tokens. Initially, it was promoted by airdropping to all addresses that qualified for $ARB airdrops. And a transaction tax was designed for Arbidoge, with part of the tax revenue used to buy back $ARB, which will be used to reward ArbDoge holders and LPs.
Meme Or Social Experiment? Here Comes the Nova!
Unconditional Basic Income
Nova is the upcoming Memecoin that will be officially released on July 7. Unlike most previous Memecoins that are purely sentiment-based, Nova introduces a concept called UBI (Unconditional Basic Income) into the tokenomic.
UBI, short for Unconditional Basic Income, also known as Universal Basic Income, refers to a system in which every citizen or member can receive a regular amount of money without any conditions, qualifications, or eligibility requirements. It is distributed by the government or organizations to all members to meet their basic living conditions, including food, housing, education, healthcare, public utilities, and other basic expenses. Through economic security, UBI aims to fulfill basic human rights.
This idea originated from Thomas More, the author of "Utopia", in the Middle Ages, and is similar to the cash-sharing plan currently in effect in Macau. During the Covid pandemic in 2020, American entrepreneurs such as Bill Gates also called on the US government to distribute relief funds to the public. Recently, Sam Altman, the founder of OpenAI, also proposed a UBI plan. He believes that when AI replaces more jobs, not having work and income should not become a problem for people's survival. Therefore, his idea is to guarantee everyone's basic living by giving everyone money.
But the question is, where does the money come from? Altman predicts that within the next 10 years, companies in the entire AI industry will earn enough money to take a portion out of that money to distribute to everyone. He conservatively estimates that 250 million people can receive $13,500 for free each year.
To ensure that everyone in the world can receive this money equally, Altman chooses to use blockchain technology to issue WorldCoin. He believes that everyone should join the WorldCoin network and then achieve fair distribution of UBI through the WorldCoin network.
UBI Social Experiment of Nova
How does Nova do it? Nova wrote smart contracts through ChatGPT and set a 9% tax for token sales in the contract, while purchases are not taxed. Of the 9% transaction tax, 3% will be used to purchase $ETH and distributed as relief funds for users who suffered huge losses in crypto, 3% will be used for marketing, and 3% will be added to the liquidity pool to ensure sufficient stability of liquidity.
The total supply of Nova's native token $NOVA is 1 quadrillion, with an initial price set at $0.000000001 and an initial market cap of $0.1 million. After issuance, 95% of the total supply will be used as liquidity, and the remaining 5% will be used for the development of the ecosystem. At the same time, Nova also designed a mechanism in the smart contract for token burn to achieve deflation - every time the price increases by 10 times, the smart contract will burn 1% of the total supply.
In summary, Nova hopes to use a system similar to DeFi revenue sharing to achieve a digital UBI social experiment based on crypto technology.
Itarian Care for NFT Collapse
The NFT market has been declining this year. During the bull market, liquidity was concentrated in blue-chip collections as NFTs are crypto assets with relatively poor liquidity. After a long period of interest rate hikes, NFT liquidity has finally been drained, and the emergence of Blur has accelerated this process. As the tide receded, only Azuki's price remained strong. However, Azuki Elementals has been plagued by scandals and controversies since its release, causing the prices of all Azuki NFT collections to plummet. Azuki's collapse was like tearing off the last fig leaf of the NFT market. After Azuki's collapse, blue-chip NFTs generally fell, and it was a dark moment for the NFT market.
To help users who suffered huge losses in recent NFT collapses such as Azuki and BAYC, Nova decided to distribute relief funds to them in the first stage of its development. Specifically, the first 10,000 $ETH raised through the tax on Nova token sales will be used for relief funds and distributed to holders of the previous blue-chip NFT Top30. To ensure fair and transparent distribution, Nova will conduct a list check to ensure that every user who receives relief funds is a genuine blue-chip NFT holder. So that the fees generated by $NOVA traders will be delivered to users who truly need them. At the same time, this is only the first stage, and as Nova develops, more crypto users suffering from losses will benefit from UBI.
Unlike other Meme coins that focus on the concept of safeguarding, Nova shows humanitarian care for users who suffer losses in NFT collapses through the UBI mechanism. At the same time, this sounds quite "ironic" - those once-famous NFT holders were not the people who needed relief, but they can also become recipients of relief. This is exactly the idea advocated by UBI, while also spreading the spirit of humanism. In the low tide of the NFT market, Nova can support those blue-chip NFT holders through tax subsidies. When the NFT market rebounds, these users will continue to accompany Nova in helping other users.
Closing Thoughts
We are not sure if this social experiment will succeed, but we believe that Nova's humanitarian spirit is worth promoting. After the collapse of Azuki, some people watched from the sidelines, while others laughed at those who suffered the consequences. But whether it's a bull market or a bear market, crypto or the real world, there are always people suffering, and we have reason to help them in times of need. Because no one can be sure who will fall into the abyss in the next second. We also hope that Nova can develop into a real crypto utopia through this social experiment.
Meme