Memes drive markets.
It’s a reality that TradFi talking heads struggle to grapple with and accept during every crypto bull run. Yet even for legacy markets, assets are often more affected by cultural narratives than business fundamentals.
Bitcoin is a simple, dead, digital rock, yet it has outperformed every asset class of the past decade. It’s not a bond, nor a business – just a misunderstood technology coupled with powerful ideas, stories, and community.
BOS is game-changing because it allows crypto to plug into not only Bitcoin's network but also Bitcoin's idea. By melting the borders between blockchains, BOS lets altcoins become a part of Bitcoin’s epic meme and gives them the firepower to soar to the moon.
Narratives Over Numbers
It’s no secret that memes and memecoins are a core part of crypto’s identity. What may surprise many, however, is that they are arguably the best-performing sub-category among all altcoins this year.
As of early September, only 42 tokens were outperforming BTC year to date in CoinMarketCap’s top 300 coins. Even among those coins, 10 of the top 14 were memecoins – including MAGA, WIF, TURBO, and FLOKI. Tokens of the more serious variety related to AI, DeFi, or infrastructure, were comparatively poor performers.
“There are projects out there making $500 in fees per day while having $5-10 billion FDV,” argued Murad Mahmudov during his speech “The Memecoin Supercycle” at TOKEN2049 in September 2024. “They need the ‘narrative’ and the ‘memetic premium’ to support their overvalued market caps.”
One of the clearest displays of this phenomenon is visible in Ether (ETH)’s 2024 performance. Fundamentally, the network continues to function and even underwent a significant upgrade this year. Despite this, the asset is up only 45% year to date, underperforming the likes of Dogecoin (DOGE) at +393%, and SHIB at +168%.
Next to other coins, Ethereum hardly lacks technology; that is in fact one of its standout attributes. Instead, what Ethereum lacks is a compelling narrative.
Years ago, Ethereum’s “narrative” surrounded its highly anticipated Merge upgrade, which would make ETH a deflationary asset, and transition the protocol to proof of stake consensus.
Though the asset pumped in the month before its arrival, ETH sold off immediately when the Merge was actually finalized in September 2022, and has underperformed BTC ever since.
By comparison, Dogecoin and its dog token brethren have a great story this year. Elon Musk – a fervent Dogecoin believer – has been appointed under Trump’s upcoming administration to lead the “Department of Government Efficiency”, aka DOGE.
Does this have any substantive connection to Dogecoin or other dog coins as investable assets? None at all. But it’s a fantastic meme and marketing vehicle, and it’s helped push DOGE up +213% in the last month alone.
None of this is to say that tech doesn’t matter in crypto. But when it comes to token prices, memes are primary, and tech is secondary.
So where can we find the most powerful meme in crypto?
Enter Bitcoin.
Bitcoin’s Epic Saga
When the Bitcoin whitepaper was published, it was undoubtedly significant as a breakthrough technology. It was the first peer-to-peer electronic cash system, a digital solution to the Byzantine General’s problem, and the first asset with an absolutely fixed and inelastic supply.
Yet since the very beginning, Bitcoin has drawn its greatest strength from what it represents, not what it is.
Launched in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, Bitcoin symbolized a fair and transparent financial paradigm – an escape from the world’s broken system of centralization, censorship, and banker bailouts. Bitcoin’s Genesis Block was embedded with the message “Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks” – and its immutable ledger carries that mission statement to this day.
Bitcoin’s meme was rebellious. It was “fuck you money.” It was an idea exciting enough for a grassroots community of cypherpunks and economists to rally behind, and become its decentralized marketing department.
Years later, Bitcoin’s development and adoption journey has been filled with compelling lore that only feeds its memetic momentum.
Satoshi Nakamoto, its anonymous founder, abruptly vanished from the project in 2011, removing the closest thing the project had to a centralized leader. With the world yet to find Satoshi, his absence has turned him into a revered god for the Bitcoin community, and has inspired full-blown documentaries on Bitcoin’s origins and false prophets.
With its leader gone, the Bitcoin community later fought an intellectual civil war to determine the future of the protocol. The decentralized community ultimately defeated powerful centralized interests that sought to take the project in a new direction, maintaining Bitcoin’s stability and purity.
Over the past ten years, Bitcoin has massively outperformed other major asset classes with a 75% compound annual growth rate. That’s despite bans on crypto in China and Russia, multiple industry bankruptcies, and both legal pressure and ridicule from U.S. market regulators – all of which Bitcoin has survived and bounced back stronger from.
In 2024, Bitcoin has converted the most powerful men in the world from enemies into allies, from BlackRock CEO Larry Fink to U.S. President-elect Donald Trump. Bitcoin ETFs shattered global ETF performance records, and states across the country are now racing to implement Strategic Bitcoin Reserve legislation. Gary Gensler – Bitcoin’s arch nemesis leading the SEC – has announced his incoming resignation.
Put it all together, and Bitcoin’s heroic tale is better than fiction can devise. Magic internet money built by basement coders with no business or yield has defied the odds and is now the center of attention on Wall Street and in geopolitics.
To say Bitcoin is crypto’s ultimate meme is an understatement. Bitcoin, more aptly, is poetry in motion – an epic saga every investor, corporation, and government now wants to be a part of.
Bitcoin and BOS: Where Memes Meet Technology
To be clear: Bitcoin, at its core, is still a technological marvel. In fact, the reason Bitcoin has succeeded so strongly is precisely because it has the technology to support its meme.
Bitcoin does indeed preserve your purchasing power over time, and BTC does not debase. It protects your property rights, can’t be hacked, empowers free global trade, and lets you transact with people who your government may not like.
But there are some areas where Bitcoin has fallen short of the idea it occupies in our minds. For example, it’s far too slow and cumbersome to be used as a day-to-day medium of exchange. Its privacy is also terrible. Worst of all, Bitcoin has no native DeFi. As such, the asset can’t actually be used for basic financial services without putting it back in the hands of middlemen, which defeats the purpose of BTC.
That’s where BitcoinOS comes in.
Through BOS, external execution environments can “plug into” BTC, allowing the network’s users to access all the decentralized functionality once foreign to them. Using breakthrough ZK technology, it effectively upgrades Bitcoin by integrating it with more capable blockchains through rollups and trustless BTC bridging.
These other chains can fill in any gaps where Bitcoin’s technology doesn’t match its ideal.
This is great news for BTC holders, but also implies a great deal for any alt chains / Layer 1 networks that integrate with BOS.
In a literal sense, these chains can gain access to part of Bitcoin’s $1.9 trillion capital base, and may inherit the Bitcoin network’s security. But beyond that, these blockchains can now authentically brand themselves as “extensions” of Bitcoin – allies in Bitcoin’s great memetic tale that are key to making its ideal a reality.
This is an incredibly powerful idea on the market, and one that has already proven its strength before BOS’s mainnet launch. In late October, it was announced that Cardano had become BOS, with plans to activate trustless BTC bridging between the Bitcoin and Cardano networks.
From this fundamental technical innovation, the Cardano community has capitalized and turned it into an incredibly bullish new meme. The idea that Cardano will become a Bitcoin “partner chain” and a leading “Bitcoin DeFi Layer” has spread like wildfire, earned Cardano new headlines, and put a new wind in Cardano’s sails.
This momentum is already evident in ADA’s price. The news surrounding BOS – combined with news of Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson soon advising the government’s crypto policy – has helped push ADA’s price up 181% over the last 30 days, vastly outperforming other top tokens.
Cardano is one example of a chain that’s always had strong fundamental technology, innovation, and governance, but has struggled to find the meme power to give it that kick of momentum. BOS is one way that the community has found to recover it.
This story can be replicated with any chain that decides to onboard BOS, and one that all blockchains should look forward to. History shows us that the projects and companies that join Bitcoin’s story and complement it are the biggest winners.
The Bitcoin epic is unfolding before our eyes. In what way will you partake and seize some of the glory?
