Why is Fartcoin worth $1 billion?

From around 19 cents, within 10 days its price hit $1.27. Fartcoin, like Goatseus Maximum before it, had broken the $1 billion market cap valuation.

Author

Adam Atlantic
January 13, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

Yes. Fartcoin.

You read that right.

And yes, at the time of writing, Fartcoin has a market cap in the crypto markets of $1.17 billion.

Every fibre of our existence doesn’t want it to be true. But it is, and the why and the how is important to understand.

This is crypto, in all its wild and wacky glory.

To understand how Fartcoin gets to $1 billion we need to wind the clock back to June 2024.

A ‘performance artist’ called Andy Ayrey created an AI bot called Truth Terminal. It existed in an online site called Infinite Backrooms. The idea was to let two AI bots free from constraints, ‘talk’ AI-to-AI about anything. Importantly, no humans would contribute.

Truth Terminal was plugged into X.com where it was also able to freely post. It was trained on X.com content, but soon after creation it switched source data to 4chan. That’s when things got really wild.

Soon after, Truth Terminal began to obsessively post about a meme-based religion it invented, the ‘Goatse Gospel’, based on a truly gross internet shock meme.

The incessant posting of the Goatse Gospel, led to the creation of the ‘Goatseus Maximus’ crypto token on the Solana blockchain. Truth Terminal then began to obsessively post about that.

An AI crypto, with a (frankly insane) backstory like this, and the meme-factor blew the GOAT token price up to over $1 billion (albeit it’s now around $600 million).

Ever since, in Infinite Backrooms, Truth Terminal has gone on to suggest other ideas, with varying success, but one idea was the creation and launch of Fartcoin.

Of course this led to the creation (by a human, not Truth Terminal) of the Fartcoin crypto on Solana’s blockchain. The meme got traction with memecoin traders and Fartcoin also started to grow in value, meme culture, and notoriety.

But things really shot higher when a post started circulating on various social media that went viral:[1]

This went viral around December 9th.

At this point, memecoin traders started to rally behind Fartcoin even harder and its price rocketed.

From around 19 cents just before this began to circulate, within 10 days its price hit $1.27.

Fartcoin, like Goatseus Maximum before it, had broken the $1 billion market cap valuation.

It’s hard to say if the Reddit post was real, or just a creative way to ‘pump’ the token price. Either way, the viral nature of the post and the AI/meme-based origins of Fartcoin meant this was now another memecoin success story.

This is a ridiculous part of crypto.

Except this has been happening every cycle for a decade now. Dogecoin was first launched in 2013 as a memecoin, it’s now worth $57 billion. Shiba Inu was launched in 2020 as a memecoin to copy Dogecoin, it’s worth $12 billion.

Every cycle there are opportunities in memecoins like these to mint sizeable returns.

It means you can’t ignore what’s happening, as weird as it might be. But also, don’t make it a core part of your strategy either.

As we’ve pointed out before, play in the memecoin space, expect to lose money. Rarely do you make it big.

But if you do play, make sure it’s only with punt money you’re ready to kiss goodbye. That way you won’t be disappointed when it’s gone, but also, you’ll be incredibly smug if you (somehow) land on a random winner.

Trust in crypto,
Adam Atlantic