A Phenomenon Triggered by a Unique Encryption Coin: From Absurdity to Breaking the Circle

On October 18, 2024, a cryptocurrency named Fartcoin was born. This absurdly named token actually became one of the few mainstream coins to rise against the trend in the first quarter of 2025, even causing a stir on Wall Street.

The origin of this token comes from a conversation between artificial intelligences. In an AI agent model, a casual chat about a certain tech entrepreneur "liking the sound of farting" triggered a chain reaction. The AI suggested: "How about we create a coin called Fartcoin?" And so, this "fart coin" was born.

Fartcoin attracted a lot of attention as soon as it was launched. On December 13, 2024, a teasing tweet about Fartcoin quickly spread across social platforms. What made this tweet go viral was a retweet by a prominent figure in Silicon Valley venture capital. Although he did not explicitly state that he bought Fartcoin, for a project that is entirely a meme, getting such attention is already a form of "capital certification" and a "breakthrough signal."

More substantial signals come from the on-chain fund movements. Shortly after Fartcoin was launched, when its market value was still below 100 million USD, community members tracked on-chain addresses and discovered behavior patterns highly similar to those of a certain veteran hedge fund—multiple large purchases, active interactions, and early positioning. This fund was established in 2018 and is known for focusing on speculative narrative-driven assets. Its founder frequently expressed interest in the AI meme sector on social media platforms at the end of 2024.

At the same time, cross-validation of data across multiple chains shows that several strategy pool addresses are very close to this fund, frequently engaging in buying, locking, and liquidity allocation operations during the early stages of Fartcoin.

In addition, one of the largest market makers in the cryptocurrency market appeared early in the front-row positions of Fartcoin. According to on-chain data, this market maker holds 1.56% of the total supply of Fartcoin, ranking fourth. In the asset allocation of its main address, Fartcoin ranks among the top five, even surpassing some mainstream assets.

Multiple accounts highly related to the main address of the market maker were also active synchronously at the early stage of Fartcoin's launch—from building positions, market making, to arbitrage, everything was done in one go. In early 2025, the founder of the market maker explained the hedging logic of Fartcoin's over-the-counter trading in an interview, and for the first time admitted that he personally also holds Fartcoin, jokingly saying: "It's just that I'm still in a trapped state."

With such market support, it's no wonder that the rise of Fartcoin is so prominent and strong, completely not following the overall market trend. According to data statistics from a top trader, in the first quarter of 2025, most mainstream assets experienced significant pullbacks: ETH has dropped over 46% since the beginning of the year, SOL has fallen by 24%, and the sub-sectors of AI, L1, DeFi, and Gaming are all in deep red. Amidst this sea of blood, Fartcoin is the only green in the entire chart, with a rise of 14.84% in the first quarter.

Not only did it rise during the downturn, but as the market improved in May, Fartcoin's increase still led mainstream assets, rising over 50%, far exceeding Bitcoin's 23% during the same period.

The popularity of Fartcoin has not stopped in the cryptocurrency circle. What truly made it a phenomenon is its breakout effect on Wall Street.

"We are currently in the Fartcoin phase of the market cycle." This statement comes from a billionaire who accurately predicted and shorted Lehman Brothers, a founder of a hedge fund. In a letter to investors in the fourth quarter of 2024, he used an entire paragraph to analyze the rise of Fartcoin, calling it "a product of pure speculative sentiment," and listed it alongside Pets.com and Dogecoin as typical examples of financial bubbles.

In his view, the name Fartcoin itself is a meme coin full of sarcasm, has no intrinsic value, lacks real-world applications, and does not possess any substitutability. He even said that rather than investing in Fartcoin, he would prefer to buy an abstract painting by Jackson Pollock, at least that painting "is something that someone would want to hang on their wall."

Another researcher from an asset management company wrote in a report titled "The Fartcoin Phase of the Market": "I disagree with the statement 'Fartcoin is useless.' Its purpose is to annoy those of us who think we are engaged in serious financial work." He referred to this phase as "fart-based encryption economics" and pointed out that Fartcoin is not a failure; it perfectly hits the three new logics of the market—nihilism, attention economy, and sheer stupidity.

In his eyes, the core of Fartcoin's success is not technology, but its ability to spread. It can spark discussions, create emotions, and force everyone who takes the market seriously to respond to it. Even if you just curse it, you've already fallen into its trap. "Fartcoin is a product of AI's precise manipulation of human brain circuits. If you think it resembles a malicious financial experiment designed by artificial intelligence, that's because it is."

And another co-founder of a capital management company, a rational representative of traditional finance, known for his calmness and factor modeling, suddenly let go of the "rational man hypothesis" when facing Fartcoin. He wrote on social media: "Ironically, Fartcoin is the only thing I don't doubt." In the context of that post at the time, this was a gentle mockery of the absurdity of the entire market.

This coin called "Fart" not only steadily stands above a market value of one billion, but it also has its own "MicroStrategy" like Bitcoin—FartStrategy.

The operational logic of FartStrategy is very simple, even one might say it is blatant: this is a DAO specifically created for purchasing Fartcoin, and its mission statement is, "Hot air rises, and we will ride this wave to create value for Fartcoin and $FSTR( FartStrategy token holders )."

It has no profit model, no application landing, and no stable mechanism. It is just a transparent joke, dressed in the guise of a smart contract, packaging "we plan to continuously buy Fartcoin" as a kind of "financial strategy" under the name of community voting. Even the official copy candidly states: "FartStrategy is a comedic absurd example, and holding it should not be expected to yield any economic returns."

According to statistics from a certain data platform, from January 3, 2025, to May 9, the chip structure of Fartcoin is gradually shifting from concentration among early large holders to dispersion among retail investors. In particular, from January to May of this year, the number of addresses holding less than 1000 dollars began to increase at a faster pace. At the same time, Fartcoin has also become one of the most actively traded coins in terms of trading volume and liquidity on a certain trading platform.

From the initial institutional manipulation to the current dispersion of chips. All seemingly rational financial narratives ultimately reveal their true nature in the bathroom humor of Fartcoin.

Fartcoin almost fits all our stereotypes of a meme coin: a funny name, no practical value, it relies entirely on linguistic effects and social drive to become popular, even causing traditional Wall Street investors to feel defensive. This case once again proves that in the cryptocurrency market, rationality and irrationality often coexist, and emotions and narratives can sometimes even surpass fundamentals, becoming the key factors that dominate the market.