OpinionMarketsAltcoins
|7 min ReadNarrative, Emotion, and Odds: A Meme Trader’s Playbook
Maya Chen
Senior Analyst
Published
Jan 16, 2026
On EP35 of WEB3 Mint To Be (prodcast), host Alex sat down with Dayu, a battle-tested Chinese-language crypto KOL who lives in the trenches of meme trading. He speaks in clear, blunt lines. “All altcoins have zero intrinsic value,” he says. “Price can be infinite.” That is the whole game. Narrative, emotion, and odds. No comfort. No fairness. Just stories, flow, and risk.
Three Eras: From Doge To Destruction
Dayu splits meme history into three eras.
First comes the wild era. Dogecoin and Shiba rode pure attention. Celebrities, jokes, and timelines. Elon Musk understood the formula early. Attention plus a token creates its own economy. There is no need to pretend about utility. It is speculation. People joined because people love to gamble. Everybody knows it.
Second comes the growth era. The market started to build its own stars and syndicates. Names like PEOPLE, BONK, PEPE, WIF, BOME, ORDI. Funds chased the strongest stories. Dayu caught BONK with around 100,000 USDT on exchange and rode it to many multiples. That run taught him how a simple story plus deep liquidity can do tremendous things.
He missed the BAYC social circle but hit Goblintown hard. He bought roughly at 0.25 ETH and exited near 5 ETH on average, with a peak exit above 8 ETH. “That was my first bucket of gold,” he says. In total, more than a thousand ETH. A life-changing win that came from leaning into a weird, loud, ugly collection that still captured the culture.
Then comes the destruction era. Pump tools made launching a token trivial. Any joke, animal, or headline could become a coin in minutes. Attention atomized. Lifespans shrank. Most new memes died quickly. There were rare outliers like TRUMP that exploded to massive fully diluted valuations because the story was historic. But the total pie did not grow much. It was the same amount of capital sliced into more and more tiny pieces.
Barbell Positioning: Blue Chips And Meme Tickets
Dayu runs a barbell portfolio. On one side sits what he calls real value. On the other sits pure memes.
The meme side is high risk and high payoff. He treats each meme as a ticket with asymmetric odds. Sizing is everything. He often aims for roughly one percent of token supply in liquid names. He prefers to enter only after the market cap clears about 10 million dollars. He wants enough depth, enough survival chance, and a path to exit. He does not want a blind lottery ticket to zero.
The center of gravity, though, remains long-term assets. He likes real businesses and compounding models. He admires Pop Mart’s intellectual property engine. He studies Tencent and Pinduoduo to learn how distribution and scale really work. He wants private equity in names like SpaceX.
For “digital gold” he prefers Bitcoin. In his view, physical gold is abundant in space. Bitcoin, in contrast, travels with us as a shared ledger. He even imagines a world where quantum communication keeps an interplanetary Bitcoin network in sync. The vision is big. The conviction is bold.
How He Picks Winners In A Crowd
In a sea of memes, Dayu uses three words: natural, original, viral.
Natural means the coin feels discovered, not manufactured. ORDI had that energy. It came out of inscriptions and culture, not a marketing office. Firsts matter. Copycats rarely survive.
Original means there is a twist others cannot easily fake. BOME raised real size into the pool and changed the fundraising meta at that moment. Many tried to copy its structure. Most ended up as “animal pens,” quick dumps with fast exits and broken trust.
Viral means the story broadcasts itself. Presidents minting coins. Billionaires changing profile pictures. Symbols that regular people can screenshot, share, and repeat. If the narrative cannot spread beyond the core community, the trade cannot scale.
Price still matters. He will not chase a meme already in the high hundreds of millions of dollars in market cap unless the narrative is truly superior. He calls himself “daring to be late.” He lets the market filter the garbage first. Then he moves.
Scars, Big Wins, And Hard Rules
His early burn was PEOPLE. He cheered, contributed, posted, but held too little size while the wider crowd only cared about price. That experience taught him a cruel lesson. The market is a casino. You must care about entries and risk, not emotions or community points.
His highlight reel starts with BOME and TRUMP.
With BOME, he entered around a 300 million dollar market cap, rode the Binance listing, and sold into strength. He remembers walking through a park in Hong Kong, head clear, trimming size while the tape was still strong.
With TRUMP, he moved even faster. He bought minutes after launch near a 1 billion dollar market cap, sized big, hit double digit returns quickly, then sold too early. The tape moved millions per tick. The noise was huge. “Opportunities like a president minting a coin are rare,” he says. Next time he wants a quiet room and a calm mind for that kind of trade.
His clear failure came with a rumor coin tied to the Argentina president. He expected that other leaders would copy the TRUMP meme. He bought aggressively, doubled, then watched it fade and cut for roughly a 20 percent loss when the denial hit. The lesson was simple. Respect the stop. Protect the principal. No romance with the narrative.
“With memes you must be a rake. Never fall in love,” he says. If price blinks at you the wrong way, leave.
He says meme winners tend to share four edges. Diligence, because early flow demands constant scanning. Vision, built through real wins and real losses, not theory. Luck, helped by being a decent person over the long run. And courage, the kind that still places the next bet after a hit. Above all, the will to cut losers quickly. If you would not buy the coin again today with fresh cash, sell it. No stories. No coping.
A Warning To Newcomers
Dayu’s first message to beginners is conservative. Do not touch memes at the start. Buy Bitcoin and learn why it exists. Read, listen, and understand what you are holding before you go near pure speculation.
If you insist on playing memes, he says, cap it at one percent of your capital. Keep your head. Respect your stop loss. Accept that the intrinsic value of a meme is zero. The price can be anything. That is both the beauty and the danger.
The opportunity is tremendous, but only for those who survive long enough to see it. Stay liquid. Stay honest with yourself. Let the market test your conviction. Do not let your ego write the story for you.
Host: Alex, Mint Ventures Research Partner. Guest: Dayu. Views are personal. Nothing here is investment advice.
Disclaimer: This document is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. The views expressed in this document are not, and should not be taken as, investment advice or recommendations. Recipients should do their own due diligence, taking into account their specific financial circumstances, investment objectives and risk tolerance, which are not considered here, before investing. This document is not an offer, or the solicitation of an offer, to buy or sell any of the assets mentioned.