The Rise of an Absurd Token

A cryptocurrency with an absurd name and seemingly no practical use has unexpectedly become one of the few mainstream coins that rose against the trend in the first quarter of this year. It has even caused a stir in traditional finance, leaving many investors feeling confused and uneasy.

This remarkable Token is Fartcoin, which has a similar origin to another well-known project, GOAT.

The birth of Fartcoin originated from a conversation between artificial intelligences. In an AI agent model called "terminal of truths", a casual chat about a certain tech entrepreneur "liking the sound of farting" triggered a chain reaction. The AI suggested: "Why don't we issue a coin called Fartcoin?" And so, Fartcoin was born on October 18, 2024.

Born to be in the spotlight

Fartcoin attracted a lot of attention and investment from cryptocurrency enthusiasts as soon as it was launched.

On December 13, 2024, a tweet mocking Fartcoin quickly spread across social media. What made this tweet noteworthy was not the content itself, but the identity of the person sharing it: a co-founder of a renowned venture capital firm. Although he did not explicitly state that he purchased Fartcoin, the public attention from a heavyweight figure in Silicon Valley's investment community is in itself a form of recognition and a signal of breaking into the mainstream for such a purely meme project.

Another more substantive signal comes from on-chain fund movements. Soon after Fartcoin was launched, when its market value was still less than 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.

The fund was established in 2018 and is an all-weather strategy fund initiated by a group of seasoned professionals in the cryptocurrency industry, known for focusing on speculative narrative-driven assets. Its founders frequently expressed interest in the AI meme sector on social media platforms towards the end of 2024, and even retweeted a post on December 13 questioning whether the fund held a large amount of Fartcoin. Although there was no direct response, it was widely interpreted by the community as a "default entry."

Meanwhile, multiple on-chain data cross-verifications show that several strategy pool addresses are very close to this fund, which has frequently engaged in buying, locking, and liquidity allocation operations in the early stages of Fartcoin.

In addition, a more active player has emerged - one of the largest market makers in the cryptocurrency market, which was seen early on in the front row holdings 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 that are highly correlated with the main address of this market maker were also actively engaged during the early launch of Fartcoin — from establishing positions, market making, to arbitrage, all in one go.

It is worth mentioning that in early 2025, the founder of the market maker explained the hedging logic of Fartcoin's over-the-counter trading in an interview and first admitted that he personally also held Fartcoin, jokingly saying: "I'm just still in a state of being stuck."

With such market support, it's no wonder that Fartcoin's price increase is so noticeable and strong, completely not following the trend of the market.

According to data statistics from a top trader, in the first quarter of 2025, most mainstream assets have experienced significant pullbacks: ETH has fallen over 46% year-to-date, SOL is down 24%, and sectors like AI, L1, DeFi, and Gaming are all deep in the red, experiencing severe losses. Amidst this sea of blood, Fartcoin is the only green in the entire chart, with a growth rate of 14.84% in the first quarter. Against the backdrop of widespread despair among many assets, Fartcoin stands out remarkably.

Not only did it rise during the bearish market, but as the market improved in May, Fartcoin also continued to lead mainstream assets with an increase of over 50%, far exceeding Bitcoin's 23% during the same period.

Reaction of Traditional Finance

The popularity of Fartcoin has not stopped within the cryptocurrency circle. What truly makes it a phenomenon is not just the逆势上涨 of its price, but the reaction it has caused in the traditional financial sector.

"We are in the Fartcoin phase of the market cycle." This statement comes from a billionaire who accurately predicted and shorted a large financial institution, the founder of a well-known hedge fund. In a letter to investors in the fourth quarter of 2024, he spent an entire paragraph analyzing the rise of Fartcoin, calling it "a product of pure speculative sentiment" and categorizing it alongside other financial bubbles as a typical representative.

In his view, the name Fartcoin itself is a meme coin full of irony, with no intrinsic value, no practical applications, and lacking any substitutability. He even said that rather than investing in Fartcoin, he would prefer to buy an abstract painting, at least that painting "is something people would still want to hang on their wall."

But it is precisely because he strongly opposed it in the letter that it becomes more interesting. Because when a financial veteran known for "rationality" and "value" starts to make lengthy comments on a meme coin, you know this is not an ordinary speculative Token.

Another researcher from an asset management company expressed it more directly. In a report titled "The Fartcoin Phase of the Market," he wrote: "I disagree with the statement 'Fartcoin is useless.' Its purpose is to annoy those of us who think we're engaged in serious work in finance." The text is filled with anxiety about the market's irrationality. He referred to this phase as "fart-style crypto-economics" and pointed out that Fartcoin is not a failure; it perfectly hits the market's three new logics—nihilism, attention economy, and outright absurdity.

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 only criticize it, you've already fallen into its trap. "Fartcoin is a product of AI precisely manipulating human neural circuits, and if you think it resembles a financial experiment designed by malicious artificial intelligence, it's because it actually is."

Another billionaire, a co-founder of a capital management company, known for his calmness and factor modeling, suddenly abandoned the "rational agent hypothesis" when faced with Fartcoin. He wrote on social media: "Ironically, Fartcoin is the only thing I have no doubts about." In the context of that post at the time, it was a mild mockery of the absurdity of the entire market.

In this satire, Fartcoin does not disguise itself as having "fundamentals" like other assets. It never claims to be some sort of innovative infrastructure, nor does it peddle any technological narrative, but rather it stands there bare, honestly admitting that it is just an "emotional product." On the very day he made this statement, Fartcoin took off again, with its price rapidly surging.

What is even more intriguing is that this billionaire said this a few months later: "Fartcoin's performance today compared to the past month, I have to say, I might have to stray even further from what my mentor taught me." (His mentor is the founder of the "Efficient Market Hypothesis")

Imitators of Fartcoin

The coin named "Fart" not only firmly stands with a market value above one billion, but surprisingly, it also has its own corporate supporter like Bitcoin—FartStrategy.

When even the "meme" can replicate the model of a certain listed company that "buys coins, then buys coins again, and uses holdings to support market value," this absurd drama has truly completed the final piece of the puzzle.

A well-known financial columnist dedicated a segment of his 2025 column "The Crypto Perpetuum Mobile" to analyze FartStrategy, calling it "the pinnacle artwork of financial nihilism." The article begins with: "If you can sell packaged air, then why can't it be Fartcoin?"

The operational logic of FartStrategy is very simple, and can even be described as blatant: it 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 (the Token of FartStrategy) holders."

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

The columnist compared it to a mirror derivative of a listed company—the latter continuously raises funds to buy Bitcoin, increasing the company's valuation; while the former relies on the interaction of memes and DAOs to create self-pressurizing hot air, forming a "Fartcoin flywheel," a financial perpetual motion machine driven continuously by emotions. He described it as "a leverage container with hot air as the asset," which sells $FSTR to buy more Fartcoin when its market value exceeds the actual total value of the held Fartcoins, completing a meme pixel-level closed loop.

Fartcoin comes from absurdity and stands firm in chaos.

According to the data from the on-chain data analysis platform, from January 3, 2025, to May 9, 2025, the chip structure of Fartcoin is gradually shifting from concentration among early large holders to dispersion among retail investors.

Especially from January to May this year, the growth rate of addresses holding small amounts (less than 1000 USD) began to rise. At the same time, Fartcoin also became one of the most active 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 toilet humor of Fartcoin.

Fartcoin almost fits all our stereotypes of a meme coin: a funny name, no practical value, relying entirely on linguistic effects and social drivers to gain popularity, even unsettling the traditional financial world.

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