When foreigners start playing with Chinese local dogs: A cross-cultural experiment in crypto wealth creation

Shocking Moments for Polish Traders

The first time Barry saw a Chinese token break through a $20 million market capitalization, he was completely stunned.

As a co-founder of WOK Labs, this Polish guy runs a community of hundreds of European traders. But when that token continued to surge to $60 million, $100 million, their group was already exploded—lots of people frantically depositing money on the BSC chain, not really understanding what was happening, only knowing the price was rising.

This isn’t an isolated case. On October 8th, the trading volume on the BSC chain skyrocketed to $6.05 billion, directly returning to the level of the 2021 meme craze wave. But this time, it wasn’t driven by mechanism coins, but a bunch of Chinese Meme Gems.

The data gets even crazier: over 100,000 new players flooded in that day, with nearly 70% making a profit. Active addresses increased by nearly one million compared to the same period last month. This wave truly pulled many foreigners into the world of BSC.

Cultural Barriers Became the Biggest Hurdle

“Before, when we played Meme coins, we followed American internet culture—self-deprecating, rebellious, we understood all those memes,” Barry said. “But this time, the sudden emergence of Chinese Meme Gems confused many Western players.”

In Europe and America, crypto trading tends to favor conspiracy schemes, relying on the Ethereum ecosystem, following big KOLs or teams to manipulate and pump. These communities develop slowly, but the big players hold bottom-position chips, ready to dump at any time. So it’s hard to build long-term projects in Europe.

Chinese communities are different. They focus more on emotional resonance and storytelling, “telling stories” in WeChat groups to attract followers, making it theoretically easier to form long-term communities.

Especially in this cycle, Chinese players are having a blast. As long as they buy an IP (or a coin mentioned by an opinion leader) they think will blow up, they can “print money.” One retail investor swapped 65 different Chinese Meme Gems on BSC within 7 days, each with an initial investment of $100–$300 to test the waters, then increased positions on the ones showing momentum. He netted $87,000 in profit in a week.

This “casting a wide net” approach is very typical. Meanwhile, Western traders are also starting to abandon small-cap coins around $500,000 in market cap, shifting toward more certain targets starting from $5 million.

Barry’s agency, which connects Chinese and Western markets, is becoming more active—helping Asian projects gain Western trust and assisting European teams to enter Asia. He believes this cultural gap might be fostering new cross-circle cooperation opportunities.

From Doge to Chinese Meme Gems, Completely Different Mindsets

Looking back, the ancestor of Western Meme coins is Doge from 2013, where two programmers used it to mock the seriousness of certain coins. By May 2021, fueled by celebrities like Elon Musk and community enthusiasm, its market cap soared to $88.8 billion.

The later Frog meme followed a similar path—culture memes born from 4chan, which exploded in early 2023, surpassing $1 billion in market cap. The project explicitly stated it had “no intrinsic value, only for entertainment.”

This value system dominated many Solana Meme coins afterward—nihilism, dark humor, subversion reflecting real-world values. Solana Meme coins used image memes and rebellious spirit to capture investors’ imaginations, dominating the attention economy for a long time.

Chinese Meme Gems are entirely different. They are rooted in resonance and identity projection. For example, tokens that self-deprecate as “working people,” reflecting the helplessness of the working class; fantasy series about cultivation escaping reality; or “life” series that carry dreams of overnight wealth—all with a common trait: some connection to official entities.

For Chinese people, this is called “broadening the road,” but for Western players, these names imply the upper limit is controlled by the “system”—whether they want to pump or not depends on official mood.

However, the explosion of the “Life” series was indeed driven by emotional resonance. It aligned with a previously popular “life” concept, with a storytelling approach that’s clearly different from Doge’s satire—more about loyalty and sentimentality.

When this impression is understood by enough people, this Ticker becomes tied to the system. When officials mock it, they “have to pump”—which might be the idea behind many who hold after a wash.

This Meme craze isn’t entirely retail-driven. From He Yi’s joke, to a founder’s reply, to official interactions, and finally the launch of MemeRush platform, the process involves phased positive signals, maintaining high market cap Meme coins’ visibility, liquidity, and longevity.

Incorporating chaotic Meme issuance into the official system makes the celebration more organized, while keeping market attention focused on BSC for a long time.

This “upward stepwise” expectation explains why, at the start, several hot projects didn’t seem to cause obvious liquidity siphoning. Under the combined efforts of officials and communities, a significant stepwise wealth effect was formed.

Exchanges Are Starting to Clash

On October 11th, a head of Base tweeted calling for resistance against centralized exchanges charging 2%-9% listing fees.

Three days later, the founder of a prediction market project revealed on X that when negotiating with a top exchange, they found they needed to stake 2 million tokens, pay an 8% airdrop and marketing share, and deposit $250,000 as a guarantee.

He compared two exchanges, believing one compliant platform valued project quality more, while the top one resembled “listing for a fee.” Once this was exposed, the top exchange quickly issued a statement denying the claim, calling it “completely false and defamatory,” emphasizing they “never charge listing fees,” and threatening legal action.

Later, they issued a more restrained statement, admitting their initial response was over the top but reaffirming they don’t charge listing fees.

While the controversy was brewing, the compliant platform responded swiftly. The Base head publicly stated: “Getting projects listed on exchanges should be free of charge.”

But public opinion started to shift. That compliant platform, seemingly “pouting,” officially announced support for the mainnet tokens of the top exchange—marking the first time a competitor’s mainnet tokens were supported directly.

In response, the top exchange founder expressed a welcoming attitude on social media, even encouraging more BSC projects to list.

The person who initially exposed the fee issue also began to show goodwill. The Base head’s attitude shifted 180°, first posting a demo video of the Base App, which even featured the “Life” series token, joking in Chinese, “Activating the ‘Life’ mode on Base App.”

These actions are interpreted by the industry as a thawing of the US-China crypto rivalry, also bringing a rare “little golden dog” back to the Base chain.

When trading volume and attention from the Asian market reach a certain scale, Western exchanges have no choice but to approach Chinese communities.

Foreigners Are Starting to Learn Chinese

Mainstream Western media are paying close attention. Many Western retail investors in groups lament, “We don’t understand the coins’ prices,” and most only rush to buy after the price takes off.

Even communities like Barry’s, which have deep exchanges with Chinese systems, often encounter the “knowing the meaning but not the significance” problem when predicting culturally meaningful Meme coins. For overseas investors, Chinese elements once became a new barrier to entry.

Some members of Western communities have even developed Chinese-to-English translation tools. Recently, a series of videos of foreigners learning Chinese to buy Meme coins went viral.

This wave emphasizes the idea that “language is an opportunity.” For the crypto world, the cultural and emotional information behind different languages is itself a valuable resource. This is the “first time Western investors need to understand Chinese culture to participate in the feast.”

Barry believes: “I think the Chinese Meme Gems wave is nearing its end. The longer it lasts, the more PTSD traders will develop. We can see these Meme coins are already starting to rotate into smaller-cap, faster-moving sectors.”

But he also says: “English and Chinese are now the main components of the Meme market, and this situation won’t change soon. China has a bigger market and is more emotionally driven. European markets tend to lag behind. I think English Tickers might return, but they will become more integrated with Asian culture—thanks to the inspiration from this Chinese Meme wave, they will become more Chinese-like: humorous, symbolic, and aesthetic.”

Final Words

To catch the next Meme wave, relying solely on luck is no longer enough; it requires deep understanding of the language and culture of different communities.

AI might help with cross-language dissemination—such as automatically generating Chinese meme images or translating social media posts—but AI still struggles to replace deep cultural context understanding.

We may see a more multipolar crypto world. Chains like Base and Solana are increasingly featuring Chinese Tickers like “Golden Dog.” There are new trends of integration and mutual influence between Western and Eastern communities, but also the risk of partitioned ecosystems.

Within these cultural gaps, new opportunities might be hiding.