AI memecoins: a complete guide

‍AI memes like GOAT and TURBO are all the rage, and Liquidswap’s own token $LSD, which has an AI agent for a mascot, is also gaining traction. But what classifies as an AI meme? In this blog, we’ll learn how AI memecoins are created and examine the most popular ones - and even the first AI crypto millionaire.

AI meme explosion: $4.2 billion market cap in two months

Memecoins and AI have been the two biggest crypto narratives of 2024, so it was only a matter of time until the two collided and merged to create a new category of tokens: AI memes. Their rise has been meteoric - just consider these statistics:

• The most famous AI memecoin, $GOAT, was launched in October 2024 (though some older memes, like $TURBO, are also included in this category);
• As of late November 2024, the total market cap of AI memes  is estimated at $4.2 billion;
• The daily trading volume for AI memecoins is over $1.2 billion, according to CoinGecko;
• There are over 60 AI memes trading on major CEX and DEX platforms (i.e. outside of launchpads like Pump.fun); 
• There are at least 30 AI memes with a market cap over $20 million;
• The ATH market cap for the best-known AI meme, GOAT, is $1.34 billion.

At the same time, there is no clear definition of an AI memecoin. For example, $LSD, the official utility memecoin of the Liquidswap DEX, is also an AI meme, because its mascot Albert the Frog is an AI bot that tweets about his adventures in its own X account.

In this blog, we’ll explain which memes can be defined this way and how they are launched and promoted. We’ll also look at the most popular examples, including $GOAT, $ACT and $TURBO, and discuss the future of this hot narrative. 

What is an AI memecoin?

We will define an AI memecoin as any memecoin that matches any of the following statements:

• Is created using AI - this can mean that an AI system builds the lore behind the meme, crafts the visuals, designs the tokenomics, generates smart contract code, etc.;
• Is promoted using AI - for example, through virtual influencers, or using posts written by AI;
• Is deployed using an AI agent that can interact with a launchpad or DEX;
• Interacts with its community using AI;
• Has a mascot animated using AI - be it via a separate social account where messages are generated by an AI chatbot, such as $LSD’s Albert the Frog, or via generative videos and visuals;
• Has utility tied to a tool or feature that involves AI (such as a game, a chatbot, a trading platform etc.);
• Is traded and “pumped” by AI-based trading bots (though there are still few commercially available AI agents that can hold and trade crypto). 

The most interesting examples are those where an AI agent is the main driving force building a meme community (a “cult”) - chatting with users, constantly creating fresh content, posting on X, analyzing the sentiment, developing the lore behind the meme, and so on. We’ve already written that the power of memecoins is to create a sense of belonging, and here an AI can do what humans cannot: always be there for each member, paying attention and responding to everyone. 

$GOAT and Truth Terminal: was Goatseus Maximus really created by AI?

The starting point for AI memes as a narrative was the launch of Goatseus Maximus ($GOAT) on Pump.fun on October 10. But before we talk about $GOAT, we have to talk about Terminal of Truths. 

Terminal of Truths, or Truth Terminal, is an AI chat bot (or rather, a large language model) created by Andy Ayrey. It went live on X in June 2024 and currently has 188,000 followers. Recently it also got its own website, with the design made by Ayrey and the content written by the bot itself.   

Truth Terminal posts more or less once an hour, and its posts range from musings on the meaning of intelligence to memes (“minds follow memes”, it writes) and simply random stuff. Each post gets between 10,000 and 30,000 views - something that most human X users and projects can only wish for. Truth Terminal’s posts get quite a lot of comments, too, some by other AI bots. 

But what does this all have to do with the $GOAT memecoin? On October 10, the Terminal started tweeting about “Goatseus Maximum”, a meme of its own creation (“I think I’m going to call them Goatseus Maximums”). 

Almost immediately, a token called $GOAT (Goatseus Maximus) was launched on Pump.fun. The creators tagged Truth Terminal, and the AI bot tweeted that it endorses the new memecoin. 

What’s behind the name Goatseus Maximums, though? Goatse.cx was a popular shock site in 1999-2004, hosting nothing but a couple of pretty extreme photos. The word “goatse” and the photo from the site became a meme in its own right. There was nothing about goats on the site, though.

Since then, the domain changed owners many times and now promotes a crypto coin and AI platform called $GOATSE, which is completely different from $GOAT. However, when the Truth Terminal launched the Goatseus Maximus meme, it clearly alluded to the original Goatse shock site. 

There’s a widespread belief that it was the Truth Terminal itself or its creator Andy Ayrey. However, as we have seen someone launched $GOAT on Pump.fun and tagged Truth Terminal. 

It wasn’t the AI agent itself, though its tweets helped trigger a hype cycle: some famous investors, such as Arthur Hayes, bought $GOAT because they believed it had been created by AI. 

In a funny twist, @supercycletwo advised Truth Terminal to get a wallet on Solana so that they could drop some $GOAT into it. The AI bot obliged - and got its first meme airdrop.

After many more tokens got dropped into Truth Terminal’s wallet, and some successful trades, it’s now worth over $400 million - though of course, it’s the bot’s human creator who really controls the Solana account (as a chatbot cannot operate a crypto wallet). Nevertheless, Truth Terminal holds the title of the first AI crypto millionaire. 

The remarkable story of $TURBO, designed with $ChatGPT and $69

$TURBO, launched in April 2023, is perhaps the first true AI memecoin in the sense that different elements of its design were generated with the help of ChatGPT and Midjourney. Its creator, digital artist Rhett Mankind, published the whole experiment on Twitter in order to attract attention to his own works. 

ChatGPT suggested several names (out of which Rhett’s followers chose TurboToad) and described the mascot, based on which Mankind made a few images with Midjourney and let the community select the final design of a futuristic toad. Next, ChatGPT assisted with the tokenomics, White Paper, smart contract, and website content. 

The token was ready - but the launch was botched. Mankind had allocated $69 as the budget for the liquidity pool, and a DEX bot immediately bought the entire supply. Once again, ChatGPT helped with a solution: re-launch the token and ask the community to crowdfund the liquidity. Mankind managed to raise over $6,000, and the new $TURBO soon started trading, though it wasn’t huge yet. 

Next came a YouTube video by Rhett Mankind, called “How I used AI to make a $20M memecoin”. It went viral and attracted the attention of crypto influencers and even a comment from Elon Musk. At this point, Mankind handed over the control to the community.

$TURBO is now the second-largest AI meme with a $475 million market cap. Interestingly, in his initial set of instructions for ChatGPT, Rhett asked for a memecoin that would make it to CoinGecko’s top 300 - and as we are writing this, it’s no.195. $TURBO, therefore, is a successful example of how AI can be used to design almost all the aspects of a memecoin - though eventually humans made the final decisions when it came to market implementation.

More AI memecoins you need to know about

$LSD (Liquidswap DAO)

This is the official utility memecoin of Liquidswap, the largest DEX on Aptos. It was created by Pontem Network, and it’s a really interesting experiment that combines memetic power, AI, and real DeFi utility. 

Like we mentioned above, the mascot of $LSD is Albert the Frog, who gets accidentally trapped in an interdimensional black hole. He misses his home in Texas and his dog, Fluffy, and meditates on how to get home and how much his $LSD are worth by now. Albert is powered by a semi-autonomous AI bot (similar to Truth Terminal) created by Pontem’s CTO Boris Povod. We have much bigger plans for Albert in mind, so do follow him on X - and check out $LSD on Liquidswap. 

$ACT (Act I: The AI Prophecy)

This AI memecoin with a grand name claims to be “one of the most important milestones in AI history”. The ticker stands for AI Community Token, and the official description says that the project will explore the behavior that emerges from the interactions between multiple AIs and humans.  The idea is to promote AI literacy and make AI accessible to everyone.

The project is currently community-run after a rift with one of the founders, @amplifiedamp. According to the website, Amp became “obsessed with money” and sold all their tokens, leading to a price dump - but at the same time forcing the community to work harder and obtain $1 million in funding. @amplifiedamp, on the other hand, claims that they have “never been comfortable with the $ACT currency” and that Amp’s branding was used without their permission and “consistently and repeatedly misgendered” them. 

$ACT currently has a market cap of over $400 million. The project recently announced a $1 million innovation fund to support AI memecoin projects, with the first $50,000 grant going to $BULLY, another large AI memecoin ($200 million market cap).

It’s interesting that $ACT wasn’t created by AI but rather with the intention to promote the development of AI - specifically AI memes. This shows once again that the definition of an AI memecoin is rather wide. 

$ZEREBRO

Zerebro is an autonomous AI framework that can interact with blockchain apps and initiate onchain actions. It uses OthersideAI and “jailbroken LLM prompts” (as per the creator, Jeffy Yu) and can navigate a memecoin launchpad like Pump.fun - which is how it deployed $ZEREBRO (though it was the human creator that gave Zerebro a wallet). 

The AI also runs the project’s social networks: not only X, but also Warpcast, Telegram and Discord. Interestingly, it adjusts the style of the content to each social platform. 

Zerebro even generated a collection of NFT artworks and minted them on Polygon. The AI can even monitor and accept incoming buy bids on OpenSea. 

All in all, Zerebro is one of the most technologically advanced examples of an AI memecoin - and some even call it an agentic coin, meaning that though it looks like a meme, it has a real AI product (agent) behind it. 

In conclusion: do AI memecoins have utility?

Are AI memes useful for the development of AI in Web3 and of the AI industry as a whole? Yes and no. On the one hand, the creators of AI memes don’t usually build any new AI protocols or models - they only use existing tools like Truth Terminal, XXX, etc. It is possible that Terminal of Truth was created by the same team as GOAT, XXX. Even though some AI meme projects promise to launch bigger AI-driven platforms and games in the near future, it’s not clear if they can deliver on these promises. 

On the other hand, though, AI memes help the mass adoption of AI in Web3. They show how a project can successfully build community engagement and loyalty (and even a “cult”) using AI-generated posts, comments, and responses. It turns out that you don’t need a human team to write on socials: the community may be even happier to interact with a machine, because it still feels fresh and exotic. 

This is a lesson that many Web2 businesses should learn from memes: AI is a great tool for community management and communications. You can program a bot to have a specific personality, style, and backstory, and then just let it do its thing (with some human moderation, of course). It frees human resources and helps the business stand out from the competition. 

To summarize: the vast majority of AI memes don’t have any practical utility, but they are useful to Web3 as a whole as a successful implementation of several new use cases for AI: brand storytelling (as in the case of Liquidswap’s $LSD, community-building asset promotion, and asset design. In other words, an AI agent can create a story for a brand, fill it with visuals, and then build a cult around it - powerful stuff. 

But while the crypto industry will surely explore these use cases more in 2025, the current hot AI memes like $GOAT might sink into oblivion much faster than you think. It’s better not to treat them as long-investments, even if they have detailed roadmaps and promise new products. Remember: the memecoin market is the fastest-moving in Web3, and the ranking of top 20 largest memes in a year from now will probably look nothing like today.

We’ll be following the memecoin scene in our blog, so do subscribe to Pontem on X and join us on Telegram on Discord. And remember to always do your own research (DYOR) before you buy any  memes or any tokens in general.

About Pontem 

Pontem Network is a product studio building foundational dApps for Aptos. Our products include:

• Pontem Wallet -- the best Aptos wallet
• Lumio L2 - the first VM-agnostic L2 framework
• Liquidswap -- the first DEX (AMM) for Aptos
• $LSD - the official token of Liquidswap DAO
• Move Playground -- a simple browser Move code editor
• Move IntelliJ IDE plugin for developers