4. The meta matters as much as the coin.
A great coin can be trapped inside yesterday’s narrative.
SPX6900 is a great meme.
FARTCOIN, BONK and WIF are great memes.
But markets rotate and liquidity moves.
What worked explosively in the previous cycles does not necessarily offer the same asymmetry in the next one.
My view is that custom pairs are one of the most important metas of this cycle and are still in their early innings.
I also think the most interesting expression of this meta is ultimately with altcoins rather than stocks.
$AI worked partly because the NVIDIA pairing was novel but there is a structural limitation with pairing memes to gigantic trillion dollar public companies. Even $100m of NVIDIA-linked accumulation is irrelevant relative to NVIDIA’s scale unlike a mid-cap.
If a meme community directs $10m, $20m or $50m worth of economic attention toward a midcap, suddenly the community can become meaningful relative to the shareholder base and the company itself may notice.
That is why some of the most interesting management interactions we have seen in this meta have all involved mid-cap companies rather than mega-caps.
If I wanted long-term exposure to a stock custom pair, something like $BONER would probably interest me more than an NVIDIA pair, although I currently have no exposure.
But I still think alt pairs offer the cleanest structure.
And within that universe, PUMP stands out because unlike most altcoins, you can actually attempt to value the underlying business of Pumpfun.
ZEC, NEAR and many others can certainly run, but determining whether they are fundamentally cheap is much more subjective because sentiment and monetary premium drive so much of their value.
PUMP is different cos it generates revenue and that gives you something concrete to anchor the thesis to.

5. Perpetual memetics matter.
The best memes should remain understandable and relevant across cycles.
They should not require you to explain an obscure 2026 narrative five years from now.
$USELESS probably has one of the strongest examples of this.
People will probably always describe memecoins as useless.
And there is only one meme whose entire identity is explicitly built around that criticism.
That gives the meme an unusually durable cultural hook. I don't currently own any, but it is the sort of asset where I understand the argument for slowly accumulating over a very long period.

$BATON has a different kind of perpetual memetic quality because its identity is attached to what I consider one of the most systemically important companies in Web3. For Baton to lose relevance, then PUMP has to also lose relevance. What makes $Baton also special is that the alignment goes even deeper than just a reflective PUMP meme. Pump.fun does not merely happen to be another crypto company but a company whose entire business lives and breathes memecoins. Thats what makes $Baton so special.

A meme tied to some random Layer 1 ultimately depends on that chain continuing to care about memes. Pumpfun cannot stop caring about memes ever hence BATON is culturally attached not only to a successful crypto company, but to a company whose continued relevance is intrinsically linked to the continued relevance of memecoins themselves. That is a very unusual alignment that we have never seen.

I spent weeks reassessing the market, reviewing my prior mistakes and thinking about what I actually wanted from my next high-conviction position.
I arrived at a simple but interesting framework:
Strong community.
Clear catalysts.
Relevant meta.
Understandable underlying.
Durable memetics.
Enough asymmetry to justify sitting through brutal volatility.
and kept looking for a meme that checked these boxes until i found Baton.

When I eventually found it, I was genuinely surprised by how low the market cap still was.
I watched the community for weeks, set my bids, and accumulated roughly 1.5% of supply around the $1.2m–$1.3m MC range.

These days, I have very little interest in buying something simply because I think it can 2-5x.