The Binance Life, finally becoming the first Chinese coin to be listed on the Binance perpetual contract.

If you are a Chinese cryptocurrency practitioner, in these past two weeks, it is impossible that you have not heard of this term. Since the birth of this "ticker," it has been both a joke and a vision. CZ himself said he did not expect that a simple reply would lead to this series of events.

First, it triggered discussions by OKX's CEO Star. Then came the Chinese Ticker craze of Tron and Solana, followed by a few days ago when the limitless founder publicly disclosed the so-called "listing clause," sparking a confrontation between two chains and trading platforms. Finally, Jesse's comment of "embarking on the Binance Life mode on Base" ended this confrontation.

And what this represents may not just be this one Ticker, but may represent a deeper cultural shift behind it. This may be the first time that a series of high-market-cap memecoins are not in English but in Chinese. What does the meme culture it represents mean?

This time we reached out to 0xBarrry, co-founder of WOK Labs, a Polish trader who operates a community of hundreds of people. What do these foreigners think when they play with Chinese memes?

Conspiracy Community Meets Chinese Conspiracy Coin

In the eyes of ordinary traders, this wave is both mysterious and exciting.

Polish trader and WOK Labs co-founder Barry recalled, "The first time I saw a coin with a Chinese symbol break through a market cap of 20 million US dollars, I was shocked, realizing that this kind of conspiracy coin still has great potential. When it surged to 60 million US dollars, even 100 million US dollars, the European groups were already in an uproar, many eager to recharge on the Bsc chain just because the price went up, but they were unclear about the reason."

This market sentiment is not an isolated case. Defillama on-chain data shows that on October 8th, the trading volume on the Bsc chain surged to 6.05 billion US dollars, reaching the peak of the 2021 BSC mechanism coin frenzy, except this time led by Chinese Meme.

Today, more than 100,000 new traders participated in this round of memecoin frenzy, with nearly 70% of them making a profit. This indeed attracted many "foreigners" to participate in BSC's on-chain activities, and the number of active addresses has also increased by nearly 1 million compared to the same period last month.

Western investors only rushed in when the price surged, and many of them only "googled in Chinese" afterwards to realize what was happening. The difference in culture and traditional trading habits also led to European and American players suffering losses for the first time.

"In the past, meme investments in Europe often followed American internet culture, characterized by self-deprecating and rebellious humor. The sudden rise of Chinese memes has left many Westerners disoriented," Barry said.

However, due to his early collaboration with a Chinese team to create WOK Labs, Barry understood the operational mode of the Chinese community in advance, including factors such as personal relationships, emotional resonance, etc. He started spreading the Chinese narrative in the European community, explaining the differences to more Western traders.

Furthermore, the difference in the form of community participation in Memecoins is also quite evident. European traders more often participate in conspiracy-type meme projects, relying more on the Ethereum ecosystem, orchestrated by well-known KOLs or teams through massive market control to drive up prices. Such communities are often established more slowly, but with suitable well-known KOLs or teams holding a large number of bottom chips, there is also a significant risk of selling pressure. That is why it is very difficult to establish something long-term in the European market.

In contrast, the Chinese community finds it easier to establish communities, focusing more on emotions and storytelling (or leader coins). Project teams and meme communities gather resonance through storytelling in WeChat groups to drive emotions. The emotionally driven promotion under "fair" conditions theoretically can bring about a more sustainable community form.

Especially in this market cycle, it is relatively easy for Chinese players. They just need to buy an IP (or a statement from an opinion leader) that they think is hot, and they can "print money at will." A retail investor who is only enthusiastic about buying Chinese coins rotated through 65 different BNB chain Chinese meme coins in 7 days, initially casting a wide net with 100–300 dollars and then adding to positions in coins with strong momentum. In one week, they made a net profit of approximately $87,000. This high-frequency "cast a net" approach to a certain extent reflects the rapid speculative style of "most" retail investors in the Chinese community on the new track. Meanwhile, Western players are gradually abandoning the small-market cap memes around $500,000 (rough range) and turning to more certain targets starting at $5 million.

This is also where agencies bridging the East and the West, connecting markets such as China, Korea, Japan, and the West, are becoming more active, helping Asian projects gain trust in the West and assisting European teams in entering Asia.

He believes that this culture gap, brought out by individual experiences, may be nurturing new opportunities for cross-circle collaboration.

From Dogecoin to Chinese Meme Coins, From Satirical Memes to Ideological Memes

Looking from a more macro perspective, the memecoin trend is rooted in the collision of different cultural genes. The pioneer of Western memecoins was Doge, founded in 2013 as a joke by two programmers.

Doge was initially a humorous mockery compared to the serious demeanor of Bitcoin. However, due to celebrity endorsements (such as Musk, etc.) and enduring community enthusiasm, it peaked at a market cap of over 88 billion USD in May 2021.

The subsequent Pepe coin had a similar experience. As a cultural meme nurtured by the 4chan community, the coin quickly gained popularity after its launch in early 2023, with a market cap surpassing 1 billion USD at one point. The Pepe project relies entirely on internet culture heat. It has no presale, no team allocation, no roadmap, and the team has stated that the coin has "no intrinsic value and is for entertainment purposes only."

This value system also dominated a large number of Solana Memecoins that followed, such as Nihilism like Fartcoin and Uselesscoin, or Neet embodying the love of "subverting real-world value reflection" and dark humor in Western internet culture, or Meme like 67 that is trending on TikTok. Meme on Solana captures investors' imagination with image gags and a rebellious spirit, also dominating the era of attention economy memecoins for a long time. At the same time, the lack of "cultural value judgment" of these tokens in areas dominated by the Chinese language has led to deviations.

Chinese memecoins present different characteristics. They are often rooted in resonance and identity projection. For example, tokens like "Humble Xiao He" and "Customer Service Xiao He" use self-deprecating humor of blue-collar workers to mock social reality. The "Cultivation" series mirrors Chinese netizens' fantasy of escaping reality. "Binance Life" directly embodies the dream of overnight wealth in the cryptocurrency market. Of course, their common feature is also their relationship with the official platform.

This is a cultural difference under a mindset. For Chinese, this is called widening the path, while for most Western players, such names mean that their limit is controlled by whether the "system" is willing to pump the price.

However, the explosion of Chinese memecoins represented by "Binance Life" actually directly benefited from this emotional resonance. Its slogan analogizes "Binance Life" to the previously popular "Apple Life," a narrative innovation that is clearly different from Dogecoin's irony, appealing more to loyalty and emotion.

When a sufficient number of people understand this impression, the ticker is bound to the system. When it is pulled out to mock, the official party "has to stabilize the price," which may be the idea of many people who can still hold this coin after the wash-out.

This round of meme frenzy was not entirely spontaneously generated by retail investors but was also the result of careful cultivation by the Binance ecosystem. From one joke to CZ's replies, to a series of Fourmeme official interactions, and Binance's launch of the MemeRush platform, staged release of positive news, outing of high-cap memecoins, mid-term liquidity, sustainability in the later stage, bringing the originally disorderly memecoin issuance into the official system, making the frenzy more organized, and keeping the market's attention focused on the BSC chain for a long time.

Transferring the enthusiasm from a single project to the entire BSC ecosystem further fueled the public's "degen" psychology of "maybe the next one can make you a millionaire." This "upward ladder-like" expectation is also why, at the beginning of this round of the bull market, when multiple popular projects emerged, we did not feel a significant liquidity sucking effect between projects.
This is the result of the joint action of the official and the community, becoming a significant ladder-like wealth effect. This path validates the structured listing expectations behind Chinese memecoins and the market's consensus that has reached a level that we might not have dared to think about a few months ago.

In contrast, Western memecoins are more based on lucky community frenzy or driven by conspiracy groups. This time, the BSC ecosystem, under the multiple roles of the founder, platform ecosystem, and community, has transformed this frenzy into a glaring "wealth creation movement."

Trading Platform Public Relations Battle, Listing Fee Debate, and "Sino-US" Rapprochement

At the same time, this storm has also triggered a fierce public relations showdown between trading platforms. On October 11, 2025, Jesse first tweeted calling on everyone to boycott centralized exchange platforms with listing fees ranging from 2% to 9%.
Three days later, on October 14, CJ Hetherington, the founder of Limitless Labs, a prediction market project invested in by Coinbase, revealed on X that, in negotiations with trading platforms, it was discovered that in order to list on Binance, the project team needed to stake 2 million BNB and pay a hefty fee, including an 8% airdrop and marketing distribution of the total tokens, as well as a $250,000 deposit.

He compared the differences between Binance and Coinbase, stating that Coinbase values the project's intrinsic worth more, while Binance is more like a "listing fee." Upon this statement, Binance promptly published a rebuttal, claiming the accusation was "completely untrue and defamatory," emphasizing that "Binance never charges a listing fee," and threatening legal action against CJ for disclosing internal conversations.

Subsequently, Binance issued a more restrained statement, acknowledging that their initial response was too aggressive but restating that they do not charge any listing fees.

As this debate escalated, Coinbase also swiftly responded. Jesse Pollak, Head of Base Blockchain, publicly stated on social media, "Getting a project listed on a trading platform should be zero cost."

However, it was at this moment that public opinion began to shift, with Coinbase seemingly acting out of spite, officially announcing the inclusion of BNB in its future supported token list. This marked the first-time historical support announcement of a direct competitor's mainnet token. In response, Binance's founder CZ welcomed the move on social media and encouraged Coinbase to list more BSC chain projects.

CJ, who had an "exposure" clause, also began to show goodwill, while Jesse Pollak's attitude made a complete 180-degree turn. He first teased a Base App demo video on X, with the Base App even using "Binance Life" as an example token in the demo. Pollak even joked in Chinese, "Opening Binance Life mode in the Base App," and replied under CZ's tweet, "Binance Life + Base Life = the ultimate combination," these actions were interpreted by the industry as a breakthrough in Sino-US crypto camps and also incidentally brought out a long-lost little golden dog for the Base Chain.

It can be said that when the trading volume and attention brought by the Asian market reach a certain scale, Western exchanges have to actively approach the Chinese community, and the competition among trading platforms intertwines with cultural narratives.

Cognitive Responses of Eastern and Western Communities

Mainstream European and American media paid close attention to this event. At the same time, many Western retail investors in various groups lamented, "We don't understand the price increase," and most people hurriedly bought in only after the price took off. Even those like Barry, who have in-depth interactions within the Chinese system, often encounter the problem of "knowing the meaning but not the significance" when foreseeing a Memecoin with internal cultural meaning. This shows that, for overseas investors, Chinese elements have become a new entry barrier.

A domestic dog tool for Chinese to English translation developed by some members of the Anglo-American community

This wave has also highlighted the concept of "language as opportunity." For the crypto industry, the cultural and emotional information behind different languages is a layer of valuable resources. This is the "first time that Anglo-American investors have needed to understand Chinese culture in order to participate in this feast."

The popular video series of foreigners learning Chinese to buy memecoins that was trending some time ago

However, Barry believes that "I think the Chinese Meme market has come close to an end in this wave. The longer its duration in this cycle, the more severe the PTSD it brings to traders. We can see that these Memecoins have started to evolve towards low market cap and faster-moving sectors."
At the same time, he also said, "English and Chinese are already the main components of the meme market, and this situation is unlikely to change soon. China has a larger market and is more susceptible to emotion-driven decisions. The European market tends to lag behind. I think English tickers may make a comeback but will become more integrated with Asian culture. Due to the inspiration from this round of Chinese Memes, they will become more Chinese in humor, symbolism, and aesthetics."

In the future, to seize the next opportunity in the memecoin space, relying solely on opportunity is no longer enough. A deeper understanding of the language and culture of different regional communities is also required. Currently, AI may assist in cross-language communication, such as accelerating information dissemination through the generation of Chinese-language memes and the translation of social media dynamics, but AI still struggles to replace a profound understanding of cultural context.

We may also witness a more polarized crypto world, where projects like Base and Solana are increasingly adopting Chinese tickers, forming a new trend of integration and mutual learning between Western and Eastern communities. There may also emerge separate ecosystem partitions where cultural differences present new opportunities within the crevices.

Welcome to join the official BlockBeats community:

Telegram Subscription Group: https://t.me/theblockbeats

Telegram Discussion Group: https://t.me/BlockBeats_App

Official Twitter Account: https://twitter.com/BlockBeatsAsia