In the attention economy, being forgotten is scarier than death. I wonder if everyone still remembers that little dog wearing a pink knitted hat? WIF, Dogwifhat, was once the hottest meme coin on Solana. At its peak, its avatar flooded social media, meme images spread overnight throughout the crypto community, and its market cap soared to tens of billions of dollars, even overshadowing Pepe for a time. But now, it has almost disappeared from everyone’s memory. It didn’t rug, nor was it hacked. It was simply forgotten slowly: The KOL who first supported it, @Ansem, no longer mentions it, the community has gradually quieted down, and meme updates have stopped; after the failure of The Sphere project, nearly $700,000 in funds were returned, and people’s confidence collapsed. That pink knitted hat, which once fetched a high price and symbolized meme faith, was hastily auctioned off, as if it were its last relic. WIF ultimately couldn’t become Doge—it didn’t have Musk’s retweets; nor could it generate a new meme culture and ecosystem like Pepe. It didn’t rug, but the result of a rug has already occurred. There was no death announcement, but everyone quietly turned away. Its disappearance wasn’t because it wasn’t good enough. It simply lost attention. I often think about why some things that we once loved so much end up as mere bubbles. Perhaps it’s because emotions themselves are not long-lasting; they need to be constantly stimulated, responded to, and updated. But we have long been living in a dopamine-driven era—not sustained by faith, but by "feeling pretty good" to maintain attention. The deeper truth is that in this world ruled by attention, the fate of meme coins has never been linear. A single tweet can create a hundredfold coin, and a single public sentiment can cause everything to collapse. There is no slow disappearance—only the moment of falling from the peak. You don’t even have time to say goodbye; it has already vanished from people’s timelines.
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