When Western Players Start Learning Chinese to Trade Crypto: A Cross-Cultural Meme Wealth Experiment

A Polish Trader’s Shocking Moment

When Barry first saw the market cap of a certain Chinese-ticker token surpass $20 million, he was stunned.

As a co-founder of WOK Labs, this Polish trader runs a European crypto community with hundreds of members. That day, he realized something: is it really possible to play conspiracy coins like this?

By the time that coin soared to $60 million, and even broke $100 million, his Discord group had exploded. A bunch of people were frantically depositing into the BSC chain, totally clueless about why the price was rising—they just knew the price was flying.

This wasn’t an isolated case.

On-chain data shows that on October 8th, BSC’s trading volume skyrocketed to $6.05 billion. This number is back to the level of the 2021 yield-farming craze. Only this time, the leaders aren’t DeFi projects, but a wave of Chinese meme coins.

That day, over 100,000 new addresses poured in, with nearly 70% of users making money. Active addresses increased by almost 1 million compared to the same period last month.

Barry put it bluntly: “Previously, Europeans played memes following American culture—self-mockery, rebellion and all that. Suddenly these Chinese memes popped up, leaving many Western players totally confused.”

The Trading Logic Behind Cultural Differences

Interestingly, Barry had collaborated with Chinese teams in the past, which helped him understand this playbook early on. He began to educate his European community about Chinese narratives—personal connections, emotional resonance, and KOLs leading the hype.

How do Western players trade memes?

They rely more on the Ethereum ecosystem, looking for well-known KOLs or teams to control and pump the price. These communities build slowly, but the big players hold massive amounts of the bottom tokens, which also means huge sell-off risk. That’s why it’s hard for Europe to create long-term projects.

What about Chinese communities?

They build fast, tell stories, and focus on emotions. In WeChat groups, storytelling builds consensus, theoretically resulting in more lasting communities.

Especially in this cycle, Chinese players use a simple and direct strategy: buy the IP you think will go viral (or follow the words of a certain KOL) and you can “print money at will.”

One retail investor rotated through 65 different Chinese meme coins on BSC in 7 days—starting with $100 to $300 in each, then adding to whichever one took off. After a week, he netted $87,000 in profits.

This high-frequency “scattergun” approach is a typical reflection of Chinese retail’s speculative style in new sectors. Meanwhile, Western players are adjusting their strategies, abandoning coins with market caps under $500,000, and turning to tokens starting at $5 million with more certainty.

Agencies like Barry’s, bridging East and West, are becoming increasingly active—helping Asian projects gain Western trust, and helping European teams break into the Asian market.

From Doge to Chinese Memes: Ideological Shifts

Looking back, the origin of Western meme coins was Dogecoin in 2013—two programmers created it as a joke to mock Bitcoin. But thanks to celebrities like Musk, it soared to a peak market cap of $88.8 billion in May 2021.

Pepe Coin was similar. Spawned from 4chan’s culture, it went viral after its launch in early 2023, breaking a $1 billion market cap. The project team openly declared: “No intrinsic value, for entertainment only.”

This philosophy dominated many Solana meme coins—Fartcoin, Uselesscoin with their nihilistic vibes, or Neet reflecting Western Internet dark humor. Solana’s memes used visual gags and rebellious spirit to grab attention and long commanded the meme sector.

But Chinese memes? It’s a totally different logic.

They’re rooted in resonance and identity projection. Coins like “Humble Xiao He” and “Customer Service Xiao He” are self-mocking reflections of working-class realities. “Cultivation” series represent netizens’ fantasies of escaping reality. “Binance Life” directly embodies dreams of overnight wealth.

The common feature? All have some connection to “official” institutions.

For Chinese people, this is called “broadening the road.” But for Western players, it means the ceiling is controlled by “the system”—whether the price pumps or not depends entirely on the official stance.

Official Push: From Jokes to Wealth-Building Movement

This meme boom wasn’t entirely grassroots. To some extent, it was carefully cultivated by a certain exchange ecosystem.

From He Yi’s joke, CZ’s reply, to a series of official interactions, and then the launch of the MemeRush platform—each step and stage brought new positive news, maintaining the breakout, mid-term liquidity, and long-term continuity of high-market-cap meme coins.

What was once chaotic meme issuance was brought into the official system, turning the frenzy into something more organized. Market attention was locked onto the BSC chain for an extended period.

This “upward staircase” of expectations is why, when multiple hot projects appeared at the same time, you didn’t feel a pronounced liquidity drain.

This is a stair-step wealth effect created jointly by officials and the community. This pathway validated the structured listing expectations behind Chinese meme coins, bringing market consensus to a level unthinkable just a few months ago.

Western memes are more like community-driven frenzies or conspiracies. But this time, the BSC ecosystem turned the frenzy into a blatant “wealth-building movement.”

Listing Fee Disputes: A PR Battle

The frenzy also triggered fierce battles between trading platforms.

On October 11th, Jesse tweeted a call to resist CEX listing fees ranging from 2% to 9%.

Three days later, the founder CJ of a prediction market project revealed: to list on a top exchange, projects had to stake 2 million BNB, allocate 8% of total tokens for airdrops and marketing, and pay a $250,000 security deposit.

He compared two exchanges, arguing that one compliant platform valued project merit, while the other just “charged for listing.”

A top platform quickly denied it, calling the accusations “completely false and defamatory,” emphasizing they “never charge listing fees,” and threatened legal action. They later issued a more restrained statement, admitting their initial response was overzealous.

As the debate heated up, a certain blockchain executive Jesse publicly stated: “Listing projects should be zero cost.”

Then the narrative flipped. The compliant platform officially announced it would include BNB in its future supported token list—the first time in history it supported a direct competitor’s mainnet token.

CZ welcomed the move on social media, encouraging more BSC projects to be listed.

CJ also began to show goodwill. Jesse made a 180-degree turn, posting a demo video using “Binance Life” as the sample token. He even joked in Chinese about “starting Binance Life mode on a certain chain,” and replied under CZ’s tweet, “Binance Life + a certain chain = strongest combo.”

This series of actions was interpreted as a rare thaw between the US and Chinese crypto camps, and incidentally pumped a long-dormant dog coin for a certain chain.

When trading volume and attention from Asian markets reach a certain scale, Western exchanges are forced to proactively engage with Chinese communities. Exchange competition and cultural narratives are now deeply intertwined.

“I Don’t Understand Chinese, But I Have to Buy”

Western mainstream media is closely following this phenomenon. Many Western retail investors lamented in groups: “The price is soaring and we don’t even understand what’s going on.”

Most only rushed in after the price had already taken off. Even communities like Barry’s, with deep ties to the Chinese ecosystem, often “know the intent but not the meaning” when encountering memes with internal cultural references.

For overseas investors, Chinese elements briefly became a new barrier to entry.

Some Western community members even developed dog coin tools to translate Chinese to English. Recently, there’s even been a trend of foreigners learning Chinese to buy meme coins, sparking a series of viral videos.

This wave emphasized the idea that “language is opportunity.” In crypto, the cultural and emotional information behind different languages is itself a layer of value.

This is the first time Western investors have needed to understand Chinese culture to join the party.

But Barry thinks: “I feel the Chinese meme wave is already nearing its end. The longer this cycle lasts, the worse the PTSD will be for traders. We can already see these coins rotating into smaller-cap, faster-moving segments.”

But he also said: “English and Chinese are now the main pillars of the meme market, and that won’t change quickly. China has a bigger market and is more easily driven by emotion. The European market is typically more lagging. I think English tickers may return, but they’ll be more fused with Asian culture—thanks to the inspiration from this Chinese meme wave, they’ll have more Chinese-style humor, symbolism, and aesthetics.”

A Multipolar Crypto World

In the future, if you want to catch the next meme opportunity, luck alone won’t be enough. You need to deeply interpret the language and culture of different regional communities.

AI might help cross-language dissemination—auto-generating Chinese memes, translating social posts, etc. But AI can’t replace deep understanding of cultural context.

We may soon see a more multipolar crypto world. Each chain may see more Chinese-ticker dog coins, with Western and Eastern communities both blending and, at times, operating in their own separate ecosystems.

And in the cracks between these cultural differences, there just might be new opportunities.