Meme Coins and NFTs: What Is Book of Meme?

TL;DR
Book of Meme (BOME) is a recently released meme coin created by artist Darkfarms. After getting off to an incredible launch and attracting a lot of attention, Book of Meme is now crossing over between meme coins and NFTs, with plans to store NFT art, create an active social network, and with NFT art auctions currently taking place using BOME as a bid currency.

Meme coins are soaring while NFTs are a little out of the limelight, but Book of Meme is a new token that’s bringing the two together by crossing over between these similar areas of the crypto world.

The artist behind the coin is called Darkfarms, so let’s get a grip on Darkfarms’ background, on what the Book of Meme token is intended to do, and on why NFTs and meme coins are looking like a natural combination.

The Similarities Between NFTs and Meme Coins

NFTs and meme coins share several characteristics:

• A capacity to leverage hype and attention, and an obsession with tapping into the culture of the crypto space. 
• Quick shifts in attention, derivative projects appearing rapidly, copycats profiting off leading tokens.
• Utility often (in the case of NFTs) or almost always (in the case of meme coins) taking a back seat to things like aesthetics, in-jokes, and community.

These are generalizations, but there’s certainly an overlap between NFTs and meme coins, while some differences are that meme coins have greater liquidity and supply than NFTs, and tend to operate at a faster and more volatile pace.

What Is Book of Meme?

New meme coins can come and go so fast (with a few sticking around) that it’s hard to keep track of them, but one of the standout launches within the current meme-centered mania is Book of Meme (which has the ticker BOME.)

Launched on March 14th on Solana, BOME used a pre-sale approach, meaning buyers sent SOL before launch, in return for a distribution of the coin when it was released. Ordinarily, that would sound extremely risky and the kind of deal we should probably steer clear of, except that BOME is the creation of a well respected NFT artist called Darkfarms, meaning it carried a way higher-than-average level of trust from the outset.

From there, despite flying under the radar during the pre-sale, BOME catapulted in less than two days to around a $1.6 billion market cap, while getting listed on major centralized exchanges, which is an incredibly bullish start for a meme coin project. Now sitting at a market cap of around $700 million, the question is, does BOME have more substance than a typical meme coin?

Future Plans

BOME creator Darkfarms has big ambitions for the project, as he plans to create a hub of meme-art storage, utilizing IPFS and Arweave. The plan has a community-centered, open-ended approach, incorporating the possibility of a decentralized social network, and aiming to become what Darkfarms has called an “everything burrito”.

Just like a burrito, the plans are a little messy, but they set the project apart from other meme coin launches, and suggest that BOME may have more in common with NFT projects than with other coins, as it seeks to preserve artistic creativity on-chain.

Who Is Darkfarms?

The creator of BOME, Darkfarms, has a pristine reputation in the world of Pepe-focused NFT art, having released work in both the Rare Pepe and Notable Pepe collections. He is also well known within his niche for releasing SMOWLz, a CC0 NFT collection whose floor price shot up after the BOME launch.

Essentially, Darkfarms is about as deeply embedded in the world of NFTs, Pepe, and crypto-centered meme culture as you could possibly get, and so it makes sense that when he released a meme coin, it quickly became a huge event.

BOME Art Auctions

Making the most of the hype generated by the BOME token launch and its amazing price gains, Darkfarms has now sparked a new way of selling art NFTs, with artists auctioning work on Twitter, prices and payments in BOME, and bids happening in the replies to tweets.

Some portion–or sometimes all–of the BOME tokens accepted as payment then goes on to be burned by the receiver, with the reason being “for the culture”, but also creating a spectacle and reducing the total supply of BOME in the process.

Amid growing attention, the first sale to use this method was for a piece called MAGICINTERNETJPEGS #149970, created and sold by Darkfarms himself, and selling for 18,888,888 BOME, or around $260,000 at the time, with the bidding process taking place on Twitter.

Is BOME an NFT Bid Currency?

It looks like the BOME token is several things at the same time. It’s become a community meeting point for anyone who subscribes to Darkfarms’ views on crypto and art, but it can also simply be a volatile meme coin. It might become a vehicle to help archive memes and art, or even to create a social network around these themes, and it’s currently functioning–among some artists and buyers–as a currency for trading JPEGs.

In fact, Darkfarms has tweeted directly about “BOME as a bid currency for artists to auction their work”, and speculated about whether NFT marketplaces might be able to accept bids made in BOME, with some tokens burned as a transaction tax.

To what extent these ideas can be fully realized, remains to be seen, but for now, Book of Meme is unique, mixing meme coin speculation with Pepe-oriented NFT culture, and causing a lot of positive disruption in the process.