The Rise And Musk-Induced Demise Of Pacmoon

Less than one month after releasing version two, meme-coin project Pacmoon has already moved on to version three.

When updates like this happen in such a short time, it is usually because something wrong needs fixing. This time, however, it was the opposite: V2 was brilliant. A breakthrough for social gamification strategies.

When Bobby Big Yield and his partners launched Pacmoon at the start of the year, their plan was to make $PAC the number one community meme-coin on Blast, an Ethereum layer-2 network.

To counter the short life span expected of a meme-coin, the team worked on ways to keep the community engaged.

Their labor resulted in Pacmoon V2, "a new model to decentralize the 'validation' of good content and proliferation of a native community revolving around $PAC." The new system relied on a network of validators (users holding more than 10,000 tokens) that acted as Pacmoon content curators by liking posts on X. Their likes earned them rewards, and they also gave points to OPs.

The mechanism was highly effective in providing instant rewards for engagement to both users and creators, and its success was immediate and massive.

In the first two weeks after it went live, Pacmoon attracted more validators than Solana, onboarded thousands of creators, including Beeple, and inspired incredibly diverse creations, from AI-generated music to carpets.

Then, Elon Musk changed the rules of the game.

On June 11, the tech billionaire announced that likes on X posts would become anonymous, stating that it would protect users' privacy and promote freedom of expression. Critics, however, point to this as a way of hiding the spam and bot issues that have increased since the CEO took over.

Regardless of the reason, the decision made it impossible for Pacmoon to maintain its validator method as it relied entirely on the public data from the soon-to-be-buried feature.

With version two becoming inoperative overnight, the team started working on a third version, which is a downgrade to the standard centralized community-building model, where project-related content posted on social media is curated by the developers rather than by the users themselves.

Despite losing its trump card, Pacmoon is committed to being a successful meme-coin with a long life.

This week, Pacmoon announced a content creation contest in partnership with Animoca Brands' consumer network, Mocaverse, called "PACMOCAVERSE." The initiative, open for 72 hours, will reward users who create posts about the blend of the Moca and Pac universes