Avalanche 'Meme Coin Rush' Offers $1 Million in Rewards for Traders

The Avalanche Foundation today announced the launch of Meme Coin Rush, a $1 million liquidity mining incentive program aimed at boosting the meme coin ecosystem on the Avalanche blockchain. The Foundation will hand out rewards for providing liquidity for meme coin trading pools on certain DeFi platforms.

This initiative follows the Foundation's recent acquisition of five Avalanche-based meme coins—the dog-themed Kimbo (KIMBO), chicken-themed Coq Inu (COQ), gecko-themed Gecko (GEC), technology joke token TECH, and NOCHILL—as part of its digital culture initiative.

“In the same tradition as the Foundations successful past incentive programs, Meme Coin Rush is designed to help scale liquidity and drive momentum, only this time for the community coin ecosystem on Avalanche,” the Avalanche Foundation said in an announcement shared with Decrypt.

Meme Coin Rush also mirrors the earlier Avalanche Rush program, which the Foundation said was instrumental in driving Avalanche DeFi growth when it kicked off in 2021.

In the first phase of the Meme Coin Rush program, Avalanche is launching liquidity incentives in partnership with SteakHut and Trader Joe, two Avalanche-native DeFi platforms. The Trader Joe exchange is not to be confused with the popular American grocery store chain.

During Phase 1 of its initiative, the Avalanche Foundation will provide $1 million in incentives in AVAX for native meme coins on SteakHut and Trader Joe. On SteakHut, the Avalanche Foundation will use Uniswap V3 to provide mining rewards to those injecting liquidity into its native meme coin pools. This helps reduce volatility, increase liquidity and stimulate trading of those tokens.

On Trader Joe, meanwhile, Avalanche will launch incentives with “single-sided, time-locked staking vaults for select tokens based on holder and market cap criteria.” Users will earn points for staking into pools, which increases the scarcity of those tokens and potentially increasing their price.

The foundation says the first weekly epoch includes vaults for the following community coins: Coq, Kimbo, NoChill, Gec, Tech, Husky, Meow, Kong, Meat, and Kingshit.

Meme coins are cryptocurrencies that are inspired by internet memes or jokes. They started as a lighthearted way to engage with the crypto community, but have since grown into a serious—but notoriously volatile—investment for some. The most famous example of a meme coin is Dogecoin, which was created as a parody of Bitcoin but has since gained a massive following and has even caught the attention of celebrities like Elon Musk.

The growth of meme coins can be attributed to several factors, including the power of social media for rapid meme propagation, their accessible lower prices that appeal to new investors, and the fun, community-driven nature of grassroots social media campaigns.

These tokens have not been particularly popular on Avalanche, however, mostly running on Ethereum and Solana. The Avalanche Foundation aims to change that.

“Meme coins have become a cornerstone of Web3, representing the uniqueness and interests of diverse crypto communities,” said Eric Kang, BD Manager at Ava Labs, in the announcement. “Meme Coin Rush will be a showcase for users to see the diversity of Avalanche-native DeFi protocols and to dive into vibrant communities at the forefront of culture on Avalanche.”