When a foreigner starts learning Chinese to trade cryptocurrencies

Binance Life has finally become the first Chinese coin to be listed on Binance perpetual contracts.

If you are a Chinese cryptocurrency practitioner, you cannot have missed this term in the past two weeks. Since the birth of this "ticker," it has been both a joke and a vision. CZ himself mentioned that he did not expect a simple reply to trigger a series of subsequent events.

First, it sparked discussions from OKX's CEO, Star. Then came the Chinese ticker craze for Tron and Solana, followed by the recent public disclosure of the so-called "listing terms" by the founder of Limitless, leading to confrontations between the two chains and trading platforms. Finally, Jesse's remark, "Activate Binance Life mode on Base," ended this confrontation.

What this represents may not just be this one ticker, but rather a deeper cultural shift behind it. This might be the first time a series of high-market-value memecoins are represented in Chinese rather than English. What does the meme culture it represents signify?

This time, we found the co-founder of WOK Labs, 0xBarrry, a Polish trader who operates a community of hundreds. What do these foreigners think when they engage with Chinese memes?

Conspiracy Community Meets Chinese Conspiracy Coins

This wave appears both mysterious and thrilling to ordinary traders.

Polish trader and WOK Labs founder Barry recalled, "I was shocked the first time I saw a Chinese-labeled coin's market cap exceed $20 million. On one hand, I realized that this type of conspiracy coin still had great potential. When it surged to $60 million, even $100 million, the European group was in an uproar, with many rushing to recharge on the BSC chain just because the price went up, without understanding the reason."

This market sentiment is not an isolated case. On-chain data from Defillama shows that on October 8, the trading volume on the BSC chain surged to $6.05 billion, reaching the same level of the previous mechanism coin boom in 2021, but this time led by Chinese memes.

On that day, over 100,000 new traders participated in this memecoins frenzy, with nearly 70% making profits. This indeed attracted many "foreigners" to participate in on-chain activities on BSC, and the number of active addresses increased by nearly 1 million compared to the same period last month.

Western investors rushed in only when prices soared, with many realizing the situation only after "checking Chinese." The cultural and traditional trading habit differences also caused many European and American players to suffer losses for the first time.

"In the past, meme investments in Europe often followed American internet culture, characterized by self-deprecating and rebellious humor. Suddenly, the Chinese memes that took the spotlight left many Westerners feeling lost," Barry said.

However, due to his early collaboration with Chinese teams to create WOK Labs, Barry understood the operational dynamics of the Chinese community, including personal relationships and emotional resonance. He began to spread the Chinese narrative within European communities, explaining the differences to more Western traders.

Moreover, the differences in community participation in memecoins are also quite apparent. European traders are more likely to engage in conspiracy-type meme projects, relying heavily on the Ethereum ecosystem, often driven by well-known KOLs or teams with significant control. These communities tend to develop more slowly, but suitable KOLs or teams holding large amounts of bottom chips also face significant selling pressure, which is why establishing long-term projects in the European region is challenging.

In contrast, Chinese communities tend to establish themselves more easily, focusing more on emotional storytelling (or leader coins). Project teams and meme communities gather resonance in WeChat groups by "telling stories" to drive emotions. The emotionally driven form of promotion under "fair" conditions theoretically leads to more sustainable community structures.

Especially in this cycle, it has been relatively easy for Chinese players. They only need to buy the IP (or the statements of opinion leaders) they find popular to "print money at will." One retail investor, solely interested in buying Chinese coins, participated in 65 different Chinese meme coins on the BNB chain within seven days, initially spreading $100 to $300 widely and then increasing positions in coins with strong momentum, netting about $87,000 by the end of the week.

This high-frequency "net-spreading" strategy reflects the rapid speculative style of "most" retail investors in the Chinese community towards new tracks. Meanwhile, European and American players are gradually abandoning small-cap memecoins around $500,000 and are instead turning to more certain targets starting from $5 million.

Agencies like Barry's, which connect the East and West, bridging markets in China, Korea, Japan, and Europe, are becoming increasingly active, helping Asian projects gain Western trust and assisting European teams in entering Asia.

He believes that the cultural differences arising from personal experiences may be nurturing new cross-circle cooperation opportunities.

From Dogecoin to Chinese Meme Coins: From Satirical Memes to Ideological Memes

From a broader perspective, the memecoin trend is rooted in the collision of different cultural genes. The ancestor of Western memecoins is Doge, created in 2013 by two programmers as a joke.

Doge was initially a humorous satire of Bitcoin's serious demeanor but eventually reached a market cap peak of $88.8 billion in May 2021 due to celebrity effects (like Elon Musk) and sustained community enthusiasm.

The subsequent Pepe coin had a similar experience. As a cultural meme birthed from the 4chan community, it quickly gained popularity after its launch in early 2023, with its market cap once exceeding $1 billion. The Pepe project relied entirely on the heat of internet culture; it had no presale, no team allocation, and no roadmap, with the team declaring that the coin "has no intrinsic value and is for entertainment only."

This worldview also dominated many subsequent Solana memecoins, such as Fartcoin and Uselesscoin, which reflect nihilism, or Neet, which embodies the Western internet culture's love for "disruption of real-world values" and dark humor. Meanwhile, trending memes on TikTok, like 67, captured investors' imaginations with images and rebellious spirits, leading to a prolonged attention economy era of memecoins. This also resulted in a lack of "cultural value judgment" on these tokens in Chinese-dominated regions, leading to biases.

Chinese memecoins, however, exhibit different characteristics. They often root in resonance and identity projection. For example, tokens like "Humble Xiao He" and "Customer Service Xiao He" humorously mock social realities from the perspective of underclass workers. The "Cultivation" series reflects Chinese netizens' dreamy fantasies of escaping reality, while "Binance Life" directly embodies the dream of becoming rich overnight in the crypto market. Of course, their common feature is their association with official entities.

This represents a cultural difference within a particular mindset. For Chinese people, this is about "widening the path," while for most European and American players, such names imply that their limits are controlled by whether the "system" is willing to pump the price.

However, the explosion of Chinese memecoins represented by "Binance Life" is directly attributed to this emotional resonance. Its slogan compares Binance Life to the previously popular "Apple Life," and this innovative narrative is distinctly different from the satire of Dogecoin, appealing more to loyalty and sentiment.

When enough people understand this impression, the ticker becomes bound within the system. When it is mocked, the official side "has to pump the price," which may be the thought of many who can still hold onto this coin after a washout.

This wave of meme frenzy is not entirely driven by retail investors; it is also the result of careful cultivation by the Binance ecosystem. From a joke by He Yi, CZ's reply, to a series of official interactions from Fourmeme, and the launch of the MemeRush platform by Binance, the positive news was released in steps and phases, maintaining the outflow of high-market-value memecoins, mid-term liquidity, and long-term sustainability, bringing the originally chaotic memecoin issuance into the official system, making the frenzy more organized and keeping the market's attention focused on the BSC chain for an extended period.

This spread the enthusiasm from individual projects to the entire BSC ecosystem, further driving the public's "next order might make them millionaires" degenerate psychology. This "upward ladder" expectation is also why, at the beginning of this market cycle, when multiple popular projects emerged, we did not feel a significant liquidity siphoning effect between the plates.

This has become a significant ladder-like wealth effect under the joint action of the official and the community. This pathway validates the structured listing expectations behind Chinese meme coins and the market consensus, which at this level would have been unimaginable just a few months ago.

In contrast, Western meme coins are more about luck-driven community revelry or conspiracy group promotion. The BSC ecosystem, under the influence of founders, platform ecosystems, and communities, has transformed this revelry into a blatant "wealth creation movement."

The Public Relations Battle of Trading Platforms: The Listing Fee Dispute and "China-U.S." Thawing

At the same time, this turmoil has sparked intense public relations battles between trading platforms. On October 11, 2025, Jesse first tweeted calling for a boycott of centralized trading platforms that charge listing fees of 2% to 9%.

Three days later, on October 14, CJ Hetherington, founder of the prediction market project Limitless Labs backed by Coinbase, revealed on X that during negotiations with trading platforms, he discovered that to launch on Binance, project teams need to stake 2 million BNB and pay high fees, including an 8% airdrop and marketing allocation of the total token, as well as a $250,000 deposit.

He compared the differences between Binance and Coinbase, believing that Coinbase values the project itself more, while Binance is more like "charging for listings." Upon this revelation, Binance quickly published an article denying the allegations, stating that the claims were "completely false and defamatory," emphasizing that "Binance never charges listing fees," and threatening legal action against CJ for leaking internal conversations.

Subsequently, Binance released a more restrained statement, admitting that the initial response was excessive but reiterating that it does not charge any listing fees.

As this debate intensified, Coinbase also responded swiftly. Jesse Pollak, head of the Base blockchain, publicly stated on social media, "There should be 0 fees for projects to go live on trading platforms."

But it was at that moment that public opinion began to reverse. Coinbase, seemingly "out of spite," officially announced that it would include BNB in its future supported token list, marking the first time it announced support for a token issued by a direct competitor's mainnet. In response, Binance founder CZ welcomed this on social media and encouraged Coinbase to list more BSC chain projects.

CJ, who originally "exposed" the terms, also began to extend an olive branch, while Jesse Pollak's attitude underwent a complete 180-degree shift. He first posted a demonstration video of the Base App on X, using "Binance Life" as an example token in the demonstration. Pollak even humorously remarked in Chinese, "Activate Binance Life mode on the Base App," and replied to CZ's tweet, "Binance Life + Base Life = the strongest combination." This series of actions was interpreted by the industry as a breakthrough in the China-U.S. crypto camp, also bringing a long-lost little golden dog to the Base chain.

It can be said that when the trading volume and attention brought by the Asian market reach a certain scale, Western trading platforms have to actively approach the Chinese community, and the competition among trading platforms intertwines with cultural narratives.

Cognition and Reaction Between Eastern and Western Communities

Mainstream Western media have paid close attention to this event, while many Western retail investors have expressed in groups, "We don't understand the price increase." Most people rushed to buy in only after the price took off. Even in communities like Barry's, which have deep exchanges with the Chinese system, encountering the "only knowing its meaning but not its significance" problem when predicting a memecoin with internal cultural implications is common, indicating that for overseas investors, Chinese elements have become a new barrier to entry.

Some members of the European and American communities have developed translation tools for Chinese to English dog coins.

This wave also emphasizes the notion that "language is opportunity." For the crypto circle, the cultural emotional information behind different languages itself is a layer of valuable resources. This is "the first time that Western investors need to understand Chinese culture to participate in this feast."

Recently popular videos of foreigners learning Chinese to buy memecoins.

However, Barry believes, "I think the Chinese meme market is nearing its end. The longer this cycle lasts, the more severe the PTSD it brings to traders. We can see that these memecoins have started to evolve towards smaller market caps and faster rotations."

At the same time, he also said, "English and Chinese have become the main components of the meme market, and this situation will not change quickly. China has a larger market and is more easily driven by emotions. The European market tends to lag behind. I believe English tickers may return, but they will become more integrated with Asian culture. Due to the inspiration carried by this round of Chinese memes, they will embody more Chinese humor, symbolism, and aesthetics."

In the future, to capture the next wave of memecoin opportunities, it will not be enough to rely solely on chance; a deep understanding of the languages and cultures of different regional communities is also necessary. AI may currently help with cross-linguistic communication, such as by automatically generating Chinese meme images and translating social dynamics to accelerate information dissemination, but AI ultimately cannot replace a deep understanding of cultural contexts.

We may see a more polarized crypto world, with Base, Solana, and more emerging "golden dogs" with Chinese tickers, where there are new trends of integration and mutual learning between Eastern and Western communities, but there may also emerge fragmented ecosystems, and within these cultural differences may lie new opportunities.