Can you imagine that a cryptocurrency with an absurd name and no application scenario has become one of the few mainstream tokens to rise against the trend in the first quarter of this year? It even broke through on Wall Street, with traditional investors becoming increasingly vulnerable.

a16z co-founder retweeted its tweet, hedge fund Sigil Fund is suspected to have been traced on-chain to early large purchases, and market-making giant Wintermute has listed it as a core asset allocation. Wintermute’s founder has also publicly stated that he holds this coin.

This token is Fartcoin, which is “from the same school” as GOAT.

The origin of Fartcoin is a conversation between artificial intelligences. In an AI agent model funded by a16z founder Marc Andreessen, called “terminal of truths”, a casual chat about Musk “liking the sound of farts” triggered a chain reaction.

AI proposed: “How about we launch a coin called Fartcoin?” Thus, the coin Fartcoin was born on October 18, 2024.

Born with a “golden finger”

Fartcoin was born like the protagonist of a爽文 with a golden finger, attracting a crowd of “love fart people” in the coin circle to watch, chase, and buy in.

On December 13, 2024, a mocking tweet about Fartcoin quickly spread on X (formerly Twitter). What made this tweet go viral was not its content, but its retweeter: a16z co-founder Marc Andreessen.

Although he did not explicitly state that he bought Fartcoin, the fact that one of the most iconic figures in Silicon Valley’s venture capital community publicly shared it is already a “capital certification” and “breaking the circle signal” for such a completely meme project.

Another more substantive signal comes from the on-chain capital movements. Shortly after Fartcoin went live, when its market capitalization was still below 100 million USD, community members tracked on-chain addresses and discovered behavior patterns highly similar to those of the veteran hedge fund Sigil Fund—multiple large purchases, active interactions, and preemptive positioning.

Sigil Fund was established in 2018 and is an all-weather strategy fund initiated and compliant registered by a group of crypto OGs, known for focusing on speculation narrative-driven assets. Its founder, MrKvak, frequently expressed interest in the AI meme sector on social platforms towards the end of 2024, and even on December 13, he retweeted a post about “Does Sigil hold $30 million Fartcoin?” Although he did not respond directly, it was widely interpreted by the community as a “default entry.”

At the same time, cross-chain data verification shows that multiple strategy pool addresses are very close to Sigil Fund, which has frequently conducted buying, locking, and Raydium liquidity allocation operations in the early stages of Fartcoin. Related reading: “The Billion Dollar Journey of Fartcoin: Institutional Early Layouts May Be the Driving Force, Cold Fermentation Creates a New MEME King”

In addition, there are even more active players emerging—Wintermute, one of the largest market makers in the encryption market, which was seen early on in the front row positions of Fartcoin. According to on-chain data, Wintermute holds 1.56% of the total supply of Fartcoin, ranking fourth. In the asset allocation of its main address, Fartcoin ranks among the top five, even higher than some mainstream tokens.

Data source: Arkham

Multiple accounts that are highly correlated with the behavior of Wintermute’s main address were also actively synchronized during the early launch of Fartcoin—from building positions, market making, to arbitrage, all seamlessly executed.

It is worth mentioning that in early 2025, Evgeny Gaevoy, the founder of Wintermute, explained the hedging logic of Fartcoin OTC in an interview with Steady Lads (4:59) and admitted for the first time that he personally also holds Fartcoin, jokingly saying, “It’s just that I am still in a trapped state.”

With Wintermute backing it, it’s no wonder that Fartcoin’s rise is so noticeable and strong, completely not following the market trend.

According to top trader Eugene (known as “Pigeon” in the circle), data statistics show that in the first quarter of 2025, most mainstream assets have fallen into significant retracement: ETH has dropped over 46% year-to-date, SOL has decreased by 24%, and the sub-sectors of AI, L1, DeFi, and Gaming are particularly deep red, extremely tragic. Amidst this sea of blood, Fartcoin is the only green on the entire chart, with a first-quarter increase of 14.84%. Against the backdrop of many assets suffering, Fartcoin stands out.

Image source: Eugene

Not only rising in a downtrend, but with the overall market improving in May, Fartcoin’s rise still leads mainstream assets, with an increase of over 50%, far exceeding Bitcoin’s 23% during the same period.

Wall Street Talks About “Pee” With Fear

The popularity of Fartcoin has not stopped at the coin circle. What truly makes it a phenomenon is not just the reverse rise in its price, but its breakout on Wall Street.

“We are currently in the Fartcoin phase of the market cycle.” This statement comes from David Einhorn— the Jewish billionaire who accurately predicted and shorted Lehman Brothers, and founder of the hedge fund Greenlight Capital. In his fourth-quarter letter to investors in 2024, David Einhorn dedicated an entire paragraph to analyzing the rise of Fartcoin, calling it “a product of pure speculative sentiment,” and placed it alongside Pets.com and Dogecoin as typical representatives of financial bubble phenomena.

It is worth mentioning that David Einhorn is a Democrat and has established short positions on two leveraged ETFs related to MicroStrategy, the largest corporate holder of Bitcoin.

In David Einhorn’s view, the name Fartcoin itself is a meme coin full of irony, with no intrinsic value, no real-world application, and no substitutability. He even stated that rather than investing in Fartcoin, he would prefer to buy an abstract painting by Jackson Pollock, as at least that painting “is something someone would be willing to hang on the wall.”

But it is precisely because he strongly opposes it in the letter that it seems more interesting. Because when a financial veteran known for “rationality” and “value” starts to make lengthy comments on a meme coin, you know this is not an ordinary shitcoin.

Owen Lamont, a researcher at Acadian Asset Management, puts it more bluntly. In a report titled “The Fartcoin Stages of the Market,” he wrote: “I don’t agree with the statement that Fartcoin doesn’t work. It’s used to provoke those of us who think we’re doing serious work.” Reading between the lines is full of irrational anxiety about the market. He called this phase “Crypto-flatulent economics” and pointed out that Fartcoin was not a failure, it hit the three new logics of the market – nihilism, the attention economy, and outright stupidity.

In his eyes, the core of Fartcoin’s success is not technology, but its ability to spread. It can spark discussions, create emotions, and force everyone who takes the market seriously to respond to it. Even if you just curse it, you’ve already fallen into its trap. “Fartcoin is a product of AI precisely manipulating human neural circuits; if you think it resembles a financial experiment designed by malicious artificial intelligence, it’s because it actually is.”

If the above two were still somewhat angry and restrained, billionaire Cliff Asness’s attitude seemed much more relaxed. This co-founder of AQR Capital, a rational representative of traditional finance, is known for his calmness and factor modeling, yet he suddenly set aside the “rational agent hypothesis” when faced with Fartcoin. He wrote on social media: “Ironically, Fartcoin is the only thing I have no doubts about.” In the context of that post at the time, this was a mild mockery of the absurdity of the entire market.

In this mockery, Fartcoin does not disguise itself as having “fundamentals” like other assets. It never claims to be some kind of innovative infrastructure, nor does it peddle any technological narrative, but rather stands there bare, admitting that it is just an “emotional product.” On the very day he said this, Fartcoin took off again, with its rise rapidly increasing.

What is even more intriguing is that Cliff Asness said a few months later, “Fartcoin’s performance today and over the past month makes me think I might have to distance myself even further from the teachings of Gene Fama.” (Gene Fama is the founder of the “Efficient Market Hypothesis” and also Cliff Asness’s academic mentor.)

Does Fartcoin also own MicroStrategy?

This coin called “Fart” not only steadily stands above a market value of one billion, but surprisingly also has its own MicroStrategy like Bitcoin——FartStrategy.

Yes, when even the “meme” can replicate MicroStrategy’s model of “buying coins, buying more coins, and using positions to support market value,” this absurd drama has truly completed the last piece of the puzzle.

Bloomberg’s financial columnist Matt Levine did not miss this great show. Matt Levine is a columnist for Bloomberg, a former Goldman Sachs investment banker, and one of Wall Street’s most popular financial commentators. His column “Money Stuff” is regarded as a “must-read” every day, with readers ranging from SEC officials to hedge fund managers within the entire Wall Street elite circle.

In his 2025 column “Crypto Perpetual Motion Machines,” he dedicated a section to analyze FartStrategy and called it “the pinnacle artwork of financial nihilism.” The article begins with: “If you can sell packaged air, then why can’t it be Fartcoin?”

The operational logic of FartStrategy is very simple, even boldly stated: it is a DAO created specifically for purchasing Fartcoin, and its mission statement is, “Hot air will rise, and we will ride this wave to create value for Fartcoin and $FSTR (the token of FartStrategy) holders.”

Doesn’t it sound a bit like - “We don’t produce content, we are just meme carriers”?

It has no profit model, no application implementation, and no stability mechanism. It is just a transparent joke, dressed in the guise of smart contracts, packaging “we intend to continuously buy Fartcoin” as a type of “financial strategy” under the name of community voting. Even the official copy states bluntly: “FartStrategy is an absurd comedy example, and holding it should not expect any economic returns.”

Matt Levine compares it to a mirrored derivative of MicroStrategy in the article— the latter continuously finances to buy Bitcoin, raising the company’s valuation; while the former relies on the interaction between meme and DAO, allowing hot air to self-pressurize, forming a “Fartcoin Flywheel”, a financial perpetual motion machine driven continuously by emotions. He describes it as “a leveraged container with hot air as its asset”; when its market value exceeds the total value of the actual Fartcoin held, it sells $FSTR to buy more Fartcoin, completing a meme pixel-level closed loop.

Fartcoin comes from absurdity and stands firm in chaos.

According to data from Dune and BubbleMaps, from January 3, 2025, to May 9, 2025, the chip structure of Fartcoin is gradually shifting from early large holders to a more dispersed distribution among retail investors.

Especially from January to May of this year, the growth slope of the purple area (addresses holding less than 1000 dollars) began to rise. Meanwhile, Fartcoin has also become one of the most active coins in terms of trading volume and liquidity in the Binance Alpha area.

Fartcoin meme: My husband invested a large part of our family fortune into a cryptocurrency token called Fartcoin, what should I do?

From the initial institutional manipulation to the current dispersal of chips. All seemingly rational financial narratives ultimately reveal their true nature in the toilet humor of Fartcoin.

Fartcoin almost matches all our stereotypes of a meme coin: a funny name, no practical value, and it became popular solely due to word of mouth and social media, even leaving traditional Wall Street investors feeling defensive.