From MEME to Infrastructure: Why Are the Upgrade Logics of These Two Projects Being Misinterpreted?

The most frequently asked questions these days are nothing more than: $PING and $PAYAI why haven’t they pumped yet? One MEME coin is making a high-profile launchpad, while a practical utility token is stirring up a migration and pool swap. Both seem to be somewhat abandoning the scene. It indeed makes people feel uneasy.

Honestly, with the current market environment, no one has confidence. But I want to share some observations that can be understood:

First Layer: Why doing this all makes sense

The most fatal flaw of MEME coins is the lack of a sustainable empowerment mechanism, relying entirely on consensus and sentiment to support the price. Utility tokens, on the other hand, are essentially small businesses with very low ceilings and low technical barriers. Currently, both types of projects face the same problem—lack of support from the “confidence side.”

The recent moves of $PING and $PAYAI seem inexplicable but are actually targeted solutions:

$PING is trying to detach from the pure MEME label through a Launchpad, while establishing a self-sustaining flywheel mechanism. $PAYAI aims to upgrade from a simple utility token to an infrastructure protocol layer through token migration. From a macro perspective, both actions are attempts at a transformative leap to expand imagination space.

Second Layer: Pure logical deduction

These promises haven’t been fully realized yet, so we can only discuss the logic itself for now.

It’s not surprising that $PING is doing a Launchpad. In a bear market, sentiment and consensus are insufficient to sustain prices, and the narrative of the x402 track is too MEME-like, easily reverting to the original form. But from another angle, if $PING becomes a platform token for a Launchpad, its nature changes completely. By continuously testing one, two, three projects issued on the platform, as long as one project hits a liquidity opportunity, it can trigger a revaluation of value. Looking at it this way, this strategic upgrade is indeed worth scrutinizing.

Token migration for $PAYAI is most likely to trigger various speculations. Many say the project team is short on chips and is using migration to control the situation. But there’s a flaw in this logic—if it were truly about controlling the scene, wouldn’t spreading FUD be more efficient? So I tend to believe that the team sees through the limitations of utility attributes and is thinking of upgrading to a protocol layer to provide continuous empowerment for the token. Staking, rewards, ecological incentives, CEX locking—these mechanisms can all be integrated. Such a decision, from a long-term perspective, is not problematic.

Third Layer: Why the market can’t understand

In simple terms, it’s a mismatch of thinking frameworks. When a large wave of people rushes into the x402 track, they still think in terms of MEME coin strategies—buy in, wait for the windfall, quickly cash out. But the growth logic of the x402 track itself is completely different from MEME, and short-term results are unlikely to be immediately visible.

$PING’s launchpad is just the beginning of the x402 asset issuance narrative. It may succeed or fail, but that’s only the prelude. More launchpads are already in the preparation stage within the ecosystem. Looking at the ideas released by various projects, the new batch of launchpads is no longer just about issuing tokens casually—businesses like Gamefi and Socialfi with real application scenarios can be incorporated into token issuance. This progress is indeed several steps ahead of just idle chatter.

The protocol service layer upgrade of $PAYAI is even more subtle. It is said that this team consists of technical engineers, but I think such teams appearing during a bear market is actually a good thing. With ample time, they have enough window to validate their ideas. Moreover, utility tracks inherently have large commercial expansion potential. Under a new positioning, they might be starting to continuously empower the entire ecosystem, ultimately changing the status and value capture ability of tools within the x402 ecosystem.

In short, although the operations of these two projects seem strange, from a long-term perspective, their logic holds up. The market currently doesn’t understand them more because participants’ thinking patterns are still stuck in speculation stages, rather than truly understanding the logic of ecosystem evolution.