The cacophonous cauldron that is noise.cash is always bubbling. Pure noise, many say, but there are scrumptious morsels there, too, if one cares to look. Consider the following post, from user Kentokiyo, with @MoreGainStrategies:

MoreGainStrategies posted about it. I liked the idea of a BCH mascot, but thought that we couldn't modify an existing product as it would be copyrighted.

Later that day, user Feels posted this:

...to which I responded (with MoreGainStrategies and Whattheactualduck):

I told MoreGainStrategies that I was inspired by their post and I've been thinking about it since.

What would make a good mascot for BCH?

I think we can begin to standardize qualities of a good crypto mascot by looking at some other crypto projects. Consider the following:

• Dogecoin

• Uniswap

• PancakeSwap

• Beefy Finance

• Curve Finance

• LeoFinance

• HONK HONK

Some of these are obvious, some less so, but each can tell us something. Note: the following sections got rather longer than anticipated. You can skip ahead to my conclusions if you'd like.

Dogecoin

The meme gold standard, right? The important thing to remember here is that Sir Doge was a meme before he was a crypto meme.

Qualities: Popular, Established Meme. Dang Cuteness. Meme-iest Project?

Uniswap 🦄🧦🚀

This one is about consistent branding. Check out Uniswap's Github. Note that a fair number of their repositories have emoji identifiers:

• uniswap-interface 🦄

• uniswap-sdk 🛠

• uniswap-lib 📖

• governance 🏛

• etc...

This sets a standard of communication. Each emoji is vested with additional connotation as part of a group language.

🦄 is so cute and magical and it's going to make us so much money!

There's also 🦄🐷 and 🧦. Some of you know what I mean in this context, and that speaks to the power of Uniswap's early branding methodology. For the rest of you I'll give a bit more context.

🦄🐷 stands for Unipig, a "gamified demo of Uniswap on Ethereum Layer 2." Built in collaboration with Plasma Group (PiG), Unipig was a demonstration of the power and scalability offered by Ethereum Layer 2 protocols. It primarily used social media engagement to drive the airdrop distribution of PIGI tokens, that could then be swapped on the site to demonstrate one's allegience, either to 🦄 or 🐷. Now defunct, the project boasted 20,769 blazingly fast transactions that avoided a total of 33.2304 ETH in gas fees.

🧦 stands for Unisocks, an exploration of dynamic asset pricing based on market maker bonding curves. The asset in question: neat socks, valued at the time of writing at $64,261.79 USD. Pat Doyle has written a very good article on this phenomenon over at Medium.

I would argue that Uniswap have successfully laid claim to the Unicorn emoji. 🦄 is their mascot. They are a consistent brand with an aim towards casual ease of use. They leveraged a fun meme-y approach to showcase their project's technical scope. They even have a particular shade of pink: #FF007A.

Qualities: Consistent, Fun Brand. Emoji Identifiers. Memes Demonstrating Tech.

PancakeSwap and Beefy Finance

I'd like to mention these projects together as they follow the general trend of Uniswap, each with their particular flavor. The main take-aways here are in branding and mascot choices.

PancakeSwap's Bunny

Or is it a pancake? It's both! Their logo is obviously inspired by Oolong, the meme rabbit that balances things on its head.

This is another example of a crypto mascot basing itself on a well established meme. This comes with some built in brand recognition and memetic loyalty.

Note also that their documentation uses an emoji identifier schema, just as Uniswap did.

🐰 + 🥞 = 🤑

Qualities: Established Meme. Cute AF. Consistent Branding. Emojis.

Beefy Finance's Cow

Beefy Finance offers a clean brand experience along with its cute and simple little cow logo.

This is not particularly noteworthy for our purposes, but one can imagine any funny picture of a cow getting a Beefy Finance spin.

The same concept applies to PancakeSwap and Uniswap. Take their iconography, their branding, use that foundation to build a meme. A weird pancake for that error you keep getting. A tired cow ( 🐮💤 ) when the APY dips. A unicorn with its horn piercing the moon.

When you have community engagement with a quality brand, the memes will come.

Qualities: Branding. Starting With Cuteness. Meme Potential as Community Potential.

Curve Finance

You might be wondering why this is on the list. You don't see any mascots looking at the Curve Finance website. This one requires a dip into Telegram.

Meet the Curve Llama:

Rad. How about another?

And one more:

You can't find these memes anywhere but the Curve Finance Telegram. They are...so good. But what can we learn here?

It's those cute animals again, but what I'm really trying to get at here is the diversity of visually expressible emotions. This is something that made emojis particularly resonant in the context we discussed earlier. They transcend human verbal language. They express ideas within a readily understandable visual context.

A well constructed meme takes this property and adds a twist, sometimes humor, sometimes critique, sometimes non sequitur. The purpose of the meme is engagement of the viewer through surprise or joy. It can become a tool for group bonding. It can convey complex information.

A sad bedraggled llama on a surfboard, whaaaaaat!? Love this image, yes, show it to all my friends, so cute!

And then:

I'm lurking in Curve's Telegram and someone flash loan attacks Yearn Finance. I throw out the "Ride the Curve" llama. We all laugh and hope for the best.

Qualities: Strong Visual Language. In Jokes. Community.

LeoFinance

This one's real quick. Their branding is slick but not super meme-y. But they chose a good animal. And so, thanks to @Sneezewort for this, posted to noise.cash (go check out his LeoFinance!):

Qualities: Sneezewort Knows Memes. Choose The Right Animal.

HONK HONK (a note on Pepe)

I understand why the HONK team chose a Pepe meme. It makes sense for their branding, and it has strong recognition and engagement. I like HONK, but Pepe has too much baggage.

Pepe wearing a BCH shirt? Hell yeah, sounds great. But Pepe doesn't belong to anyone, and is certainly not for everyone.

Plus, we already have the Feels SLP token.

Qualities: Meme Recognition. Pepe. Meme-iest Project.

Conclusions: Mascotability

Let's review the qualities we've seen in these projects.

• Cute Animal 🐰

• Consistent Branding 🦄

• Meme Recognition 🤡

• Strong Visual Language 🦁

• Community 🦙

The first one is easy. A good BCH mascot should be a CUTE ANIMAL.

The other criteria are more complex. A mascot should be representative of BCH. That being said, BCH does not have consistent branding, because we are not a brand. We are a collection of stakeholders looking to build value for our network.

I was looking around for good examples of mascots and I realized very quickly that it's the projects that have mascots and branding. Most of Defi. Microblogging like HIVE ( 🐝 ) and LeoFinance. Things like DOGE and HONK are weird outliers where the coin is also the meme.

But I saw a lot of similarities in the feel of Curve Finance's Telegram and BCHChannel, for example. There's a lot of memes floating around. The BCH gang can tip each other SPICE and HONK and that's fun. But Curve has a rich set of memes all their own.

A BCH mascot should be a cute animal that can be ours. Not some Doge off the street that we tape to the sides of our coins. We need sufficient source material: images in the public domain or licensed specifically for remix without attribution. Thankfully, a few of the image sites recommended to users here on read.cash fit these restrictions.

We, the community, can make our own memes. Anyone with a phone can make a good meme these days. We can build our strong visual language, our community jokes and demonstrations of tech.

Are you ready?

No, are you?

For capybaras?

I'll go over some of my motivations in a future article, but this is my personal choice.

What do you all think? Do you have an idea for a mascot or a great meme format? Leave a comment below, let me know what you think, make the meme, share the meme, subscribe if you liked what you saw and think I can pull it off again, and I'll see you next time!

Lead photo by José Luis Photographer from Pexels

Capybara photo by Brett Sayles from Pexels