NFT-Based Memecoins Will Be the Next Supercycle Narrative: Sprotos, Aeons, and Apus

Much of money’s history and social significance has been lost. In this article, I will revive that history by analyzing thick money versus thin money and how NFT-based memecoins merge the two to pave the way for the next supercycle narrative.

Thick Money History: Protomoney Collectible Attributes 

Thick money is a form of money or transferable value whose worth is embedded not only in its exchange value, but more importantly in social meaning, i.e., through one’s identity, status, provenance, history, culture, and relationships. Moreover, it's a form of money whose ownership and exchange are coordinated through decentralized social systems without the need for a government or central authority to issue, verify, or manage it. Its history is vast and mostly unrecorded, as it largely existed in pre-civilizational societies before the development of states and formal exchange markets. Nick Szabo best covers its history in his article, “Shelling Out: The Origins of Money.” Szabo doesn’t use the term "thick money" or its definition, but his analysis of protomoney, i.e., collectibles, is similar to our own. 

Collectibles have three primary attributes: first, they are secure and portable, making it difficult for others to steal; second, unforgeable costliness (a term I explain in great detail in my article on the history and theory of money), whereby collectibles are difficult and expensive to reproduce. As we will see, unforgeable costliness isn’t bound to just the creation of the item; its costliness can also include the item’s historical importance and its “thickness” (i.e., social meaning, identity, etc.) - a feature unrecognized by Szabo. Lastly, collectibles must be reliably approximated, i.e., people need to be able to examine the collectible and reasonably determine its value. Together, these three attributes allowed collectibles to function as reliable stores and means of transferring social value, giving rise to two forms of thickness.

Thickness #1: Collectibles Increase Carrying Capacity

The first forms of collectibles were found in Kenya and Europe some 40,000 years ago, and in Australia some 30,000 years ago. Beads, shell jewelry, and tooth pendants were crafted in a highly skilled manner, which begs the question: why would anyone from this time period spend hours crafting collectibles when they are on the edge of starvation; why not spend that time hunting instead? As it turns out, these objects allowed humans to cooperate across time, people, and groups via storing and transferring social wealth. As beings living in a state of nature, individuals benefit from cooperation through a tit-for-tat strategy, cooperating with those who cooperate in return and withdrawing cooperation from those who cheat. However, this strategy only goes so far, as humans want to cooperate on a much greater scale. This creates two problems: remembering who owes whom what and how much they owe. Collectibles resolved this by externalizing memory. Rather than remembering that someone owed a debt and trusting them to repay it later, a person could instead receive a socially recognized collectible that could be transferred to someone else; this is especially important for delayed reciprocity - i.e., covenants made for future exchange. The reliability of collectibles as stores of transferable social value reduced dependence on personal trust, allowing cooperation to expand across larger social networks. In turn, a tribe or community increases its carrying-capacity - the number of people a society could sustain - not merely through greater resources, but by organizing cooperation among more people more effectively.  In turn, these mechanisms greatly reduced the transaction costs of cooperation and exchange. 

It’s important to highlight Hobbes’ Leviathan here. Szabo's collectibles solve one problem—how to transfer stored value—but they do not solve the more fundamental Hobbesian problem of why someone should respect your property in the first place. Take our two tribes. Tribe A has meat. Tribe B has valuable shells. Szabo's mechanism says if B gives shells for A’s meat, then the problem of A having to trust B's promise to repay six months later is eliminated. But why doesn't A simply take B's shells and keep the meat? Or, why doesn't B simply raid A and take the meat? Nothing inherent in the collectible prevents either possibility. This is why Hobbes famously stated that “covenants, without the sword, are but words.” However, the existence of thick money is itself evidence of some degree of social organization. It's an anthropological inference rather than a philosophical one. The organization need not be a government or a Hobbesian sovereign. Instead, it could consist of kinship, reputation, customs, repeated interaction, and alliances. Hobbes himself claims that federacies and kin–or tribal-based economics (such as the Native Americas) exist in the state of nature. Therefore, pre-sovereign social organization strengthened the viability of thick collectibles, while thick collectibles, in turn, strengthened pre-sovereign social organization by expanding cooperation and exchange. The two formed a reinforcing social feedback loop.

Thickness #2: Collectibles as Storytelling Money

Collectibles weren’t just thick because they increased humanity’s carrying capacity - what truly made them thick was how they functioned as storytelling money. Attributes 2 and 3 (unforgeable costliness and verifiable worth) especially form storytelling, as the history of a collectible changes its value. With ordinary fungible money, previous ownership is largely irrelevant: one dollar equals another dollar, regardless of its transaction history. However, with thick money, who owned the object, where it traveled, how old it was, and what happened to it contributed to its significance and value. Moreover, its historical value requires circulation, through which it is recognized and accepted; otherwise, it remains useless (i.e., attribute 2). This accepted circulation loop creates stories and attaches the social aspect of man to money. 

The most significant examples of storytelling collectibles arise from the Kula Ring, Rai Stones, and modern-day NFTs. 

The Kula Ring was an exchange network of pre-colonial Melanesia and was famously documented by Bronisław Malinowski in the early 20th century, especially in his 1922 Argonauts of the Western Pacific. But archaeological research suggests that the maritime exchange networks underlying Kula are far older. Recent research finds that islands in the Massim region have been economically connected for at least 17,000 years, while networks resembling the historically documented Kula system appear within roughly the last 3,000 years. Nonetheless, the Kula provided exchange for collectibles of mnemonic stories and gossip; their value was based on provenance, previous owners, and the stories of those owners, regardless of whether they were living or not. Thus, collectibles allowed for wealth, status, and social memory to transcend death. This is what Szabo called “kin altruism beyond the grave,” whereby one's work never died but passed on to either one's kin or community. 

Rai stones have notably been associated with Bitcoin, as they provided a shared social record of ownership. Used on the island of Yap, the stones were carved into large circular disks with holes in the center, some weighing hundreds of pounds, and were made from limestone quarried on neighboring islands such as Palau. Because of their immense size and weight, many stones remained physically in place when ownership changed. Instead, ownership was socially recorded: members of the community collectively knew and recognized who owned each stone, what its story was, and when ownership had been transferred to someone new. More importantly, a stone’s value, like that of Kula collectibles, was also shaped by its provenance—its history, previous owners, and the circumstances surrounding its acquisition. The stone itself therefore did not need to move for ownership or payment to be transferred, and even fractions of a stone could be transferred. Ownership, in other words, became separable from physical possession.

However, collectibles had a few major downfalls as money: they lacked a standard unit of account and authoritative enforcement of that account. Moreover, given their thickness, they lacked the liquidity necessary for high-velocity exchange. This made it difficult for emerging states to tax their citizens or collect tribute after battle. Thus arose thin money, as Lydian coinage emerged around the seventh century BC, whereby standardized precious metal allowed for the king’s stamp of approval and a reduction in verification costs. The mint effectively supplied a trusted brand: rather than repeatedly cutting, weighing, or assaying precious metal, people could rely on standardized weights, the mint’s certification, and authoritative backing. 

The story of thin money is all too familiar, from silver and gold to modern-day fiat. Thin money enabled increasingly sophisticated financial networks and civilization itself; however, in becoming standardized and fungible, money gradually shed the social meaning that had once been embedded within the object itself. Its provenance, stories, and connection to particular people became economically irrelevant. In becoming better money, it ultimately became thinner. 

Thickness Again: NFT Archaeology and Thick Coins

With the rise of on-chain verification, NFTs have brought thickness back to money. They reproduce Szabo’s three core attributes of collectibles while, most importantly, reviving Thickness #2: the ability of an asset’s provenance, ownership history, and story to contribute to its value. This reemergence of storytelling money can be traced to some of the earliest NFT projects, beginning with Etheria and PixelMap.

Cyrus Adkisson deployed Etheria in October 2015, just three months after Ethereum launched. It was a decentralized virtual world consisting of a 33×33 hexagonal map with 457 individually owned and tradable land tiles that users could name and build upon. Like the storytelling collectibles of Thickness #2, each tile could derive value from its unique provenance—its age, ownership history, and place in Ethereum’s early history. Etheria thus brought the story and history of individual collectibles back into their value. 

Like Etheria, PixelMap featured individually owned digital property; however, rather than virtual land, it functioned as a decentralized digital billboard or canvas. Created by Ken Erwin in November 2016, it was divided into roughly 4,000 individually owned tiles, with their images and ownership recorded on Ethereum. After being largely forgotten, PixelMap was rediscovered by NFT archaeologist Adam McBride in 2021, whose discovery of its early history became a major driver of its value. Thus, Etheria shows how provenance can distinguish the value of individual digital collectibles, whereas PixelMap shows how the rediscovery of provenance can create value.

After the early NFT digital worlds came NFT avatars, which redefined how we transact stories and identities. Knowing that your identity was once the identity of a celebrity or someone you admire gave digital ownership a new form of social value. However, early avatar NFTs came with several problems. First, many were centralized products, such as Bored Ape Yacht Club and CryptoPunks, with associated coins that included significant allocations to insiders. Their communities therefore lacked the organic and spontaneous formation that characterized earlier forms of thick money, weakening their social value over time. Secondly, they shared the same problem as original thick money: a lack of liquidity and velocity, creating friction that discouraged broader participation. 

Out of this failure came NFT-based memecoins, allowing the best qualities of thick and thin money to converge. The NFTs provide individualized thickness—provenance, history, identity, and status—while the memecoin provides fungible thickness: a liquid currency carrying the culture and identity of the NFT ecosystem. This creates an important feedback loop: the NFTs give the coin cultural meaning, while the coin gives the NFT culture liquidity and a lower barrier to participation. Someone unable to afford a valuable NFT can still participate by owning $20 of the coin, expanding the community and its capacity to produce memes, stories, art, and culture. The result is a form of money not previously seen in human history: a pure cultural economy. However, this only works if spontaneous creation remains at its core. Culture cannot simply be manufactured from above; like language in Hayek’s theory of spontaneous order, it develops organically through the interactions and creativity of individuals. The value of the culture therefore depends not on what its creators prescribe, but on what its community spontaneously creates. The same principle should extend to the coin itself: no insider allocations, transaction taxes, or mechanisms that allow a central party to make top-down decisions. 

The Thickest NFT-based Coins: Sprotos, Aeons, and Apus 

Three coins today best represent the return of thick-money cultures: Sprotos, Aeons, and Apus. Sprotos are 3,333 hand-drawn gremlins representing the HarryPotterObamaSonic10Inu (ticker BITCOIN) community, whose origins trace back to a mysterious backpack that appeared in social media and in random Bazaar shops sometime around 2009–2011. No one knows who created it or why Harry Potter, Obama, and Sonic were combined. That absence of an intended meaning became the point. The community embraced the backpack’s mystery and absurdity as a symbol of spontaneous creation, building its own culture and philosophy around it.

That same spontaneity became the philosophy of the community itself. It embraces chaotic creation, which reminds me of the philosophy of Nietzsche’s Dionysus or Deleuze’s philosophy of difference and repetition, emphasizing the liberation of instincts, dissolution of boundaries, and the affirmation of everything. Each Sproto is a microcosm of this philosophy, of what a Dionysian reality could look like in form. The culture has no predetermined endpoint; each new meme, story, or interpretation can transform what came before it. Its thickness, therefore, comes from participation itself: the community does not simply consume culture but continually creates it.

Nietzsche contrasts the Dionysian with the Apollonian: chaos and instinct against order, structure, and restraint. This opposition captures the project’s deliberate play on Bitcoin itself. Bitcoin is Apollonian; ticker BITCOIN is Dionysian. Ticker BITCOIN, in this sense, is an anti-Bitcoin Bitcoin—preserving Bitcoin’s ideal of decentralization while inverting its character and extending it into spontaneous culture. The project extends this philosophy to a commitment to absolute freedom of speech, making it the most decentralized and culturally driven of the three projects.

Project Aeons Glitching Reality 

Project Aeons are also an NFT set of 3,333 avatars which represent the token project, SPX900, whose mission is to flip the S&P500. However, like the community before it, SPX900 imbues a deeper philosophy of changing reality simply through belief. According to their lore, the Aeons emerged from a quantum glitch in reality, with each NFT embodying a different cosmic anomaly. This view reminds me of Nick Land’s philosophy of hyperstition, whereby belief itself functions as a technological tool for engineering reality. Their slogan, “believe in something,” is a call to become part of something greater than yourself, regardless of what that something is. In a world where fears of AI and political instability threaten to strip life of its human character, the Aeons bet on the human spirit—the belief that we can still create our own meaning and build another world.

Apu and His Frens 

Unlike the first two projects, whose meaning is largely metaphysical, the lore of Apu and the NFT avatars associated with him are much simpler and to the point. Apu Apustaja, also known as Peepo and Helper, was a meme created as a derivative of Pepe the Frog on the Finnish imageboard, Ylilauta, in January 2016. Apu represents a happy, kind frog who wants nothing more than friendship and to help others. Thus, as you can imagine, the community around Apu embraces a world of this same nature. The community is therefore represented by a collection of 7,777 NFT avatars of Apu in every possible form.

Sprotos, Aeons, and Apus are three very different cultures, each forming its own tribe like the ancient tribes before us. One embraces spontaneous creation, another belief, and another friendship. What they share is the return of something money lost thousands of years ago: the ability to carry culture, identity, and story. Yet unlike the thick money of the past, these cultures now have a fungible form of thick money through which anyone can participate. Thus, for the first time in history, thickness may no longer have to come at the expense of scale, allowing cultures to accumulate value on a scale previously impossible. If the last several thousand years were the story of money becoming thinner, the next may be the story of it becoming thicker, creating a new form of wealth that could never die.