A few weeks ago @Raymondspeaks introduced a new project. Called Gifu—pronounced somewhat tongue-in-cheekily Gif-you and not, as someone in Japan like me might first assume, Gee-fu, like the Japanese prefecture—it is a project aimed at providing meme gifs to people for their projects, gifs made by our very own @stickupboys. I don't have to tell you how popular memes are on the net, so making a project aimed at providing personalized meme images to companies and other projects for their use is not the worst idea in the world.

The project lives on Binance Smart Chain, limiting the ability of many of us to get into it. Recently, however, they created a SWAP.GIFU token to allow easier entry for us Hive folks. Currently the token supply is just enormous, which might discourage some people from investing, but they have a very aggressive burning strategy, so the real supply of the tokens is constantly shrinking.

Initially I was indifferent to the project. I own a lot of BRO and LGN, so needless to say I hope Ray does well and wished him the best on this project, but I didn't see it as something to put my own money in.

Recently, however, and with a little push from @trumpman who is really crazy about this token, I have come to see that this might be a bit of a hidden diamond. Memes are very very popular. Even if we remain in the bear market that isn't likely to change, but if we jump into a bull market soon (as we might be close to doing, with BTC already going nuts and climbing to 90k) then all bets are off: people will go nuts with money, and throwing that money at memes will probably start to look like a great idea to them.

GIFU has already made two deals, both of which resulted and are resulting in a large number of GIFU being burned. Soon they will be introducing an limited edition NFT that gives lifetime upvotes (a very popular move on Hive) and a 20% discount on all meme purchases. The NFT was going to be available to the top 50 GIFU holders and cost 150 HIVE, but with how quickly GIFU is selling, they are rethinking the cost and will inform us about the new price later.

Anyway, yeah—Gifu! Go get some!

David LaSpina is an American photographer and translator lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time and searching for the perfect haiku. He blogs here and at laspina.org. Write him on Twitter or Mastodon.