WELSH: The Top Dog on Bitcoin

For those of you who are veterans of the Stacks ecosystem, I am willing to bet that you were just as surprised as I, when seemingly out of nowhere, the humble WELSH coin pounced onto the scene in recent weeks.

WELSH, the coin we all remember seeing on ALEX and Stackswap just waiting for a good home, yet perpetually overlooked. WELSH, The underdog on the STX Bitcoin layer that just didn’t really get it when it came to things like memecoins. Yes, this is the same WELSH that is currently trading on a MEXC, a centralized exchange. This very WELSH went from the most taken for granted token that we knew of, to the coin that we all suddenly feel under exposed to.

So What Happened?

For those of you who are perpetually on X, like I am, you may vaguely recall seeing some X posts focused on WELSH around February 2023. During that time, the people who were paying attention to Stacks weren’t really focused on meme coins, we were focused on accumulating Bitcoin ordinals. The bear market plodded along, and many of us languished in the valley of low liquidity. In these times “smart money” does its best to find as close to a sure thing as possible. Smart money most certainly does not trifle with meme coins.

It was during this same time, a crypto native named Rozar.btc had developed some price aggregating software in the course of his normal job, and found himself taking an interest in WELSH coin. The meme made sense. The narrative, the first meme coin on Bitcoin, couldn’t have been better crafted by Tom Clancy himself, and the tokenomics? Well, they were just too good to pass up. By use of a bit of blockchain sleuthing, Rozar.btc was able to determine that the original developer of WELSH only held a negligible amount of the coin. It was in this moment that an idea that would launch a movement was born.

The Real Deal

There are some differences between organic crypto, and let’s call it astroturfed crypto. The differences would make great subject matter for another article, but if you pay attention here, you will pick up on some of them.

By mid November, we now know, that we had reached the bottom of the bear (although some of us had an idea), and before long those slightly bullish vibes began to permeate through X. By December a project on Solana called BONK, did the one thing that a good meme coin does best, it brought eyes to the market.

It was during this time that Rozar.btc, and a small remnant of what was the original WELSH community decided that they were going to give WELSH the attention it deserved.

The group quickly went to work making memes, making noise on social media, and in the process they were able to capture the attention of degens from around the space. They embodied the ideal of decentralization in a way that is rarely seen; and largely unappreciated by people who conceptualize crypto much in the same way they would conceptualize traditional tech, finance, etc. The WELSH community operated independently with an absence of all of the “must haves” in the nocoiner world. There was no roadmap, no planning meetings, only a shared goal: Acheiving generational WELSH.

The Results

I don’t know how many rules there are on the road to achieving a $50,000,000 market cap in any endeavor, but I do know that the now burgeoning WELSH community ignored at least 90% of them. In addition to that the WELSH community managed to catch much of the “smart money” completely by surprise. What is even more impressive is that they managed to do so on the Stacks blockchain.

For those of you who are new to this place, or are reading this in the future. Degens like speed on a blockchain, and there is no shortage of fast, efficient blockchains to choose from. Stacks requires different wallets that many crypto natives had never heard of. Stacks consensus mechanism means that 10 minute transactions are about as fast as youre going to get, on a good day. Now dear reader, don’t take this as a slight against Stacks, far from it. This is just the reality of a new blockchain that is doing things that frankly hadn’t been done before. It is also worth mentioning at this time, that by mid 2024 the Nakamoto upgrade is going to turn Stacks into the beast that it is destined to become. I only say these things to say this: WELSH did what meme coins are supposed to do. WELSH brought eyes to Stacks, and frankly that just wasn’t supposed to happen yet.

No self respecting degen has the patience to try to build their portfolio on a blockchain that found itself moving at a snails pace due to the increased retail demand, yet this is exactly what happened. This, my friends, is the reality of the space that you are now a part of. This is the power of the individual to shape the world into what will ultimately become a better place.

The Takeaways

At the time of this writing WELSH is currently trading on a centralized exchange, and community members like Rozar.btc are hard at work trying to find new avenues of distribution. The attention to Stacks has grown astronomically, and this was accomplished by real crypto communities such as WELSH and the Honey Badgers (but that story is fodder for a future article).

WELSH has earned its place as the unofficial mascot of STX, and this is a fact that needs to be recognized by our community. We should all find ourselves sufficiently motivated to chip in and lend our talents, resources, and time to do exactly what the WELSH community has been doing since November 2023. This is an opportunity for all of us to put some skin in the game (even those of us woefully underexposed to this coin) and practice what we preach. This is our mascot, this is our Welsh Corgi, and we are all in this together.

This is how we grow, anon. This is what the “lowly” degen does for the advancement of this technology. We bring the attention and liquidity that helps fuel the development of everything that the entrepeneurs and giga brains do. Everyone has something to offer in this space, and when we work together everyone wins.

So I will leave you with this: We don’t need permission, we don’t need centralization, and we don’t need to pass someone elses purity test. All we need is to follow the example set by this once neglected dog coin, and put our passions and talents to good use for a good purpose.