The meme market’s trends shift quickly, and today, the focus of most meme coin enthusiasts is on $Ghibli. Within less than a day, it surged to a $28 million market cap.

Social media is flooded with AI-generated Ghibli-style images, with even figures like Sam Altman and Elon Musk joining in on the fun. Crypto projects are also jumping on the bandwagon, creating various Ghibli-style fan art.

Let’s quickly go over the rise of the $Ghibli token.

Ghibli? Studio Ghibli? AI-generated Ghibli?

The term “Ghibli style” refers to the unique visual style found in the animated films produced by the renowned Japanese animation studio Studio Ghibli. The studio, co-founded by famous Japanese director Hayao Miyazaki, has produced iconic works like Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro, and Howl’s Moving Castle.

Ghibli’s style traces back to Miyazaki’s early works and is characterized by watercolor textures, vibrant saturated colors, and unique character designs. When people think of Ghibli, the images that often come to mind are those of clear skies, green grass, and refreshing scenes.

Miyazaki’s Last Film: The Wind Rises

Ghibli Style + AI

The Ghibli style has become a classic visual language in the traditional animation and gaming industries. Since the rise of AI-generated content (AIGC) in 2022, AI image-generation tools like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion have begun to adopt this distinctive style, leading to a surge of AI-generated Ghibli-inspired artworks in recent years.

AI-generated artwork has raised copyright issues, but years ago, Miyazaki expressed his disapproval of AI-generated art, stating that “it’s an insult to life.”

How Did $Ghibli Get So Popular?

The surge of $Ghibli can be traced back to the update of GPT-4o’s image-generation feature. Yesterday, GPT-4o released a major update, which allowed users to use the “image-to-image” function directly within the chat interface. This function enables users to upload an image and input simple natural language instructions, and GPT can generate new images based on the original image and instructions. For example: “Turn the image into a Ghibli-style cartoon.”

Although the technology to change art styles has been around for a couple of years, the GPT-4o update lowered the barrier for AI image generation, making it much easier for users to operate the “image-to-image” function without needing specialized AI design software. This lower barrier, combined with the fun of creating Ghibli-style images, led to a viral spread of Ghibli-themed content on social media starting yesterday.

Around 6 PM yesterday, a token called $Ghibli appeared on Pump.Fun. The token’s logo was a Ghibli-style portrait of Pump.Fun’s founder, @a1lon9.

Clearly, $Ghibli’s concept narrative was simple: riding the wave of the AI image trend. However, the launch of $Ghibli initially did not attract much attention, and X user @Kris7146 pointed out that the $Ghibli token had a heavy concentration of holders.

However, many on-chain leaders continued to buy, and the price of $Ghibli continued to rise. After the $JellyJelly incident last night, the market value of $Ghibli hovered around US$3 million.

This morning, Sam Altman updated his X profile picture to a Ghibli-style image, and after the community took notice, $Ghibli’s price skyrocketed from a $3 million market cap. Then, at 6:33 AM, Elon Musk posted a meme combining Ghibli-style art with images of The Lion King, a self-portrait, and Doge, captioned “Today’s theme.”

With support from such influential figures, $Ghibli’s price surged and reached a $28 million market cap before eventually retracting to around $20 million.

The explosive popularity of $Ghibli essentially reflects how market sentiment and attention can quickly gather liquidity on the blockchain. The innovation of its narrative doesn’t stand out particularly, but in the meme token world, whether the narrative is solid is just one of many influencing factors. Once the market “feels it,” prices naturally rise.

As ordinary participants, it’s important not to get caught up in the excitement and to be mindful of your investment size when you feel the market’s rhythm.

(PS: Besides Ghibli-style images, GPT-4o’s image-generation feature offers a variety of other art styles to experiment with.)

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