In down markets, I look for sideways plays with high engagement

What people forget about PEPE and SHIB is that their most important phase wasn’t the explosion. It was the quiet, boring, mildly irritating middle.

The part where the charts went sideways.
Where early whales exited loudly.
Where everyone declared the meme “dead” every six hours.
Where nothing seemed to be happening except a stubborn core refusing to leave.

That’s the phase KENDU and SPX6900 are in right now.

And historically? That’s the only phase that actually matters.

If you look back at SHIB in late 2020 / early 2021, or PEPE before its breakout, you don’t see polished marketing machines. You see messy communities arguing on Reddit, grinding memes into the void, and slowly redistributing supply from a few concentrated wallets into thousands of smaller ones. No narrative coherence yet, just cultural persistence.

That’s not an accident. It’s a prerequisite.

Memecoins don’t become durable because they’re clever. They become durable because people build social infrastructure around them before the price justifies it. Discords that don’t die. Subreddits that keep posting when nobody’s watching. In-jokes that only make sense if you’ve been there too long.

KENDU feels like that right now:
Small enough that everyone knows the lore, large enough that new people keep stumbling in. Engagement that’s disproportionate to its size. A community doing the unglamorous work of sticking around during consolidation instead of chasing the next shiny ticker.

SPX6900 is doing something adjacent but different: leaning harder into absurdity, niche identity, and self-awareness. It’s not trying to be everything to everyone, which is exactly how these things survive long enough to matter. SHIB didn’t scale because it was sensible; it scaled because it gave people something to belong to while they waited.

The common thread between SHIB, PEPE, KENDU, and SPX6900 isn’t “number go up.”
It’s that they all pass through a phase where the price action is boring but the culture isn’t.

Most projects fail here because they mistake silence for death.
The ones that make it mistake silence for a loading screen.

None of this is a guarantee. Memecoins are chaotic systems, not product roadmaps. But if you’re trying to understand where we are in the lifecycle: This is the part where future “overnight successes” quietly build their immune systems.

The explosion comes later.
First comes the part where only the weirdos stay.