A 1994 strategy classic predicted a market where the average product lives for six hours.
Then Solana built it.
In 1994, Richard D’Aveni, a strategy professor at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business published Hypercompetition and committed heresy against the Michael Porter consensus. Porter’s world was five forces, defensible positions, and sustainable competitive advantage.
D’Aveni studied Intel vs. AMD, Coke vs. Pepsi, and the airline wars and concluded the opposite: no advantage is sustainable. Every moat erodes, and the rate of erosion is accelerating.
The winners aren’t the firms that defend a position; they’re the firms that generate a sequence of temporary advantages faster than rivals can copy them and that deliberately destroy their own advantages before someone else does it for them.
Three decades later, the purest laboratory for his thesis isn’t in the Fortune 500.
It’s an on chain casino where a picture of a dog in a knitted hat reached a nearly five billion dollar valuation, a euthanized squirrel became a billion dollar asset in about ten days and launching a competitor to anything costs a couple of dollars and ninety seconds of your time.
If you want to watch hypercompetition at its theoretical limit advantage half lives measured in hours, entry barriers at zero, escalation ladders climbed daily study the meme coin trenches.
D’Aveni in three minutes
Hypercompetition‘s core claim is that markets are shifting from long, stable periods of advantage to rapid cycles of create, exploit, erode. Competition escalates through four arenas:
- Cost and quality — rivals leapfrog each other on price and perceived value until margins compress toward zero.
- Timing and know how — first movers capture profits, fast followers imitate, and speed itself becomes the contested resource.
- Strongholds — firms build entry barriers (geography, regulation, distribution lock ins); attackers besiege them until they fall.
- Deep pockets — the biggest balance sheet tries to outlast everyone; smaller players ally, or change the game to neutralize it.
Each arena has an escalation ladder, and every rung is temporary. Fight long enough and you approach the terminal state: something close to perfect competition, where nobody earns excess returns at all. D’Aveni’s prescription is his “New 7 S’s” superior stakeholder satisfaction, strategic soothsaying, speed, surprise, shifting the rules, signaling, and simultaneous or sequential strategic thrusts a toolkit for firms that accept the treadmill and choose to run it faster than everyone else. His most durable idea survives any paraphrase: the only truly sustainable advantage is the capacity to keep generating new ones.
He was describing semiconductors and soft drinks. He accidentally wrote the field manual for crypto Twitter and digital, onchain consumer markets.
Terminal velocity markets
Pump.fun industrialized token creation in January 2024: a bonding curve, a picture, a ticker, near zero cost.
In January 2025 alone, roughly 1.7 million tokens launched on the platform. About 1.4% ever “graduate” to a real DEX listing; historically the odds of any single launch reaching even a $10 million market cap have run around one in a hundred thousand, and only a few percent of the platform’s traders have ever cleared $1,000 in profit.
By mid 2026, the graduation rate had compressed further still a fraction of one percent.
Now compare product life cycles. Dogecoin took eight years from launch to its roughly $90 billion peak. SHIB took about fifteen months to briefly flip it. PEPE took three weeks to its first billion. PNUT took about ten days. By 2025, the median token’s entire life launch, peak, death fit comfortably inside a weekend. There is no IP, no switching cost, and forking any success takes minutes. The only scarce input is attention.
That is every one of D’Aveni’s conditions dialed to the maximum.
Which is what makes the winners so instructive: in a market where advantage decays this fast, the tokens that reached billions did something structurally right, even if only for a season.
Field reports: the winners and what they actually won
Dogecoin: survival by chaining advantages. DOGE (2013) shouldn’t exist it’s a joke fork of a fork. But it’s the best living illustration of D’Aveni’s central prescription, because it never had one advantage; it had a sequence.
First came the wholesome internet era: Reddit tipping culture, funding the Jamaican bobsled team, sponsoring a NASCAR.
Then the Elon era, when a single account with a nine figure audience became the most efficient distribution channel in financial history and drove DOGE to a peak near $90 billion in May 2021.
Then the political era, when the joke got a government department named after it. Each advantage decayed on schedule.
The brand’s elasticity let it catch the next wave. Longevity in hypercompetition isn’t a moat it’s serial reinvention.
SHIB: the surprise gambit. Shiba Inu’s 2020 masterstroke was distribution as theater: its anonymous founder sent half the total supply to Vitalik Buterin, unannounced.
Vitalik burned roughly 90% of it and donated the remainder around a billion dollars notional at the time to Covid relief in India.
In one move, SHIB acquired credibility, global headlines, and a costly signal no marketing budget could purchase.
That’s D’Aveni’s surprise and signaling executed simultaneously. SHIB then attempted the textbook next step: converting a temporary advantage into a stronghold by building ShibaSwap and the Shibarium chain.
The stronghold has held less well than the story ecosystems are easier to announce than defend but the sequence carried it, briefly, past DOGE itself in late 2021.
BONK: distribution as fortress.
BONK launched into the smoking crater of post FTX Solana on Christmas 2022 and airdropped roughly half its supply to the people who had just been hurt worst: Solana NFT holders, developers, and artists.
That is stronghold construction giving an entire ecosystem a shared financial stake in your success. The advantage compounded through integrations across Solana apps and the legendary (and infamous) Saga phone trade, when the BONK bundled with Solana’s struggling handset became worth more than the phone and sold it out overnight.
The lesson generalizes: in a market with no product, distribution is the product.
dogwifhat: one image, crowdsourced deep pockets.
WIF is a dog wearing a hat. That is the entire thing no roadmap, no ecosystem, no pretense and it peaked near $5 billion. Its most famous move inverted D’Aveni’s fourth arena: instead of a corporate war chest, the community crowdfunded roughly $700,000 to put the hat on the Las Vegas Sphere.
Deep pockets, decentralized. When your holders will spend their own money on your marketing, your effective budget is the community’s conviction which is enormous, right up until attention rotates.
PEPE: shifting the rules by telling the truth.
PEPE (April 2023) reached its first billion in under a month by breaking the industry’s polite fiction. While everyone else cosplayed utility and roadmaps, PEPE’s positioning was explicit nihilism: no promises, no intrinsic anything, just the most recognizable frog on the internet.
That is D’Aveni’s “shifting the rules of the game” when every rival competes on fake fundamentals, honesty about having none becomes the differentiation. It also redefined “quality” for the arena. Quality here is memetic: instant legibility, infinite remixability, a decade of cultural depth behind a single image. On those metrics PEPE was the best engineered product of its cycle, and it topped $10 billion at the late 2024 peak.
PNUT and Moo Deng: the timing arena, purified.
When New York authorities euthanized Peanut the squirrel in late 2024, tokens existed within hours; PNUT crossed a billion dollars in roughly ten days, helped along by Elon Musk posts and a rapid Binance listing.
Weeks earlier, a Thai pygmy hippo named Moo Deng did hundreds of millions on the same physics. This is Arena 2 with everything else stripped away.
No brand building, no ecosystem just speed as a pre built capability: deployment pipelines, sniper infrastructure, KOL rolodexes, exchange relationships.
In the trenches, speed isn’t a virtue. It’s a capital asset you construct before the news breaks.
TRUMP and LIBRA: deep pockets win the battle, burn the arena.
The official TRUMP token (January 2025) took the influencer playbook to its logical terminus: the KOL became the issuer.
A built in audience of tens of millions, a presidential inauguration as launch event, roughly $15 billion in value within about 48 hours.
It was also the cautionary tale about 80% of supply parked with insiders, extraction optics everywhere and a month later Argentina’s LIBRA fiasco finished the job, with a president endorsed token seeing insiders yank nine figures of liquidity within hours of launch.
Together they broke trust in the entire celebrity coin meta, and the sector spent the rest of 2025 bleeding out. D’Aveni warned about exactly this rung of the ladder: when the deepest pockets use their weight to extract rather than compete, they don’t just lose the reputational battle they can collapse the arena’s profitability for everyone in it.
The playbook, mapped to the book
Brand is compression.
A meme coin brand must transmit its entire story in one glance, because one glance is all it gets. The ticker is the brand; the image is the pitch deck.
Notice that deliberately low fi aesthetics outperform polish a slick logo reads as “VC coin,” which in the trenches is adverse selection.
This is Arena 1’s quality competition relocated to memetics: the leapfrogging isn’t over features, it’s over legibility and remixability.
Distribution is the real product.
Fair launches versus bundled insider supply; airdrops as fortress building (BONK); the exchange listing ladder as a literal escalation ladder DEX, aggregators, mid tier CEXs, then Binance as the legitimacy event.
Every listing is a temporary advantage that begins decaying the moment it prints. The teams that win treat distribution as a campaign with sequenced rungs, not a single milestone.
KOLs are the credibility ladder.
The hierarchy runs from anonymous callers, to tastemakers like Ansem who front ran the entire Solana cycle, to thesis makers like Murad whose “memecoin supercycle” talk at Token2049 turned a slide deck into a coordinated portfolio pump around SPX6900 to the terminal rung: celebrities and politicians issuing directly.
Each rung up buys reach and burns deniability. The dark side is structural: undisclosed bags, paid shills, pump and dump economics. Trust in this market is a strip mined resource, and every scandal raises the cost of belief for the next launch.
Shilling is the simultaneous strategic thrust.
Coordinated raids across X, Telegram, and TikTok; reply guy armies; ticker in bio; engagement farming timed to listings and stunts. D’Aveni’s seventh S describes attacking on multiple fronts at once so rivals can’t tell the feint from the offensive.
A well run trench campaign is exactly that, executed by volunteers who are also the shareholders.
Innovation is meta rotation.
The trenches’ R&D cycle is the rotation of narratives: dogs, then frogs, then cats, then politicians, then dead animal news cycles, then AI agents an experiment in which an LLM shitposting in public willed a fart joke into a multi billion dollar asset then creator coins, and onward.
Whoever calls the rotation early collects the arena’s first mover profits; whoever arrives late buys the exit liquidity. The platform layer rotates too: pump.fun industrialized launching, LetsBonk briefly flipped it in the 2025 launchpad wars, and pump.fun counterattacked with fee overhauls and token buybacks until it clawed back roughly 95% of daily graduations. Even the casino is hypercompetitive.
Memes are the quality standard.
Memetic fitness has real criteria: instantly parseable, endlessly remixable, functional as an in group signal, absurd enough to filter out the humorless.
The meme is the moat until the fork, roughly forty minutes later. Then community is the moat, until it isn’t.
Community is the only semi durable asset.
Holder count as religion, diamond hands as coordination technology, and the community takeover (CTO) the trench version of a management buyout, where holders revive a token its own deployer abandoned.
A community is the single thing a fork cannot copy on day one, which makes it the closest object to Porter style advantage the trenches have ever produced. It still decays. It just decays slower.
The New 7 S’s, translated
| D’Aveni’s S | In the trenches |
|---|---|
| Superior stakeholder satisfaction | Holders are customer, marketer, and market maker at once; airdrops and community ownership convert users into an unpaid salesforce |
| Strategic soothsaying | Calling the next meta before it rotates; Murad’s supercycle thesis was soothsaying performed in public, with a portfolio attached |
| Speed | News-to-token in under an hour; PNUT; deployment and listing pipelines built before the catalyst exists |
| Surprise | The Vitalik gambit; unannounced CEX listings; the Sphere stunt |
| Shifting the rules | PEPE dropping the utility pretense; pump.fun making launches free; TRUMP making the KOL the issuer |
| Signaling | Burns, LP locks, dev doxxing, buybacks, costly signals in a trust starved market |
| Simultaneous & sequential thrusts | Coordinated raids across platforms, timed with listings, stunts, and influencer waves |
The endgame D’Aveni predicted
Escalation ladders end, he argued, in something close to perfect competition: advantages copied instantly, excess returns competed to zero.
The trenches reached that terminal state faster than any market in recorded history. Millions of tokens; a graduation rate that slid from 1.4% toward a fraction of a percent; a sector market cap that fell more than 60% through 2025 while Fartcoin round tripped from $2 billion to under $300 million; extraction professionalizing bundlers, snipers, insider rings precisely because honest competition stopped paying. When everyone runs the same playbook, the playbook’s return converges on zero, and by 2026 the marginal gambler had rotated to perps and prediction markets in search of a fresher arena.
So who still profits at the terminal rung?
Exactly who D’Aveni’s framework says. The arena owners launchpads, DEXs, market makers, the house with pump.fun selling half a billion dollars of its own token in about twelve minutes as the purest expression of monetizing the arena itself. And the rare operators capable of jumping arenas entirely and starting a new cycle before the old one finishes dying.
The last durable advantage is the ability to create new temporary ones. Or to own the casino.
Every market is becoming the trenches
It’s tempting to file all of the above under degenerate spectacle.
That’s a mistake, because the conditions that created the trenches near zero production cost, instant global distribution, attention as the binding constraint are now arriving in every consumer category at once.
AI is doing to software, content, and marketing what pump.fun did to token creation. Code that took a team a quarter now takes an agent a weekend. Ad creative that took an agency a month is generated and A/B tested by the thousand overnight.
Robotics is running the same collapse on atoms: lights out factories, on demand micro manufacturing, and mature contract production stacks mean a physical product can be forked nearly as fast as a token. China’s EV market is the live preview over a hundred brands leapfrogging one another on price and features in weekly cycles, all four of D’Aveni’s arenas running simultaneously while humanoid robot prices fall toward consumer electronics territory.
Consumer packaged goods got there early. Watch the hard seltzer cycle: White Claw detonates in 2019, dozens of forks flood the shelf within eighteen months, the category peaks, margins evaporate, the meta dies. A meme coin life cycle at CPG speed.
Then attention rotated to prebiotic soda, and Poppi which called the new meta early sold to PepsiCo for nearly $2 billion. As AI and robotics compress design, production, and creative cycles further, that CPG clock speeds up toward trench time.
The uncomfortable conclusion: product parity is becoming the default state of every market. When anyone can make the thing, the thing stops being the moat. Competition migrates to exactly the variables the trenches price in real time memetic fitness, speed, community, distribution, and trust.
The builder’s playbook: brands in the age of infinite supply
Brand is compression, here too.
Liquid Death is water the least differentiated substance on Earth carried to a billion plus valuation by pure memetic branding: a name, a can, a tone.
Duolingo’s unhinged owl and Nutter Butter’s fever dream social feed run the same play: the brand is the content, and the content is the moat.
When AI equalizes every functional claim, the meme layer becomes the differentiation, and distinctive assets that transmit in one glance are the highest ROI intellectual property a consumer company can own.
Distribution precedes product.
The creator brand wave is the TRUMP token mechanic, legitimized: build the audience first, attach the product second.
Prime did over a billion dollars in retail sales within two years of launch on the strength of two YouTubers’ reach; rhode went from founding to a billion dollar exit in three years riding Hailey Bieber’s distribution.
But study Prime’s second act too sales roughly halved once the novelty decayed. Audiences are temporary advantages like everything else.
The Dogecoin lesson applies directly: chain the next advantage retail depth, product line extension, community ritual before the first one expires, or ride the full round trip down.
Community is equity make it literal where you can.
BONK airdropped half its supply to the ecosystem it needed to win over; the consumer translation is giving your community genuine skin in the game.
Ambassador economics, UGC flywheels, equity crowdfunding, loyalty that compounds into something resembling ownership rather than points.
A community remains the only asset a competitor cannot fork on day one and in an era when products, content, and even personalities can be synthesized, a real human tribe is the scarcest input in the whole stack.
Speed is infrastructure, built before the catalyst.
Shein’s real invention wasn’t cheap clothing; it was a demand sensing and micro batch production system that compresses trend to shelf into days PNUT physics applied to fashion.
Crumbl turned the drop into a weekly ritual. The AI native version: creative tested at meme velocity, hundreds of variants a day; social listening running as a permanent sniper node; supply chains modular enough to chase a meta while it’s still alive.
When the news breaks or the trend turns, the winners are the companies whose pipeline already existed.
Sequence advantages and plan the decay.
Stanley was a 110 year old thermos company that caught a TikTok meta and grew revenue roughly tenfold in four years the Dogecoin move, executed by a legacy brand.
The drop model Supreme, sneaker culture, Crumbl’s rotating menu is D’Aveni institutionalized: a business built deliberately on temporary advantages released in sequence.
Treat every launch, collab, and hero SKU as a decaying asset with a half life, price the decay into the plan, and cannibalize your own hits before a fork does.
The hard seltzer graveyard is full of brands that defended the last meta instead of calling the next one.
Costly signals beat claims in a synthetic world.
As AI floods the zone with generated reviews, generated influencers, and generated everything, cheap talk goes to zero and costly signals inherit the earth.
The consumer equivalents of a token burn or a locked liquidity pool: third party testing published in full, radical supply chain transparency, warranties that actually hurt, founders visible and accountable in public.
Provenance proof that real humans made a real thing and stand behind it is becoming a premium product attribute in its own right. Trust is the last unforgeable currency. Spend accordingly.
And when the category becomes a casino, consider being the house.
Pump.fun made more durable money than almost any token it ever launched. Shopify out earned most of the DTC brands it enabled. If your market is going trench shaped thousands of entrants, instant forking, brutal decay the D’Aveni optimal position may sit one level down the stack: the marketplace, the tooling, the infrastructure that monetizes the arena no matter which meme wins.
The shelf is now the context window
One more arena is opening, and most brands haven’t noticed.
As AI agents take over more of search, comparison, and purchasing, the fight for distribution moves from the retail shelf to the model’s answer.
Share of shelf became share of search became share of feed; the next battleground is share of model being the brand an agent recommends when a human asks for “the best X.” That fight demands machine legibility: structured data, verifiable claims, clean review ecosystems, and a reputation the models can actually parse.
The escalation ladder D’Aveni described doesn’t disappear in an agentic economy. It just moves inside the context window.
What not to import
The trenches also teach by negative example. LIBRA didn’t merely rug its holders; it collapsed an entire meta’s profitability, because extraction is arena destroying.
Consumer brands play repeated games with the same customers for decades. Shrinkflation, fake reviews, dark pattern subscriptions, and influencer scandals are liquidity pulls in slow motion and categories remember.
Import the trenches’ speed, memetic discipline, and community mechanics. Leave the extraction behind.
Finite games, infinite company
James Carse drew the line four decades ago: finite games are played to win, infinite games are played to keep playing.
The meme coin trenches are finite games at terminal velocity thousands per day, each with a winner, most ending in a graveyard.
A company is an infinite game. What D’Aveni understood in 1994, and what the trenches now demonstrate hourly, is that the infinite game is won by stringing together finite ones: an endless sequence of temporary advantages, each entered fast, exploited hard, and abandoned before it decays into dead weight.
So build the compression, the community, the speed, the signals and hold none of them sacred. Stop defending; start sequencing. Treat every advantage as a decaying asset with a half life.
Cannibalize yourself before a fork does it for you. And do your strategic soothsaying out loud, because the meta always rotates, and the profits go to whoever calls it while everyone else is still defending the last one.
The trenches didn’t break the rules of strategy. They’re the first market honest enough to run the experiment at full speed and a preview of the game every builder is already playing.
Figures are approximate and directional the trenches don’t hold still long enough for footnotes.