BBNN SPECIAL REPORT

What The System Pays For

PART I: NEW SYSTEMS ARE EMERGING

Who keeps participating after the value is created?

Via Brick Bank News Network

Ansem did not create The Black Bull.

I really do think that matters. Almost everything interesting about the token starts right there.

An anonymous developer launched the memecoin on Pump.fun in June 2026, spent about $6,300 doing it, and sent roughly 650 million tokens, about 65 percent of the entire supply, straight to Ansem. He later sold the rest of his position for about $11,800 and left with roughly $5,500 in profit. Then he disappeared. Ansem never asked for the token. He woke up in the middle of somebody else’s experiment, holding most of the supply, and saw a pretty golden opportunity sitting in front of him.

It was never a normal launch after that. The original developer is still the deployer on chain. That record does not change just because someone else becomes the public center of a project. Pump.fun also has systems that can separate the person who launched a token from the person later connected to creator fees and the public identity around it. The exact mechanics of how The Black Bull made that transition are not perfectly documented, so there is no point pretending they are. What is clear is the ending. The developer launched it. Ansem became the person the market and the community revolved around.

Zion Thomas, the Solana trader known online as Ansem, already had an enormous audience watching what he did. Once he engaged with the token, the price went insane. The Black Bull ran roughly 26,000 percent in its first week and later reached a reported peak market capitalization near $449 million. Ansem started sending some of the creator fees back out through randomized airdrops. By the end of June, roughly $7 million had gone out across hundreds of wallets. By mid August, a public wallet linked to him still held around 60 percent of the supply.

Those numbers are impressive. To be honest, the trade itself is almost beside the point. What caught my attention was what people were actually putting money into. A memecoin is not just a smaller or messier version of a normal business investment. There does not have to be a company underneath it making revenue, building software, or promising to use the incoming money to expand anything. A lot of the time, the thing being priced is closer to culture itself.

People are betting on what the internet is going to care about. Which joke sticks. Which character becomes recognizable. Which community is still there after the first rush of traders moves on. That is a huge part of why memecoins got famous. The culture is not decoration around the asset. In a lot of cases, the culture is most of what the asset has.

That does not make it meaningless. Culture has always had value. Crypto just gave people a strange new way to put a market around it. Somebody buying that token can still take real financial risk and make or lose real money. That is still very different from putting capital into a business and receiving a claim on whatever the business later produces.

The Black Bull makes this easier to see because Ansem already had the hardest part before the token existed. He had the attention. The anonymous developer did not have to invent an audience from nothing. He put the token in the hands of someone who already had hundreds of thousands of people watching him. Once Ansem got involved, people looked. Some bought. Some talked about it. Memes showed up. A community started taking shape, and the market started putting a price on all of that attention.

If you bought $ANSEM, you bought $ANSEM. You did not quietly buy shares in some future Ansem company, and nobody promised that you did. If he later builds software, media, events, or a completely different business around the audience he already has, the token does not turn into stock in that new thing just because some of the same people are watching.

There is nothing wrong with that. A memecoin can just be a memecoin. If The Black Bull spends its whole life as a cultural asset whose price depends on whether people keep caring about it, that can be a complete story. It does not need fake utility stapled on afterward so everyone can pretend they were secretly funding a startup the whole time.

What starts to get strange is when the culture lasts.

Influencer and celebrity tokens can move incredibly fast because the first audience is already waiting. The problem shows up later, once most of the people who were naturally going to hear about the token have already heard about it. Plenty of coins have rocketed off an existing fanbase and then slowly faded once the novelty was gone because the attention never really became a culture capable of carrying itself.

Sometimes that does not happen. Dogecoin lasted far beyond the joke that created it because somewhere along the way the community became capable of carrying the culture itself. It did not have to become a company for that to work. The culture just became durable.

There is another possibility, and this is where something genuinely new starts to show up. Sometimes the attention around an idea gets large enough that an opportunity exists before the institution does.

That order is unusual. Somebody usually has an idea, forms a company around it, finds money, builds something, and then spends years trying to get enough people to care. Crypto has created situations where the caring can come first. The joke or the idea catches on. A culture forms around it. An asset gives that attention a market. Only afterward does somebody look at what has formed and ask whether any of it could become something productive.

The community helped create that opportunity by caring enough for the thing to have momentum. Somebody still has to do the much harder work after that. They have to turn attention into something that can survive without constantly asking for more attention. If they build useful infrastructure, a real business, or something people keep using after the hype slows down, then a new source of value has appeared beside the original cultural asset.

Now we are no longer talking about one thing. There is still the memecoin and the people holding it. There is still the culture that gave it life. There may also be people putting in actual work, money being used to build something productive, and an institution with completely different responsibilities than the token ever had.

Someone who bought the cultural asset did something different from someone who spent months helping keep a community alive. Both did something different from the person who later takes responsibility for building around it. None of that tells us, by itself, what each person should receive. It only tells us that once several different kinds of value start growing from the same place, the original token no longer explains the whole thing very well.

That may end up being one of the more important things memecoins accidentally discovered. They created markets where an idea can gather economic weight before there is much of an institution underneath it. Most of those ideas will probably go nowhere beyond the culture, and that is fine. Some may not. Some may reach the point where attention creates an opportunity large enough for somebody to start building around it.

At that point, the question is no longer whether the memecoin itself has “utility.” The better question is what happens to the opportunity the culture created. Does somebody just keep extracting from the attention until it runs out? Or can some of that momentum be turned into something useful enough to keep producing value after the original hype has cooled? If it can, what relationship should that new value have with the people and community that helped create the opportunity in the first place?

There is no automatic answer. The rules around that transition are still mostly being improvised.

Whatever happens with Ansem, $ANSEM remains what it began as: a memecoin built around culture, attention, and a community that gathered around him. What interests me is the system starting to appear around assets like it. If somebody can turn that kind of opportunity into something productive, the path starts very differently from the way businesses have usually been built.

Once real infrastructure starts producing value, we arrive at a much older question. Who keeps participating in that value after it has been created?

Corporate America has been answering versions of that question for generations. Unlike a memecoin, it usually does not wait for the culture to form first.

It writes the claims down before most people ever arrive.

CONTINUES TOMORROW

The Black Bull started with a memecoin Ansem never asked anyone to create. Follow it far enough and a larger pattern shows up. Ideas can gather culture, attention, and economic weight before there is even an institution underneath them.

Tomorrow, BBNN leaves crypto for a while. Once an idea becomes something productive, the question of who keeps participating in the value is not new at all. The older economy already has an answer, and those rules have been developing for a very long time.

Part II of What The System Pays For

Tomorrow at 9 PM ET

BBNN