WuBlockchain has republished an analysis by Alan of the Biteye content team that tracks how the Niu Lai meme on BNB Smart Chain moved almost in lockstep with the spread of the animated film Niu Lai across Chinese social media and cinemas.
The core argument is simple: Web2 created the attention, and the chain turned that attention into price. In the republished piece, the full lifecycle only becomes visible when those two timelines are laid over each other.
Before Aug. 14, the film had generated just 7,169 yuan in cumulative box office after nine days in theaters. By midday on Aug. 19, total box office had passed 24.3 million yuan. Over the same stretch, the BSC meme token with the same name climbed from a market value in the tens of thousands of dollars to above $50 million and set a new all-time high.
Five-stage framework
The article breaks the Niu Lai meme lifecycle into five stages:
- Stage 1, deployment, from Aug. 13 to Aug. 14, with migration at about $45,000 in market value.
- Stage 2, ignition, from Aug. 14 to Aug. 15, with market value reaching $500,000.
- Stage 3, viral spread, from Aug. 15 to Aug. 16, with market value reaching $25 million.
- Stage 4, full-network discussion, from Aug. 16 to Aug. 18, with a peak near $50 million.
- Stage 5, Binance Alpha amplification, on Aug. 18, when the token broke above $50 million to a new all-time high and then pulled back.
Citing gmgn, the article says there were relatively few well-known KOLs among the earliest buyers. Most of the visible trading contest came after the attention wave had already broken out.
Stage 1: the contract arrived before the trend
According to the piece, the main address, 0xbeea...7777, was created on Flap at 11:59 on Aug. 13. Migration was completed at 16:07 on Aug. 14, putting the market value at roughly $45,100.
At that point, the film was still a little-watched release with box office under 10,000 yuan. The article says Niu Lai opened on Aug. 5 with 245 screenings on day one and 3,420 yuan in box office. By its ninth day in release, cumulative ticket sales stood at 7,169 yuan, total viewers were 236, and theater scheduling had fallen to single digits. Early outside attention focused on the contrast between the ink-style poster art and the visual quality of the actual film, but there was no broad breakout yet.
That was also the phase in which the meme contract appeared. The article stresses that it showed up before the topic became a social-media trend in the Chinese internet sphere. On-chain work in this stage centered on creation, migration, identifying the main wallet, and checking the developer and linked addresses. No recognized KOL entry had been identified at that point.
Stage 2: trending discussion brought the first buy wave
The write-up says a complaint video on Aug. 14 pushed the film’s rough modeling and clipping visuals beyond its tiny audience. Soon after, the phrase about Niu Lai having box office of 7,352 yuan and still not reaching ten thousand became a social-media trending topic. Media tallies cited in the article put the number of Weibo trending topics related to the film that day at close to 40.
The republished text says the Beijing News framed the first wave of spread as a release of frustration over shoddy production, while The Paper ran a headline saying the film had effectively been “distributed by netizens.” The point there was that the movie had received little prior promotion, and most of the post-trend promotional material came from viewers themselves.
As exposure climbed, short-video platforms including Douyin, Xiaohongshu and WeChat Channels began circulating clips of the film at scale. The article highlights repeated fragments: the calf shouting “mom” in a rough voice, the cow mother repeating “Niu Lai,” the calf stumbling, and herds that looked copied and pasted. Screen recordings, mockery captions and reaction images started repeating across platforms.
Price on-chain moved higher at the same time. The article says the meme first crossed $500,000 in market value at 00:15 on Aug. 15. A tagged wallet tied to 盗梦旅人 yz entered around a $450,000 valuation, then the account posted an analysis roughly 14 minutes later discussing the film’s low box office, high topic heat, repetitive lines and finance-friendly title.
In the article’s own mapping, this stage links short-video spread, trending-topic breakout, the main pool moving above $500,000, and the first KOL entries and calls.
Stage 3: real-world participation and on-chain momentum reinforced each other
The article defines Aug. 15 to Aug. 16 as the viral spread stage. Watching the film stopped being only about consuming content and turned into participation.
It says viewers began buying tickets on Aug. 15 simply to see “how absurd it really was.” Daily box office rose to 484,000 yuan, more than 6,000% above the earlier level, while screenings increased from 21 to 359. Some theaters started to feed the cycle themselves: a cinema manager in Guangzhou wore a cow mascot costume to open a screening, and staff in Hangzhou dressed as matadors and had viewers shout “Niu Lai” in response. Group mockery in theaters, laughter and applause after the showing then became reaction videos and went back online.
Seat-selection maps in ticketing apps became another layer of derivative content. Because the word “niu,” or bull, naturally overlaps with stock-market language and rising prices, some A-share investors bought tickets and used seating patterns to form the character “牛,” upward K-line shapes and support graphics. They then reposted those screenshots to Xiaohongshu, Weibo and short-video platforms. Each new screening batch, box-office milestone and theater stunt created another round of shareable material.
On-chain, the meme crossed two major levels in the same window. It first moved above $5 million at 19:00 on Aug. 15, then above $20 million at 03:15 on Aug. 16. Based on identified wallets, the article says smart-money principal sizes also changed with the valuation: early entries were often only a few hundred dollars, while entries in the $5 million to $20 million phase rose into the thousands and even tens of thousands of dollars.
The stage pairing here is a reversal in box office and screening volume, a market-cap jump through $5 million and $25 million, and follow-on participation from mid- to late-stage KOLs.
Stage 4: price itself started creating attention
By Aug. 17 and Aug. 18, the article says, the meme had entered a broader public-discussion phase, with market action and social circulation feeding each other more directly.
In mainland equities, Aug. 17 was the first A-share trading day after the film’s breakout. The article says Luoniushan hit limit up, Jinniu Chemical briefly touched the limit, Tongniu Information was up about 8% intraday at one point, and Gongniu Group rose more than 2%. On the Tonghuashun popularity ranking, Jinniu Chemical was first, while Gongniu Group and Tongniu Information were in the top five. The article adds that these companies had no business connection with the film; traders were simply trading the “niu,” or bull, in their names.
By midday on Aug. 18, cumulative box office for the film had passed 18 million yuan and entered the top 10 for Chinese domestic animated films in 2026, according to the republished text. Coverage that had begun as a social story centered on production quality was, by then, being rewritten by financial media around box-office acceleration, screening growth and market heat.
Brands joined the derivative wave too. The article cites Tmall Supermarket changing the phrase into “Mi Lai,” Mixue Ice Cream & Tea using “Xue Lai,” and Miniso using “Ming Lai.” At that point, “Niu Lai” had become less a film title than a reusable template for marketing and social copying.
Price action was not a straight line. The article says weekend talk that Chinese cinemas would fully ban Niu Lai briefly knocked the meme from roughly $29 million in market value to about $10 million before a V-shaped recovery. Twenty-four-hour trading volume reached about $37.6 million at one point. By Aug. 17-18, as cinemas continued normal screenings and public debate carried on, the intraday high had come close to $50 million.
The article summarizes the loop this way: outside events bring fresh buying into the main pool; KOL confirmation and price confirmation follow; then profit screenshots, leaderboard gains and trading-volume screenshots flow back to social media, pulling in another round of attention and new buying.
Stage 5: Binance Alpha widened access as turnover picked up near the top
The report says Niu Lai formally entered the Binance Alpha display and trading entry on the afternoon of Aug. 18. That centralized platform gateway widened access, and the meme’s market value broke above $50 million on a short-term basis, setting a fresh all-time high.
Even so, the article notes that by around 17:50, the market value implied by the main liquidity pool had already slipped back to about $37.3 million. In its framing, the meme had moved out of the attention-expansion stage and into a high-level rotation phase.
On positioning, the write-up says the top profit-ranking address, Qwerty @Quanterty, sold continuously into the price spike but still held more than half of the position. It adds that Qwerty’s on-chain behavior can be reconstructed into three sets of numbers, though the republished text provided here does not list those figures in detail.
The article closes that stage by tying together three points: broader reach through a centralized gateway, a new all-time high in price, and simultaneous distribution by the leading profit wallet.
The original article was written by Alan of the Biteye content team. In its repost notice, WuBlockchain said the content was shared for information purposes only, did not constitute investment advice, and did not represent WuBlockchain’s own views or position.