A meme coin named after an obscure, ultra-low-budget Chinese animated film has surged as much as 3,000x in three days, and exchange LBank has now listed the token, $NIULAI, with a $10,000 rewards campaign tied to the listing. The token trades on BNB Smart Chain and briefly touched a market cap near $30 million before pulling back to roughly $21.6 million.
The coin takes its name, and its meme, directly from Niu Lai, a Chinese animated film that released on Aug. 5 with almost no marketing and earned just 7,169 yuan (about $1,000) from 236 viewers over its first nine days. Produced by a two-person team at a company previously in the home-decoration business, the film's rough, low-budget visuals drew online mockery, with viewers calling it “disaster-level” and “worse than AI-generated animation.”
From box-office joke to viral phenomenon
The mockery backfired. Once a social post about the film's tiny nine-day box office went viral on Aug. 14, curiosity took over: box office revenue jumped past 500,000 yuan and had reached 2.53 million yuan by Aug. 16, a more than 300-fold increase driven almost entirely by the backlash-turned-fascination. Some viewers said the film's raw, handmade quality felt genuine in an era dominated by AI-generated content, turning what was meant as ridicule into a badge of authenticity.
Crypto traders moved just as fast. On-chain data tracked by Lookonchain shows one wallet spent roughly $120 to buy 19.1 million NIULAI tokens, then sold about half for $25,900 while continuing to hold the rest, worth an additional $180,200, for a combined profit near $205,800, an 822x return on the initial outlay. A separate address reportedly turned a $121 buy into more than $284,000 in realized and unrealized gains.
Exchange listing brings wider access
LBank's listing gives NIULAI a centralized-exchange venue for the first time, alongside a promotional campaign offering a $10,000 reward pool to users who trade the token and complete listing tasks. Wider exchange access typically brings both more liquidity and more volatility to newly viral tokens, and NIULAI has already shown the latter: after topping out near $29 million in market cap, it dropped more than 16% within a single hour.
NIULAI's trajectory follows a familiar pattern for internet-culture-driven meme coins, where a token's value is tied almost entirely to attention rather than any underlying product or utility. The film itself has continued benefiting from the same attention cycle, with box office receipts climbing alongside the coin. Whether NIULAI holds any of its value once the novelty fades is an open question; meme coins built on viral moments rather than sustained use cases have historically proven difficult to sustain once trading interest moves on to the next trend.
