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I worked there. Adobe Research is largely a paper mill. Lots of people reproducing other labs work with a slight tweak. And collusion rings to get your name on as many papers as possible. Go look at any adobe paper and notice the authors are on like 6 papers each per quarter. It’s not even possible to do quality work across that many projects. They’re just trading authorship with backdoor handshakes. And the papers themselves follow a very repeatable pattern of “take the most interesting research of another top paper from last quarter, introduce a new variant with advanced math. (Often overfit and fake the quality of results) and spend most of the time in paper writing. The are not pioneering and pushing forward the field or making claim to new ground.
The people in adobe research are largely there to advance their own academic careers publish or perish style. They care very little about adobe and often see it as a stepping stone to get into Google or better research labs. Most are a bit embarrassed they ended up there and not somewhere better.
They also basically refuse to collaborate with the applied teams and when they do it’s very hostile and fraught. There is a bitter rivalry between the applied team ML and the Research SIDE. I’ve literally listen to the VP on the applied side “rally the troops” by rallying that hostile competition and saying “research is killing us and the CTO is gonna give them all the GPUs you need to do better.”
(I should caveat there is a few very talented researchers who do great work and are widely respected, this is NOT the norm)

I worked there. Adobe Research is largely a paper mill. Lots of people reproducing other labs work with a slight tweak. And collusion rings to get your name on as many papers as possible. Go look at any adobe paper and notice the authors are on like 6 papers each per quarter. It’s not even possible to do quality work across that many projects. They’re just trading authorship with backdoor handshakes. And the papers themselves follow a very repeatable pattern of “take the most interesting research of another top paper from last quarter, introduce a new variant with advanced math. (Often overfit and fake the quality of results) and spend most of the time in paper writing. The are not pioneering and pushing forward the field or making claim to new ground.
The people in adobe research are largely there to advance their own academic careers publish or perish style. They care very little about adobe and often see it as a stepping stone to get into Google or better research labs. Most are a bit embarrassed they ended up there and not somewhere better.
They also basically refuse to collaborate with the applied teams and when they do it’s very hostile and fraught. There is a bitter rivalry between the applied team ML and the Research SIDE. I’ve literally listen to the VP on the applied side “rally the troops” by rallying that hostile competition and saying “research is killing us and the CTO is gonna give them all the GPUs you need to do better.”
(I should caveat there is a few very talented researchers who do great work and are widely respected, this is NOT the norm)

Sometimes you find a MEME.
Sometimes a MEME finds YOU.
That’s honestly the only way I can explain what happened when I started digging into $ZOICH.
At first I thought it was just another random TON animal token.
Another FROG.
Another “community CTO.” Another thing CT would rotate through for 48 hours before forgetting forever.
Then I went deeper.And the deeper I went… the weirder this became.
Because $ZOICH is not some newly invented crypto meme trying to force itself into culture. This thing already existed.
Years before crypto.
Years before TON.
Years before meme coins even became a category.
And that changes the psychology completely.
The moment I saw the original 2010 Zoich designs from Egor Zhgun… my brain instantly locked in.
Not because it looked polished.
Not because it looked “professional.”
Actually the opposite.
It looked chaotic.
Uncomfortable.
Absurd.
Almost like a drug-induced internet hallucination.
And THAT is exactly why it worked.
The strongest memes are never too clean early.
They feel strange.
They feel emotionally sticky.
They make your brain pause for a second.
$PEPE had that.
$DOGE had that.
$SHIB had that.
And honestly?
$ZOICH gives me that exact same psychological feeling.
Then the thesis completely changed, this wasn’t some random side character.
This was literally one of the FIRST major characters ever created by Egor Zhgun back in 2010.
Before:
$UTYA
$YODA
$VIRUS
There was the frog. $ZOICH.
And once that clicked for me… the entire thesis changed.
Because suddenly this stopped feeling like “another TON meme.”
This started feeling like:
the origin story.
The forgotten beginning.
The first piece of an internet universe people are only now rediscovering through crypto.
And when you understand meme cycles… origin stories matter WAY more than people realize.
People become obsessed with “FIRSTS.”
First meme.
First mascot.
First artist creation.
First cult character.
History matters in meme culture.
A LOT.
Especially when the receipts are fully documented.
* Separate wiki pages. ( [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoich](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoich) )
* Official archives. ( [https://www.artlebedev.com/zoich/process/](https://www.artlebedev.com/zoich/process/) )
* Interviews.
* Original design process.
* Olympic mascot contest history.
* Real internet lore from 2010.
* YT video pulled nearly 800,000 views YEARS before meme coins even existed. ( [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R926UJw7Kac](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R926UJw7Kac) )
This isn’t manufactured retroactive storytelling.
The internet history already exists.
That’s what makes this feel dangerous.
Because the strongest meme coins never invent culture from scratch.
They rediscover existing culture and financialize attention around it.
That’s exactly what happened with:
$DOGE
$SHIB
$PEPE
$BRETT
$POPCAT
The meme already emotionally existed before the market priced it in.
And that’s why I can’t stop thinking about the TON angle specifically.
Because TON STILL has no dominant frog.
That’s actually insane if you think about it.
TON already has:
$UTYA
$REDO
cat narratives forming
But no true frog leader.
No native Pepe equivalent.
No culturally rooted frog identity.
And frogs are one of the strongest meme archetypes on the internet because they are:
• memorable
• scalable
• remixable
• emotionally recognizable
That’s exactly why frog memes survive every cycle.
But what really messes with my head is this:
$ZOICH already has REAL internet history.
Not fake lore.
Not manufactured culture.
An actual viral blue frog from 2010.
Olympic mascot controversy.
Wiki pages.
Archived interviews.
800K+ YouTube views before meme coins even existed.
And somehow…
TON still hasn’t discovered its native frog yet.
The BLUE frog on the BLUE chain. 💙
That asymmetry feels seriously DANGEROUS to me.
Because every major chain eventually gets its frog.
$PEPE went to 11.5B.
Chinese $PEPE ran to 165M on Solana.
$PEPE of Base hit 145M.
And yet TON — the most Telegram-native ecosystem of all — still has no defining frog narrative.
Meanwhile sitting in plain sight is:
the first major Zhgun character
documented internet virality
Olympic internet lore
and the creator behind:
$UTYA
$YODA
$VIRUS
Maybe I’m wrong.
Maybe this stays niche forever.
Tiny caps are dangerous.
Most memes fail.
But from a pure meme psychology perspective…
$ZOICH feels less like a random meme coin and more like a forgotten internet relic waiting to be rediscovered by TON.
I genuinely think people will look back at sub-million prices the same way they now look at early $PEPE .
Like it was inevitable. Because the strongest memes never feel engineered.
They feel discovered.
$ZOICH 🐸💙
CA - EQC-hAwmSVgJ7iDUPc045FB3HISsPjaVReakE\_OA7YxPnpmD