I’ve been thinking about this idea of ‘meme investing’ the past couple of days. I hadn’t accepted it as ‘a thing’ at all until now. This was spurred on by a Bankless podcast I was listening to whilst out running in the rain yesterday featuring one of the members of pleasrDAO. If you’re not familiar with pleasrDAO, it’s a collective that spontaneously joined forces to buy a very expensive NFT by hot crypto artist pplpleasr earlier this year.
Maybe it’s because I’m a Gen-X-er but I somehow I missed the memo that memes were even a thing at first. Did memes start in the back half of the first decade of this millenium, or was it it early 2010s?? Either way I was confused when around circa 2012 I noticed colleagues of mine emailing around silly gifs with captions on them, using this word called ‘memes’ to refer to them. Uh?
Until now I’ve totally ignored things like DogeCoin (pffft), Shiba Inu (even worse!) and laughed at mooncats. But after listening to this podcast, I was at home browsing twitter and I couldn’t help but notice the avatar of someone I follow (their avatar is a mooncat). NFTs as avatars on social media are a thing too - I knew this already, my avatar on twitter is my mystic Axie! And the idea came to me again - meme investing. Millennials and zoomers are prepared to throw money at things that have no inherent value but have a story, a place in pop culture. Something like that anyways. And on the Animal Spirits podcast this week, they were also discussing it - the idea that boomers and Gen Xers don’t get it but perhaps it is here to stay. Perhaps it has some substance and stickiness?
Either way, I started thinking about mooncats - another fleeting phase from the March 2021 NFT boom (same time pleasrDAO formed). I remembered fractional NFT platforms like Niftex and Unicly have mooncats tokens. Unicly has really good liquidity mining options too, where NFTs meet DeFi! I seriously considered FOMOing in to buy some mooncat fractions. The collection on Niftex (24 genesis mooncats, thanks very much!) are in the process of migrating over to Unicly - that got me confused because Unicly already have a mooncat collection (they only have some genesis mooncats with some ‘regular’ ones too). The genesis mooncats are the ones you want - they’re the mystic Axies of the mooncats world, the OGs, only black and white cats. So I decided to wait until the genesis collection migrated to Unicly (it’s happening on July 5). In the meantime I started reading up on old-school NFT projects, the time of the first mooncats and cryptopunks. What else was around back then? My reading led me to a project called ‘Curio cards’. After about five minutes of reading about Curio cards, I found myself browsing the listings on OpenSea. I viewed from lowest price to highest price. A cheapish one (number 30 - 0.086 ETH) caught my eye. As wine entrepreneur and NFT fan Gary Vee says, “Buy sh#t that speaks to you.” This one spoke to me. Number 30, known as ‘Eclipse’ (one of 821) features a cute little raccoon, the same guy features everywhere in Curio-land - he’s even the mascot for their discord server. Clearly he’s a significant character in the story behind Curio cards (right?). I’ll take it. And that my friends, is my entry in to the world of meme investing!!
Here he is - Curio card #30 (‘Eclipse’)
Thanks for reading. Have you accepted meme investing as ‘a thing’, or do you turn your nose up at it? Do you dabble at all?