Okay. Let’s talk about meme coins.
For over eleven years, I’ve been promoting important projects in the blockchain space which I believe have real utility and potential to increase global wellbeing. In 2018, I went full time in the space working directly which such projects. I realized then how speculators fear utility. Once a project provides real utility, they take off their speculator hat and put on their investor hat, comparing against various market verticals and such. 2x-5x utility returns becomes less interesting when a 10x, 100x or even 1,000x returns on a wild speculation is otherwise possible.
I used to say this is why we can’t have nice things.
I’ve watched Doge coin grow from nothing as an army of passionate community members dreamt of someday reaching $0.01. It seemed silly and impossible to me. It seemed like a waste of talent, resources, energy, investment, attention, and more. My Ivy-League trained engineer mind scoffed at the “shitcoiners” and their “pump and dump scams” taking attention away from “real projects” doing “important” things such as separating money and the state (BTC), censorship resistant self sovereign social media (HIVE), cheap high performance secure smart contracts (EOS), decentralized governance systems (eosDAC), improving crypto usability (FIO), decentralized open source AI market places (MOR), and on and on the list goes.
Even though I often discuss how “all financial value is shared story telling” and the true security of any network isn’t the layer 1 consensus protocol (proof of work, proof of stake, delegated proof of stake, etc), but it’s actually layer 0, the number of human beings (and soon conscious entities) who believe what you are doing is valuable—in-spite of all that, I could never bring myself to own or support meme coins. When my friends would ask me about them, I’d caution them to stay away as there are thousands and thousands of projects that go no where and are controlled by small groups of people who pump and dump them to earn more BTC.
Was I right to stay away or just self-righteous?
If money is a spiritual concept (humans invented it in our minds, and it’s not really a physical thing, it’s just information we give meaning to), then who am I to say what form it “should” take? Doge coin now has a $26.2 billion market cap with $2.7 billion in 24 hour liquidity. Yes, billion with a “B”. Shiba Inu has a market cap of $18.3 billion with $2.1 billion in 24 hour liquidity. That’s a lot of people who believe in these communities and the memes and stories they create. Who am I to say that’s not “real”? Why does money have to be serious?
So after over a decade, why am I starting to change my mind, even with all the pain and frustration caused by so many pump and dump memes that wreck people financially?
In a word: community.
A week ago I was hanging out with some friends discussing a meme coin, and we were all laughing our asses off for a half hour straight. The puns and memes and innuendos just kept going on and on. There were discussions about astrology and Greek mythology and primordial deities and yes, a lot of butt jokes. We were discussing the Uranus token and its token symbol $ANUS.
Yes, I know. It’s juvenile, crass, and even a little gross. Against my better judgment, I bought some SOL on Coinbase, downloaded the Phantom wallet, used the Jupiter DeFi exchange within the wallet and explored Uranus by buying my first meme coin. I told myself I was just throwing money away as an excuse to get familiar with the Solana ecosystem, quite impressed with the ability to automate dollar cost average purchasing on a DeFi exchange as well as do direct swaps or limit orders. As time went on and the jokes continued within a community of people willing to laugh at the absurdity of it all, I slowly started to get it.
We create our own reality. Why are we so serious about it? Why do we believe “we know best”? What is… is. These meme coins, in a few rare cases, have objectively created massive financial systems with huge communities who believe in them. It humbles me to think I’ve been wrong to judge them as in any way less valid that the projects I was so proud of or even the little pieces of paper we carry around in our wallets with pictures of dead white people on them (not to mention a ton of symbolic memes, buried into each design). Why do we give totalitarians and war mongers the power to create the financial value we believe in when we now have the power to create it ourselves?
So yes, I own some $ANUS. I consider it highly speculative and in all likelihood going to zero. I may never sell them just in the off chance a large enough community grows around it to use it as money someday, just as we’re starting to see with things like $DOGE. I still don’t recommend people “invest” in wild speculations, and I do think BTC and ETH and maybe some stable coin to BTFD (by the fricken dips) such as USDT and USDC make sense to own, but I can no longer pretend I was “right” to ignore the power of meme coins and not participate.
Coinmarketcap currently shows 9,280 coin projects. Most are worthless. Uranus has a tiny market cap with very little volume and unknown chance of becoming anything global and meaningful like DOGE or SHIB. That said, the community that is forming around it makes me smile and laugh. It reminds me not to take myself or life too seriously. It encourages me to loosen up and crack silly jokes with my kids. It implores me not to think I’m right all the time, especially in the face of evidence that demonstrates otherwise. I do think most of these meme coins will be forgotten. That’s not surprising since many of the projects I thought were adding real utility are mostly ignored these days (SMART, BITSHARES, etc). Who knows what will matter to people in five to ten years? I sure don’t, and embracing that is part of the fun. Yes, it’s just speculative gambling, but even though I don’t gamble much at all, the couple times I’ve had my arm twisted to head into a casino and play some black jack, I did notice people in community together having fun.
And maybe that’s valuable enough to build billion dollar financial networks. Or maybe we’ll just create some memorable stories together to laugh at later.
Either way, I’m going to enjoy the ride. This isn’t financial advice and don’t get too serious about any of it. Win, lose, break even, at least we explored something new and, hopefully, learned about ourselves along the way.
Maybe I’ll see you on the way to the moon, or maybe even Uranus. ;)