NEW YORK, NY, June 15, 2024 /24-7PressRelease/ — Meme coins can be considered dumb, unserious, and a waste of time. Many crypto enthusiasts are frustrated with meme coins as they paint the greater crypto industry as unserious to the masses.
However, the only thing more frustrating than trying to financialize memes is complaining about them while maximizing financial gain on them. While meme coins certainly don’t need to be celebrated, it’s clear tokens like Shiba Inu or dogwifhat have communities around them. It’s hard to know If meme coins are all long-term sustainable. And these tokens are not creating generational wealth.
Meme coins are simply highly speculative investment vehicles. There is a near-endless amount of interest and capital plow into them that essentially proves that the speculation is useful, no matter whether you agree with their existence or not.
Riva Tez spoke at Consensus 2024, expressing that meme coins are helping crypto win a narrative war, by fulfilling a genuine need that people have. Meme coins meet people where they are.
Meme coins exist for the same reason as casinos or state-sanctioned gambling like the lotto- people like to dream their lives can change in an instant, without having to do much work. It’s an itch that cannot be willed away, and it turns out gambling on blockchain-based tokens is as good as a scratch-off.
Furthermore, it’s evident that meme coins are great tools for coordination and garnering attention. The one behind the meme-coin trading platform Hype, Ravi Bakhai, explains that meme coins have become a large generalized market for determining how relevant anything is at any given time.
The greater use of crypto and its place has been questioned for being a scarce commodity in the greater economy, but the popularity of meme coins creates a crowdsourced popularity. Meme coins may help cut through the noise in the same way that prediction markets help understand sentiment and truth.
The emerging category of PoliFi, a portmanteau of politics and finance, and the array of tokens that some people are using as metrics to gamble on those candidates’ re-election odds. But meme coins don’t need to be limited to politics.
As Calaxy CEO Solo Ceesay recently wrote for The Defiant: “Meme coins are a prime example of how any collective group of individuals can create the economic infrastructure to facilitate commerce, trade, and collaboration without the need for an intermediary. Before blockchain, this was virtually impossible.”
Finally, as the creation of dogecoin in late 2013 showed, it’s worth noting that meme coins are essentially just a blank canvas for performance art. This gets to the heart of the most cutting criticism of meme coins: they reveal the financial and psychological mechanisms that essentially make all cryptocurrencies tick. While it’s unlikely that Bitcoin will ever reach zero, it only has value because a crowd of people say it does.
The only real difference is that one is backed by the belief that the digital age needs a functioning value and the other by a desire to mock a person using it. The worst aspects of meme coins are true too for the rest of crypto. Celebrities launching tokens and using their fans as exit liquidity is unseemly. But there is something honest about meme coins. They make no illusions about a game being played.
Where one stands on meme coins depends on how serious the person is. Do meme coins give crypto a bad reputation, or does crypto already have one?
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