Memecoins: Musical Chairs or Future of Degens?
You’ve got to see the funny side. Through Covid, we all were participating in a collective hibernation from the real. In this fevered claustrophobia, memes ruled. You just needed to decide what type of fuel your rocket was powered with, which moon was truly safe, and whether you were taking a chinchilla or a shiba with you as a companion. To the uninitiated, this was the first time the joke made the mainstream, but crypto has history with this kind of thing.
The memes made money. It was hilarious how many made money off Doge. More than hilarious, it was heartwarming. Just as the cultural narrative was agonising over how much the Boomers took, the Gen Zs were fighting back, their muskets primed with $FLOKI, $DOGELON, and, nowadays, $COQ & $BONK. Everyone loves a good joke, and these ones are bringing the literal house down. Never underestimate humanity’s capacity to take things too far.
But surely the joke is over now? Yes, you can make a coin and slap a dog on it and make money, but everyone must have cottoned onto the fact that these coins don’t do anything, right?
To many crypto purists, meme coins are the antichrist, a grimy, dirty stage comedian with out of time and out of tune jokes spoiling the good name of crypto and causing millions of naive retail investors to lose hundreds, if not millions, getting carried away — and leaving them with a bad taste in their mouth. To others though, frogs and dogs represent a great way for otherwise disinterested observers to ‘get in on the joke’ and, in the process, discover a lot about crypto. The joke is most certainly not over — and lots of money is still being made.
Because these meme coins — the ‘genuine’ ones anyway (it feels strange saying that) — are still crypto. In fact, many are some of the purest expressions of the entire concept of decentralised ledgers in the first place. They’re not worried about utility, or tech, or interoperability — or really anything at all.
They’re just recording who has what dogs, and how many. Doge, for example, is just a version of Litecoin with some inflation. It has never failed a transaction, is maintained by hundreds of thousands of computers the world over, and works just as well as Bitcoin for keeping a record of who is owed what.
The ERC-20 brigade is a little more complex. Coins like $PEPE and $FLOKI and any written in programmable smart contracts have the capability to harbour extra malice in the code. But really, that’s a lot more effort than just copy-pasting (it’s open-source, it’s a good thing) a basic memecoin template and making your own little joke. Who knows, maybe it’ll catch on? Dark agents do exist, but even amongst the neon promontory of raining money and desperate avarice — some people do just want to have fun.
To crypto blowhards, lighten up and loosen up. Memes — as long as not perpetuated by malicious actors — are a perfect antidote to some of crypto’s overt seriousness, and in a vernacular that speaks to those who stand most to benefit from crypto — the young. Trading meme coins is fun, and profitable. Don’t blame us if you don’t have a sense of humour. On the Onomy Exchange, who knows what new concoctions will emerge, and where we’ll get our next laugh from. One thing’s for sure, it won’t be our last.
