The unstable reality of internet money
Very valuable, utterly confusing and extremely difficult to ignore—just what is the deal with memecoins? Let’s take a Deep Dive.
🤑 They are in many ways the quintessential modern financial product. As the name suggests, memecoins are a type of cryptocurrency that derive their value entirely from celebrity or meme associations.
🚀 The first, from 2013, was Dogecoin, and it’s proven unexpectedly durable.
👍👎 The term is generally used negatively, reflecting the coins’ lack of inherent value and general Ponzi-like nature, but some also see the memecoin world as a cradle of creativity.
QUOTABLE
“I find that oftentimes the most ironic and entertaining outcome is the most likely. And the most entertaining outcome would be Dogecoin becoming the global new earth currency.”
— Elon Musk, businessman and CEO of Tesla
BY THE NUMBERS
11.9 million Since it was launched in January 2024, the most popular memecoin creation platform pump.fun has been used to make 11.9 million coins, generating over US$780 million in revenue and accounting for over half of all trading activity on the Solana blockchain.
US$77 billion The total market cap of all memecoins at the time of writing was US$77 billion—but the volatility of the market is such that, by the time of reading, it could be essentially anything.
US$0.73 While Dogecoin dominates the market, with a cap of about US$36 billion, or about 46 per cent of the total, its highest ever price was just US$0.73.
QUIZ
More than 10,000 coins are created each day on memecoin generation platform pump.fun—what proportion of them fail to survive for three months?
A. 58%
B. 78%
C. 98%
Scroll to the bottom for the answer.
DID YOU KNOW?
Memecoins regularly run into legal and regulatory issues. For example, in early 2021, Thailand’s Securities and Exchange Commission banned them, saying they had “no clear objective or substance”.
THE EDIT
🍊 One born every minute. Having formerly disdained crypto, Donald Trump has subsequently used his own memecoin to enrich himself. It hasn’t enriched many other people, though: 58 wallets profited from it—and 764,000 have lost.
🐶 Who’s a bad boy? Such is the influence of Elon Musk on Dogecoin’s price. Musk is the only person who still finds the doge meme funny, and he’s been sued over it.
🤷 No one knows anything. As with many heavily hyped technologies, memecoins had a promising start a decade or so ago. Since then, the picture has become more mixed.
💸 Pretty, pretty good. As such, we can expect the future of memecoins to be part innovation, part bubble.
WATCH
For a glimpse into what most memecoins are really used for, check out YouTube videos on how to create them—a very large proportion of them focus on rug pulls, a type of scam.
THE FULL PICTURE
Asia Pacific is prominently represented among the countries where memecoins are most popular, with India close to rivalling the US as the world’s memecoin capital.
KEY PLAYERS
Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer
Software engineers Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer originally created Dogecoin as a joke, to mock cryptocurrency hype. They’ve since soured on the project and, in Palmer’s case, developed some highly negative views of crypto generally.
HONOUREE TO KNOW
Paul Soliman
Paul Soliman is reshaping government systems through BayaniChain and its secure blockchain platform, Prismo, designed to manage sensitive data. In partnership with the Philippine government, he launched Project Marissa, a blockchain-based tracking system aiming to increase transparency and accountability for the country’s PHP 6.3 trillion (US$109 million) budget.
ONE FINAL THING
Since memecoins first emerged, their lack of utility or inherent value has often seen them known by another name: sh*tcoins. So it was perhaps inevitable that something called Fartcoin would eventually see the light of day—and that it would flourish.
