The Not-So-Subtle Meme Coin Art; joke to legitimate investment.
Hundreds of imitators have attempted, with varied degrees of success, to reproduce and riff on the meme coin format, which has itself turned into a meme. This is a well-known anecdote by now: A humorous token becomes popular on social media and forums and is used as a means of speculating on the financial markets, making early adopters extremely wealthy while leaving others with a hole in their wallet.
This cycle has fully materialized during the last several weeks with the launch of the new coin, PEPE, which went live on April 15. A play on the Pepe the Frog meme, a cartoon that social media users used to show their responses and that the far right briefly appropriated in 2016, the currency was promoted as “the most memeable memecoin in existence” and “fueled by pure mimetic power” by its anonymous maker.
After three weeks, its value had risen by thousands of percent, to reach a high market capitalization of $1.63 billion (the entire paper value of all coins in circulation). Investors like as Ace jumped at the chance to profit from the wave, and cryptocurrency exchanges soon followed suit, listing the token on Binance, Gemini, OKX, and Huobi. However, those who made their investment during the peak, during the first week of May, have now lost almost 50% of it.
Certain segments of the cryptocurrency industry have harshly denounced meme coins, calling them “casinos” that denigrate the idea of using cryptocurrencies as the foundation of a substitute financial system. Out of all the hundreds of these coins in circulation, the majority are either little exchanged or not traded at all. Memes may be meaningless in and of themselves, but they do have an emerging logic—a kind of science, if you will. Distilling the winning recipe has become a successful commercial venture for some.
One of the first meme tokens to gain popularity after Dogecoin was Floki Inu, a cryptocurrency called after Elon Musk’s Shiba Inu pet dog, which is the breed featured in the Doge meme. Early in its development, in 2021, the token withstood two rug pulls (a developer quitting a project and running off with money) and went on to become one of the most popular meme coins.
The success or failure of a meme currency, according to one of the individuals who helped save the project and goes only by B (to preserve his financial privacy, he claims), depends on the person’s ability to tell a compelling tale and foster a sense of community. “Narrative and community are typically the two most important factors,” he states. The community produces a “FOMO effect,” and the tale serves as the “catalyst.”
