“I think it’s funny, that’s all!” Says Ace, a Toronto, Canada-based investor in the cryptocurrency inspired by internet memes or jokes. Talk of these ‘meme coins’, as these digital assets are known, suggests that they are meaningless. It’s all a real joke.
Ace, who asked that his last name not be revealed so he could discuss personal financial matters, has been buying and selling meme coins for years. The first was Dogecoin, the original meme cryptocurrency, launched in 2013 and popularized six years later by the now infamous Elon Musk tweet. “Everyone knew it was a joke,” repeated Ace. It served no purpose and promised no innovation, yet nearly five million people bought it.
Simple coin business meme
The meme currency format has become a meme in itself, which has been replicated and imitated by hundreds of people with varying degrees of success. It’s a familiar story: a comical cryptocurrency gains followers on forums and social networks, and becomes a vehicle for financial speculation that enriches early adopters and leaves others with a hole in their wallet. .
In recent weeks, this cycle has been completed with a new token, PEPE, which started trading on April 15. Referring to the Pepe the Frog meme, a cartoon used to depict user reactions on social media and used by extreme right-wingers in 2016, described as “currency is the most memorable meme” by its anonymous developer “Fueled by pure copying power”. Three weeks later, its value had increased by thousands of percentage points, reaching a maximum market capitalization (the total paper value of all coins in circulation) of $1.63 billion. As investors rushed to ride the wave and sniffed out the income opportunity, cryptocurrency exchanges followed suit: Binance, Gemini, OKEx and Huobi listed the token. But whoever bought in at the top in the first week of May, He has since lost more than half of his investment.
Meme Coins have been widely condemned in some industry quarters as “casinos”, mocking the vision of cryptocurrencies as the foundation of an alternative financial system. Of these hundreds of coins in circulation, most are no longer traded, or are traded in negligible quantities. But even if they don’t make sense in themselves, they have an emerging logic, a kind of science. And some have dedicated themselves to crafting a winning formula.
After Dogecoin, one of the first meme coins to gain attention was Floki Inu, named after Musk’s pet Shiba Inu, an adopted dog whose real name was Kabosu. In 2021, early in its history, the token survived two ‘rag pull’ scams, exits that occur when a developer abandons a project and takes money by quickly and artificially inflating the price to attract new investors. Is. It became one of the most traded meme coins.
