Crypto naysayers and TradFi purists have been looking at meme coins with scorn ever since Doge omitted its first virtual bark. Many within the wider crypto community feel the same way.
For those in need of a quick recap, meme coins are lighthearted cryptocurrencies that are inspired by internet memes. Ultimately, their entire identity and community have a meme or internet joke at their core. Dogecoin is based on the Doge meme, and Pepe is based on Pepe the Frog. Even new coins, like Memeinator, which is based off the terminator, centre around a meme or piece of pop culture.
They’re very much seen as the wildcards of the crypto space, given their informal nature and lack of secure fundamentals. Meme coins can be volatile in price, and their whitepapers are often deliberately irreverent.
Whilst Bitcoin offers the ultimate decentralized store of value and Ethereum offers decentralized computing, meme coins offer nothing but lolz.
Except no, they don’t. The power of meme coins has been overlooked by everyone, and the following blog will outline why all the common meme coin criticisms are total baloney. As well as outlining what an AI powered token and what a fresh take on “pop culture meme coins” looks like.
“Meme coins are hardly ‘serious’ cryptocurrency”
Yes, that’s the whole point. Dismissing meme coins for being silly is like dismissing pop music for being fun and easy to listen to. Crypto is very good at stroking its chin, puffing its chest out, boasting about its zero-knowledge proofs, and how it solves the Byzantine generals’ problem. But unfortunately, not nearly enough people speak that language, let alone care (yet).
More importantly, meme coins can be the ultimate gift to the crypto community as a whole. Everyone wants mass adoption; it’s widely accepted to be a path toward financial utopia and the gains everyone dreams of. Easier onboarding is a key piece of this puzzle; the easier it is to get people to start doing something, the more people are going to do it.
Traditionally, easier onboarding has meant making crypto easier to buy – more ways to buy, better UX, etc. But preceding all of that, you need to make crypto seem inviting enough for everyone to partake. And right now, it certainly isn’t.
If only there were a simpler, less techy, more lighthearted side to this industry that could act as an unintimidating gateway for prospective investors. Prospective investors who might not fully understand the benefits of DeFi yet. If only it had fun branding—preferably branding that harnesses relatable pop culture. If only. Oh, hang on a minute…
Plenty of meme coin derision is routed in how little people really understand about memes themselves. Memes are the lifeblood of the Web and modern culture. They are as big as rock and roll. They’re a language an entire generation has grown up speaking; why wouldn’t it make sense to use memes to incite the adoption of a currency?
55% of 13-35-year-olds send memes every week—and 30% send them every day. (YPulse)
Nobody is saying that meme coins are going to be the great onboarding ramp that brings everyone from moms in Iowa to the King of England into the cryptosphere. But it’s not the craziest thing to suggest that a different type of crypto, one that’s simpler, charming people with humor and familiar characters, just might be pretty effective at opening up this often opaque world to a new audience.
Like pop music, meme coins are the first step of an incredible journey. And yes, like certain pop songs, they may not be as world changing as some of the more serious players in their respective spaces. But for countless crypto enthusiasts, meme coins were and will always be the fun little mascots that introduced them to a life-changing technology – not to mention serious gains.
“Ok but they still undermine crypto as a whole”
That’s like saying pop music hurts the sales of Miles Davis records. Pop fans buy pop. Miles Davis fans buy Miles Davis. Some people buy both.
Throughout their short history, good and bad crypto projects have risen and fallen on their own merits. More to the point, it’s the mainstream crypto projects acting recklessly that do the real damage.
FTX went under because it was run by a madman. MT. Gox collapsed because it was careless. Meanwhile, Doge and many other cryptos have been happily moving along. Yes, like any crypto asset, there have been ups and downs. But the notion that they have somehow damaged more ‘serious’ projects is absurd. Especially when every crypto bear market has been marked by a so called ‘serious’ project failing.
Crypto and DeFi still have a long way to go. Like the internet, significant technological breakthroughs are needed before we have mass adoption. And by that point, crypto will be too successful to undermine. Especially by some fun, harmless meme coins.
“They were started as a joke!”
The Eiffel Tower was created for the 1889 World’s Fair as the focal point of Paris. It was initially considered an eyesore by many. The plan was to only let the tower stand for 20 years. But within those years, it became inseparable from French culture. Not to mention useful in a variety of respects, namely radiotelegraphy.
History is littered with inventions that started as useless eyesores/jokes/accidents/anything besides their eventual use case. But once these inventions were embraced by the masses, their real utility started to shine through.
The intended reason (or lack thereof) for something existing is totally irrelevant. If a creation finds an audience and/or a use case, then it’s as worthy of praise as anything that stuck to its original plan. Meme coins are no different. And (as outlined later), even though many, if not all, were started as jokes, plenty have developed committed audiences and genuine utilities of their own.
“They’re risky”
Sure, so is investing in startups. But hundreds of angel investors make very decent careers working with risky assets. With the potential for four-figure+ percentage gains, meme coins are a far cry from an index fund. And that’s okay. Some people want their investing – or rather, a portion of their investing – to be risky. And in the case of meme coins, they want an added dose of irreverence and a fun community to play around with.
Like an angel investor, anyone getting into the meme coin game needs to manage their risk appropriately. They need to do their research. They need to avoid putting their life savings behind one candidate. As we’ll cover below, there’s a right way and a wrong way to invest in meme coins. And if you adhere to that, their risky nature is of little concern.
“But they lack any real utility”
“Real” is the word to question here. If you define utility as being a use case that men in expensive suits can get excited about, then sure. Meme coins don’t facilitate cross-border payments between banks or power decentralized cloud storage networks. But if you’re happy to embrace the humble dictionary definition, then there are plenty of meme coins that offer utility.
In 2021, Elon Musk tweeted a Lion King meme of him holding up the dogecoin dog as if it were Simba. Photo: Twitter/Elon Musk/Disney (Twitter/Elon Musk/Disney)
Take the godfather of them all, Dogecoin. Older than Ethereum, with numerous high-profile establishments accepting it as payment as of August 2023 and many more individuals within its strong community currently accepting it for P2P transactions. Certainly aided by its prominent celebrity proponents, including Elon Musk and Mark Cuban. This is more than the vast majority of cryptocurrencies can claim. If this isn’t a brilliant example of a cryptocurrency having utility, what is?
Then, we have Doge’s understudy, Shiba Inu. The community is this crypto’s core strength. The loyal and active Shib Army uses the SHIB token along with supplementary LEASH (used for staking and gaining land in the Shiba Metaverse) and BONE (used for staking and governance within the Shiba ecosystem). Currently in development, this metaverse of theirs is more than just a bit of fun. With predictions for the metaverse industry generating $5 trillion in value by 2023, the idea that a coin like Shiba Inu could contribute to it shouldn’t be ignored.
Meanwhile, there’s a new generation of meme coins coming through. Memeinator is a meme coin that, as outlined in its whitepaper, was created to eliminate subpar meme coins. Packed with a range of utilities, including staking and an NFT project, its pièce de résistance is its AI-powered shoot-em-up game, Meme Warfare.
Meme Warfare will use its Meme Scanner AI to scan the Web for meme coin projects that are of low quality and are underperforming. Meme Scanner will then take the offending coins’ meme mascots and feed them into the game as characters for Meminator token holders to eliminate.
We also have Shiba Memu. Again, taking advantage of AI, Shiba Memu is a self-marketing meme coin. Using NLP, sentiment analysis, and predictive analytics, it will observe online sentiment towards it and any other online chatter that’s relevant. Then, taking its findings, it will craft and post the optimal messages for social media, forum interaction, and press releases.
This all will happen with zero human dependence and at an infinitely faster pace than any marketing team could manage. It’s like having 100 marketing agencies working on this coin’s marketing 24/7. And it’s a direct response to the problem that many meme coins face; the inability to sustain their marketing efforts.
Either of these projects could be the next meme coin to explode. They have taken a look at some of the typical reservations people have about meme coins – lack of utility, inability to sustain marketing hype – and addressed them directly. This begs the question, could the next meme coin to explode be one that gets adopted by the “serious” crypto crowd?
Remember, there’s a right way and a wrong way to invest in meme coins
Something everyone can agree on. But what investing looks like will vary depending on risk tolerance. And naturally, much of the risk found in both meme coins and crypto in general can be mitigated by remembering the basics.
- Do your research: Make sure the project has a coherent and well thought out roadmap, good tokenomics, etc. Having founders with public identities is also a plus.
- Look for a good, engaged community. One that is active on social and clearly cares about the project.
- Never invest more than you’re willing to lose.
- Buy in during the presale, not when the coin is pumping.
That last point deserves special attention. This is where the meme coin game is really played. This is where anyone who truly knows the potential of meme coins will focus.
Meme coin projects certainly have the power to pump 7000%. But the truth is that once you hear of this incredible news, it’s usually too late to make serious gains. This is why any meme coin investor who knows what they’re doing will get involved during the presale.
Presales are where you can find the next meme coin to explode
And this is an art in itself. Meme coin aficionados spend as much of their waking hours scouring communities and social feeds for those elusive tips on what the next big meme coin might be. That certainly takes time. So for now, the Memeinator and Shiba Memu presales could be a great place to start.
If you’re still on the fence, one final thing to consider is to what extent the meme coin criticism is really just envy. Envy for those who got in on the presale. Envy for anyone who managed to buy that car or quit their job because they timed things well. Doge and Shiba Inu are currently 9th and 19th biggest by market cap, respectively – outperforming hundreds of “serious” cryptos with “serious” utility.
People definitely don’t know the truth about meme coins. But not the people who got rich off them.