Title: Vitalik is wrong: Crypto really needs dumb memecoins
If you’re a celebrity, being part of the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) is no longer trendy—memecoins are in vogue.
BAYC, once the pinnacle of success and mainstream acclaim, is now considered passé, evident from its declining floor price.
Meanwhile, celebrity memecoins have garnered cross-industry appeal, a feat uncommon among most cryptocurrencies.
Dismissing memecoins as useless is short-sighted. They are crucial blockchain components, serving as placeholders for “real” economic activities that could shift people from traditional financial ports to blockchain ones. To achieve this, these ports must handle hundreds of thousands of transactions involving memecoins with silly names.
Even though some in the crypto community are sensitive to absurd and meaningless projects, criticism against memecoins from them might misunderstand the most active segments in today’s crypto sphere.
Celebrities are meeting crypto head-on: rapid DEXs, affordable blockchains, gambling apps, Twitter, Telegram, and Discord.
It’s hard to find flaws in them without pearl-clutching conservatism.
So, Iggy Azalea or Caitlyn Jenner having their own memecoins isn’t as taboo as Katy Perry’s CrYpTo ClAwS or Kim Kardashian’s Instagram promotion of SafeMoon clone EthereumMAX, or even Randi Zuckerberg’s WAGMI music video.
Compared to anything Jenner or Azalea’s teams have done, these stunts are more like saying, “Hello, kids.”
Countless memecoins have experienced surges, crashes, and developmental stasis (classic “rug pull” trajectories), but Caitlyn Jenner’s Ethereum memecoin has soared.
Jenner launched on Solana just days before Ethereum. The Solana-based JENNER surged over 1,000%, hitting a market cap just over $30 million.
Jenner’s team allegedly deceived by a suspected serial memecoin manipulator, making the Solana token (rapidly depreciating) an unofficial fiasco.
To boost interest in the new token, Jenner pledged a 3% transaction tax to the Trump campaign team if the Ethereum-based Jenner reaches a $50 million market cap (currently valued at $5.8 million, while the original token stands at $3.6 million).
Tens of thousands of addresses hold celebrity memecoins. However, none are high-market cryptocurrencies. Overall, memecoins like Dogecoin and Floki exceed a $52 billion market cap, yet they occupy less than 5% of the crypto market (excluding Bitcoin).
Jenner’s two tokens, Iggy Azalea’s MOTHER, and Andrew Tate’s endorsed DADDY account for less than 1% of the entire memecoin market.
Memecoins are criticized by crypto purists, even Vitalik has reservations about celebrities entering crypto. Memecoins make crypto appear immature and somewhat speculative, diverting attention and funding from more legitimate, technically advanced projects supported by venture capital.
The State of Celebrity Memecoins
For true believers, cryptocurrencies signify everything from the largest historical value transfer to solarpunk revolutions and anarchist-capitalist upheavals.
Yet, cryptocurrencies mean nothing. They are unknowable, chaotic, and imbued with meaning by technology.
Although the warm, fuzzy community feeling when trading memecoins with internet strangers might not be rational, memecoins indeed serve a technical purpose: stress-testing blockchains in ways few token categories have.
Past NFT game CryptoKitties showed Ethereum needed scaling with Layer2s; Ordinals showed almost any EVM chain could crash from sudden popularity spikes, while memecoin frenzy proved Solana’s transaction routing needed improvement.
Welcome to the world of celebrity crypto. These celebrities may not realize it, but their embrace of memecoin issuance might actually provide the right impetus for crypto, potentially improving infrastructure in the long run.
Tags:
DOGE
Memecoin
SOL
Solana
Vitalik
Ethereum
Bitcoin
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