ARE MEMECOINS A PLAGUE? WHY'S THE INDUSTRY STALLING?
Someone asked me: why have you gone a bit cold on the crypto industry? You haven’t made Youtube videos or written via your newsletter in a while.
Truly, the question felt like I’d been waiting for it for a long time.
And I’ve been bottling it up to admit that the industry has become boring - no thanks to memecoins, majorly on Solana.
I don’t feel excited to come on CT (crypto Twitter) and scroll through my feed because there’s nothing to see other than a bunch of grifters shilling down your throat the next meme they’re going to dump on unsuspecting followers.
This menace was at its peak earlier in the year when we had 1000,000 memecoins created in less than a month.
Memes, in collaboration with the proliferation of unnecessary L2s, contribute heavily to the liquidity fragmentation the ecosystem is currently facing.
I’ve seen opinions of memecoins being a retail reaction to the current low-float high-FDV launches we’re experiencing with VC-backed tokens.
I’d say that is untrue because the market isn’t even working for retail at this moment.
While users are fed up with VCs extracting value from top projects, memecoins aren’t the solution because they mostly benefit insiders and KOLs (key opinion leaders).
Most KOLs these days are just a bunch of less experienced social media influencers with huge followings who collaborate with rogue founders to get allocations and dump worthless tokens on followers.
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Someone says he’s a trader who started in January 2024 with $1000 and now has made $1 million off memes—“I’ll show you exactly how I did it; join my channel via the link.”
All of this is BS engagement farming, and it's a pity the industry has had an influx of several millions of users who are untrained in financial markets—no thanks to the Telegram bot-tapping phenomenon.
Only a fraction of retail makes money from memes in the current cycle (out of pure luck), as these tokens lose more than 90% of their value in a few weeks. It’s all targeted pump and dump, rinse and repeat, with a similar audience!
A few memecoins, however, are building real-world products and kicking hard with promotion and collaborations (FLOKI a worthy mention) despite market conditions. I've practically not seen another in their league!
It also begs the question: Is the industry seeking innovation? Should it only improve on what has already been built? Is decentralization a curse?
Perhaps Bitcoin, Ethereum (as an infrastructure), and stablecoins are the only valuable products out of the industry.
Whatever the case, the market needs to find a solution quickly!