Who Really Wins When Meme Coins Take Off
Are jokes really just jokes when there's this much money flying around?
By: Zack Abrams
May 19, 2023
Move over Dogecoin, there's a whole new crop of meme coins coming for the crown.
Most projects in crypto attempt to differentiate themselves by bragging about their team, their technology, their relationships with developers, or any number of other signifiers of legitimacy and competence.
Yet most projects in crypto will never be worth as much as PEPE, the meme coin themed after the controversial cartoon frog that recently took the crypto community by storm, racking up a market cap of over $1.5 billion just a few weeks after its launch in April. And that's despite the fact that the project's official website states "the coin is completely useless and for entertainment purposes only."
Pepe's success has inspired a litany of copycats as crypto traders speculate on hundreds of tokens themed after well-known characters in internet culture like Homer Simpson and Elon Musk. But while most crypto traders would admit that meme coins are just a bit of dumb fun, scammers and fraudsters have seized on their rampant carelessness for their own nefarious purposes.
This week on Coinage we dive deep into Meme Coin Mania and explore the winners and losers of Shitcoin Spring, as some are calling it. Uniswap, the decentralized exchange that's powering most meme coin trading, has emerged as a top beneficiary of the hype. The lucky crypto traders that turned pocket change into millions are clearly doing something right too.
But how much danger is this frenzy doing to crypto's reputation, and how can we teach traders to be more cautious? One way: fighting greed with $GREED as Ivor "Voshy" Ivosevic, a blockchain consultant based in Croatia, explained to us.
Voshy, frustrated by watching crypto traders throw away common sense in the search of easy money, launched his own meme coin called $GREED, though the crypto traders who attempted to claim some had no idea what they were getting themselves into.
"I clearly refused a stupid amount of money just to prove a point and try to educate the most people possible," Voshy told Coinage in an interview.
To hear more about Voshy's project, meme coin speedrunning, influencer drama, HarryPotterObamaSonic10Inu, a few of Pepe's many copycats, and so much more, check out the full episode of Coinage above.
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