Memecoins Are Dead. Long Live Memecoins.

UPDATE: Coinage has successfully launched the largest fair launch on the PinkSale launchpad since January to raise 1492 SOL at the time we capped the raise early due to exceeding our soft cap by 2,900%.

Coinage has consistently pointed out the damage most memecoins have brought to the crypto space, so naturally — we are now launching our own.

If that seems hypocritical, allow us the opportunity to explain why we are taking this step — and let me assure you, no one has been more opposed to memecoins than us. After all, Coinage's patronage dividend-yielding ownership model flies in the face of memecoins and the faux ownership they represent.

But memecoins do serve a purpose — even if many have become front-run, sniped, insider-laden abominations of everything crypto stands for.

Instead, Coinage is launching our own memecoin as an experiment to hopefully pull back the curtain on the memecoin industry in order to hopefully show exactly where many memecoins have fallen short. We may fail in that endeavor, but maybe that's the point. In order to write the full story on memecoins, we need to throw ourselves into the arena — and that means launching our own.

Here's the full story on why Coinage, which just crossed 100,000 subscribers on YouTube to win a Silver Play Button award, is launching the $PLYBTN token to celebrate with our community.

In The Beginning, There Was Community

For starters, let's agree that one of the best things about crypto is community-ownership. Case in point: Bitcoin showed that value could accrue to a community of token holders who all used a network, together. As more people used Bitcoin, the value of the token that powered its blockchain rose. The Bitcoin community won.

Then came Ethereum. The playbook looked very similar, but slightly different. After a shift to proof-of-stake, Ethereum needed use cases to show how its smart contracts could empower more than just digital gold. Ethereum attempted to empower ownership over everything. Case in point: When a replica of the U.S. Constitution was going up for auction at Sotheby's in 2021, a group of friends thought to throw together a DAO to crowdfund a shot at buying it. They launched ConstitutionDAO — and raised more than $40 million from more than 17,000 strangers on the internet with a very simple mission to buy the Constitution.

And yet, even when the DAO got outbid at auction to lose to billionaire hedge fund manager Ken Griffin, the experiment still showed the power of community. Afterwards, the DAO distributed PEOPLE tokens pro-rata to everyone in exact proportions to the amount that people had contributed. That is, everyone got the same price on a token launch that then exploded more than 200% in the following weeks due to all the news coverage the DAO had garnered (even despite the loss.) Despite only raising a little over $40 million, the value of the PEOPLE token peaked at more than $600 million.

It was an amazing experiment that demonstrated that the power of people pooling their money together on the internet to coalesce around a shared mission together can mean more than the same amount of money spent by one billionaire. Unfortunately, this lesson was only learned after the group had been outbid at the auction, but nonetheess, the experiment had shown the power of community.

Then, There Were NFTs

After ConstitutionDAO, the crypto space started to experiment with the idea of tokenizing community ownership. There were more DAOs and then more NFT projects. Yet, most of these NFT projects were actually a regression from the idea of what ConstitutionDAO set out to do. As ConstitutionDAO co-founder Graham Novak recently explained to us, the plan wasn't to just give everyone some digitized faux ownership over the Constitution — but to actually co-own and steer what they would do with it, together.

In fact, I wouldn't have quit to launch Coinage as a community-owned Web3 media outlet that anyone can mint an NFT to co-own were it not for ConstitutionDAO. Coinage took the torch and ran with it — becoming the first NFT project in the U.S. to pay out a distribution to our NFT holders.

The idea was real community ownership above all else.

Then, There Were Memecoins

In 2022, memecoins began their rise. Most of the tokens, including Pepe, sought to mimic the success of Dogecoin as ERC-20s — the predominant token contract on Ethereum at the time.

As Coinage covered then, the main goal became dropping the amount of time each token took to launch and dropping the cost to buy them. The speedun to launch memecoins got as fast as 22 seconds, but still required a fair amount of coding knowledge.

Eventually, that gave rise to memecoins on Solana and Pump.Fun which simplified things even further. Now anyone could launch a memecoin in as quick as it took to think of a name and pasting an image.

But then something happened.

As Pump.Fun exploded, memecoins quickly became less about community and owning something together and more about owning something before someone else. That would mean you could get a better price than someone who comes after and if you dumped the tokens you acquired first, you could make off with the money and they would be stuck holding the bag.

By now, it has become extremely evident just how far we've regressed since the days of ConstitutionDAO. It's become extremely evident just how far we've drifted from the promise of community ownership and pooling funds to own a shared mission together.

People would need to look no further than two of the largest launches this year: President Trump's memecoin and the notorious memecoin from Argentina President Javier Milei. As Coinage has covered, both tokens launched and quickly spiked in price, only to fall back down to earth. Most everyone lost money — with only those who were extremely early having anything to show for it as snipers and front-runners scooped up all the tokens on the cheap.

But could that also prove another point? Could it prove that memecoins are just far more efficient at fundraising than NFTs? Perhaps. But they also may be less efficient at fostering community.

It would seem, then, that perhaps the best of both worlds might be the only way to win.

How Coinage Wins With $PLYBTN

There is now a trend of NFT projects launching their own tokens. Pudgy Penguins launched the $PENGU token. Azuki launched the $ANIME token. Doodles is preparing to launch the $DOOD token.

None of the tokens that are live have fared very well. And we would posit that it could be a couple of reasons. For one, most of these NFT projects were not widely distributed. That is, many of the NFTs in a collection were owned by the same people. Pudgy Penguins main collection has a unique ownership percentage of under 60%. Doodles has a unique ownership percentage below 40%. Coinage boasts one that is higher than 90%.

Furthermore, there wasn't really a unifying reason for people to hold the NFTs. Most of the ways to monetize NFTs in the past have been about individual IP rights for a certain NFT — but have not necessarily been sharing revenue across all of the NFTs, pro-rata, in the same way CoinstitutionDAO once pioneered. Coinage, on the other hand, allows anyone to mint an NFT to become a legit co-owner and earn patronage dividends from our mission to build a sustainable, community-owned crypto media outlet.

It begs the question — could a more broad base of NFT holders be more successful if they had a higher conviction to hold a token in order to support a shared mission?

That is exactly what Coinage is looking to explore. And to be fair, it's not my idea. It was somewhat triggered by a tweet in defense of memecoins from Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko. In that tweet, Toly raised that people often conflate the difference between value and price when it comes to memecoins.

And his point makes sense. Memecoins are pretty efficient at allowing people to express the price at which they are willing to pay for something. (By definition, they will always be more efficient at this than NFTs because they are more fractionalized and fungible.)

But the main downfall of memecoins so far has been that they lack value. That is, the real value of any memecoin has so far trended toward $0 — which makes sense, because they technically have no value. Unlike Bitcoin, Ethereum, or Solana, which all accrue the value of the underlying activity on their chains, these memecoins do not — and as people dump, the price anyone is willing to pay eventually trends toward their value.

But what if you were able to launch a memecoin that flipped exactly the reasons so many memecoins have failed so far?

What if you were able to launch a memecoin with an existing community that boasts one of the highest uniqiue ownership rates of any NFT project? What if you were able to fair launch a memecoin that ensured everyone who put in money all got the same price to start — just like with ConstitutionDAO. And what if everyone who bought the memecoin was aligned in supporting the first community-owned Web3 media outlet?

That is exactly the experiment Coinage is looking to execute. After crossing 100,000 subscribers on YouTube, Coinage earned a Silver Play Button award. That particular award is interesting because YouTube doesn't sell it — you have to earn it by crossing 100,000 subscribers. In that sense, Coinage is already making history by tokenizing it. It's the first time a YouTube Play Button is being tokenized.

But beyond that, Coinage is looking to fix the issues that have plagued other token launches. Unlike other tokens, PLYBTN is being fair launched on PinkSale, one of the largest fair launch platforms in crypto. This will ensure everyone seeking to buy the token all pay the same price. It also (hopefully) will allow the majority of the tokens to fall into the most diamond handed holders, who makeup the core of the Coinage community. To ensure that, we've only shared this project within internal member-only channels first, and now, in this article. By the time word spreads, the fair launch will close. As of press time, we are about 85% of the way into the 50 SOL goal for PLYBTN. After the launch, PLYBTN will potentially be open to the same sniping that has plagued other memecoins — but at the very least by then we hope any of that stands to benefit our holders.

As far as tokenomics are concerned, this may be one of the simplest memecoin launches of all-time. Since Coinage is already a DAO/Coop, all of the tokens that aren't sold through the fair launch will be set for liquidity to support early trading or will be held by the DAO/Coop. More specifically, after the 10% of tokens sold in the fair launch, 51% of the PLYBTN tokens will be priced and sent into a liquidity pool. The remaining 39% will be held by Coinage and steered by our DAO (NFT holders.)

Coinage will keep our community informed as the token launch rolls out via our token-gated Telegram channel. At the very least, we will learn something about how these go. Do not put anything into PLYBTN you are not comfortable losing — and in no way should you expect to profit from the memecoin.

However, if you would like to actually co-own what we do around here, consider minting a Coinage NFT today to join our DAO/Coop to become a co-owner in the first community-owned crypto outlet.

We might just learn (and co-own) something together.

Coinage is a community-owned DAO letting our NFT holders become actual co-owners in one of the fastest-growing Web3 media outlets. Mint an NFT and become a member today to open a path to patronage dividends, or stake with us to support our project. You can catch up on all our Crypto Project of the Year coverage here, or on our YouTube channel. Subscribe to our free Substack to catch all the important headlines from around the crypto world.