Are Memecoins Dead… or Just Waiting to Return? - TOKEN2049 Dubai 2025

All right, guys. We are going to max extract alpha on this one. So, I'm Jordy. I'm the founder of Seleni. Uh, we have an all-star crew here.

Very relevant to the topic. Let's start with you, Ansom. Um, we were here last year. We were talking, you know, it was whiff Bonk at the time. We This was before your boxing fight, so you know, things were still going quite well in the market.

Oh my god. Um, you know, the good thing is this whole cycle has been a memecoin cycle. I think it's fair to say that's really been the defining factor of the last couple years. And we've been learning in real time things that work, things that don't work. Everything's been tried under the sun.

Um, what's like, you know, since last year, what have you learned maybe hasn't worked? Maybe let's start a little bit on the negative side. Um, I definitely think the thesis of the memecoin super cycle that we were talking about last year has played out pretty evidently I think in the market. It's dominated volumes all of last year. And before it was just like us crypto native crypto dgens trading these things and launching them um across the board and then people realized how much money uh traders were making off these and a lot of other entities came into the market um and tried to get in on the the fund as well.

So I think that's when it got like the negative externalities. You you started to see some of those. I would say like the best probably best example of the negatives would be like Melania um Libra. Um and the issue is there's like there's organic meme coins which form just the same way that trends do on Tik Tok or Twitter or all these social medias. And then there's these structured memecoins which are launched by uh teams with a lot of capital who are purely trying to as you said extract as much as possible um as quickly as possible.

And when you have launches like that it's really hard for them to have um to last a long time. That's what happened with some of these coins that were launched by I would say like bad actors not not great intentions. So I think that at the onset what what people are trying to do is important. Yeah. Yeah, I mean obviously we had Murad in Singapore.

He had I think maybe one of the most viewed token talks ever talking how you know you disconnect the the product from the coin and sometimes just the product is the coin and actually that's the easiest it's the sugar high you know you just don't have to overthink it and do a white paper analysis you just look at a picture or or name. um that blew up, went incredibly well and around January, February, um there's a few different takes and I want to get your thoughts, Joe. I think some people say, look, it's too high of a rake. Like the casino is taking too high of a rake. It's not letting things breathe.

That's kind of maybe like what we saw. Um is it that or is it just normal market cycles, liquidity cycles? I mean, we've seen a lot of things go up and down, including in Trafi as well. Yeah. I mean, I think it's very easy for people to point to a single data point and try to correlate the cause for the draw down in in memecoins.

And you could say, oh, is Melania or Trump or Lever or whatever. But let me be super clear. Tesla's stock was down 55% over the same time. uh Palunteer uh you know Google, Apple, all these meggaap stocks were also decimated during the exact same time that memecoins had effectively topped. So if you look at memecoins in a vacuum, you could try to point at one specific event, but in reality it was all risk assets because of the uncertainty around Trump's trade policy.

And memecoins are arguably the furthest out on the risk curve and those are the things that are going to get hit the most which is why you saw memecoins go down 70 80 90 99% and lo and behold we've seen actually risk assets tick up over the past few weeks with some of the uncertainty around Trump's trade policy kind of subsiding a bit or the tone changing and guess what rips first fartcoin right it's up like 600% right so you know I I again I wouldn't look at meme cocoins in vacuum and think, "Oh, there's a specific data point that happened in January and that's why memecoins were over." I think it's really easy for folks that trade meme coins that when their net worth is plummeting to blame something like, "Oh, it's pump fund. They're an extractive service." It's just that your bags are lower. And more importantly, risk assets are drawing down overall.

I can assure you that no one would be complaining about memecoins or Pump Fun or any of these services that enable memecoins to be made if the markets were at new all-time highs. And Carl, I mean, you probably have the most pure venture approach to this. I know maybe like in your PA you tried to be in the trenches with with everybody else. Um, how do you see uh memecoins as a overall sector? I mean, there's obviously like a picks and shovels play as well.

How do you view it like going forward? Yeah, so generally like the two best businesses in crypto are trading and asset issuance. So platforms like pump.f fun epitomize both those in a perfect way. Um so generally look like memecoins are going to evolve over time and we've already seen this start to play out where you know for the past decade it's really been things like cat and dog pictures but now we saw all sorts of new types of coins this past cycle that never really existed before.

An example is we saw new companies raising capital almost in the form of a um like basically making capital easily accessible to everyone to buy in. And as part of that, you have brand new uh companies that are being built and they're able to get much more attention on their companies and tokens because the market price is going up compared to before. So in terms of user acquisition, it's actually a lot easier to launch a token, use that as a way to rally the community, rally users to try your product and engage with it than sometimes going through the traditional capital raising structure of venture capital. So in general, we saw new types of companies raising money on chain directly. Uh we saw idea coins, I think housecoin is one of those.

We saw others in the uh last cycle like peanut the squirrel like hey we shouldn't have the government coming in and like taking squirrels like people rallied around these different like fundamental ideas. So I think we're going to continue to see the progression from just a static image to um sort of like getting into the heart of culture and what does culture say? Um and then ultimately I think we're going to move more into creator coins over time. There's always going to be a place for static memecoin pictures to exist, but if you look at a platform like pumpf fun, if you look at it just as a memecoin launch uh launchpad, you've already missed the plot. Like that was last year.

They're doing live streaming. They're doing DMs. They're building a mobile experience. So, they're moving more into content creation and curation for users. And I think coins are actually gonna enable both communities and creators to monetize a heck of a lot more than they do on traditional platforms like you know Tik Tok and YouTube.

I mean what what is your view on hyper this hyper financialization? Um do you just say okay it's inevitable so I'm not going to do a judgment on this like whether it's a good thing or bad thing for society to hyperfinancialize everything to this extent. Yeah, I mean I think it's terrific and it actually creates better users. And let me give you an example. Sports betting basically didn't really exist 30 years ago.

If you bet on sports, you had to go like have a bookie come to your house and pay cash or you had to go to a Vegas sports book or Atlantic City sports book to go trade. It was not ubiquitous. And you know, our parents generation might watch the football game or watch the basketball game, but you know, they probably weren't engaging with it regularly. This creation of both fantasy sports and sports betting has made much more engaged users where now if I talk to anyone here about their favorite sports team, they know so many more statistics than they did before. They're reading more.

They're more educated because there's financial opportunities as part of that platform. So the financialization of everything has hit sports, gaming, equities, culture, and so memecoins are the epitome of this. And it's fundamentally making better users and more engaged users. So, it's I'd say mostly positive in that direction. And there's other parts of our culture that haven't been financialized yet.

And I think as an investor, I'm looking for what hasn't been financialized and could be. And then what's the right founder to go ahead and attack that market. Yeah, let's talk about this evolution, Joe. I mean, we um we're looking at this evolution from 2017, ICOs, then we have this NFTTS, and I think Kobe said uh you know, you have like meme coins. Uh, in a way they're sort of like NFTTS.

They're just, you know, uh, meme coins with picture kind of. Um, do you think over the next couple years we get a completely like new evolution of it? And does AI play something into it? Like what are the possible things that kind of make 2025, 2026? Yeah, sure.

I mean, it actually I was going to do dubvtail off of the hyper financialization, you know, question because it's relating to the one you just asked. So turns out that prior to the global financial crisis in in the United States uh all of you know kind of call it risk assets global equities US equities etc were about four times US GDP and they peaked last year at 6.3x uh that's a huge leap in terms of the financialization of the entire financial industry or beyond the financial industry just the financialization of everything and that's in traditional financial markets. We've since pulled back to about 5x GDP over the, you know, the detonation of the the stock market over the past couple of months. My point is is that we've been hyperfinancializing for quite some time and digital assets, blockchain, memecoins, web 3, etc.

is providing basically a a a wide open gate for hyperfinancialization to run through. Coupled with the infrastructure now in web 3 is actually good enough to provide some of these innovative things that are going to be coming. So, you know, for example, people always ask me like, what's going to be the next killer use case for web 3 or crypto? And the answer is no one knows. If you look at something like the history of artificial intelligence, it's been around since the 1940s.

And I can assure you that no one in the 1970s, the 1980s, the 1990s, the 2000s. No one was saying, "Hey, I really want an app where I can chat with something and it's going to tell me every possible answer for any question that I may have." It happens as a result of a lot of the infrastructure that's been built around compute and broader forms of AI research. That's the same thing that's happening with crypto right now. So, for example, I think the infrastructure is actually good enough to start building a lot more consumer-based applications.

So, at asymmetric, we're actually launching right now the first ever cryptovc fund that's exclusively focused on consumer apps. And why do I say that? Because look at what happened when the president of the United States, arguably the most popular person on the planet, launched his memecoin. What did he launch it on? He launched on Salana and the chain hummed along with no issues.

That was the biggest test of a blockchain in the history of blockchain and nothing failed. So in my opinion, innovators and entrepreneurs coupled with I would say positive regulatory policy that's now going to be coming out of the United States for entrepreneurs and innovators, they now have the infrastructure and the kind of green light to start experimenting with this new type of stuff. Right? So if you take AI as an example, we saw in Q4 of 2024 this massive speculative bubble where people were, you know, chasing every new AI based memecoin and token. And like let's be honest, these were basically little apps that tweeted.

That was it. There's nothing innovative about that. It was a speculative bubble. However, that was kind of the 1.0 version of AI agent memecoins.

What's the 2.0 version? Don't know. But you have to pay attention to it. I actually think that now with things like MPC, which is a protocol that enables uh you to kind of stitch together various AI services and AI agents can communicate to web 2based services.

That's where you're going to see a lot of innovation around the orchestration of AI. So, what AI agents and memecoins associated with MCP and the way that that's going to shape like how is that going to work? What is it going to look like? Don't know. But that's something that I'm keeping a pulse on as it relates to AI and memecoins.

Okay. I mean, maybe we can get even more specific. Sometimes you're really at the a vanguard of, you know, some new trend, some new concept. If I were to tell you that in Q3 there's going to be a massive memecoin, like a $5 billion memecoin launching, would you guess that it's like a culture coin, one of these movement coins, like just like another dog or cat? Like what what's your sense that where we where are we now?

Going to predict the future on stage. Um I think that it's going to relate probably to some event in like globally like macro wise. uh something that people can rally around from that regard because what when meme coins do the best like the ones that do really really well it's because of some zeitgeist that people either haven't experienced before or weren't um looking forward to before that event happened. Um so I think like say economy worsens and the tariff stuff continues like throughout Q2 going into Q3 if there was some meme around the slowing of the economy or some meme around what people could rally around in that in that regard that could be something. So like a cult movement type of coin in that way.

Um but I think it's it's kind of two you kind of have two different types of meme coins that emerge. You have one that emerges just organically like like I said around a colder movement and the other side is like the businesses with actual revenue that just use the me mimemetics and attention to bootstrap attention. Um so like Bon is a really good example of that because they make a ton of money off their businesses like Bonkbot. They just launched a a competitor, a pump fund, a launchpad. So they make money, but Bon was also really good at bootstrapping community because they air dropped at the onset to all the important developers like a lot of the uh Salana traders early on like a lot of Salana OGs at a time where Salana was really at it at its lows around I think 8 $10.

Um so is that more of like a brand building exercise like you know you build a gap or you know Louis Vuitton like Bon and maybe Pangu some of these ones is just around creating a brand and then that just intrinsically holds value. I think so you you can create your IP a lot of different ways. Um Bon I think did it starting with a memecoin. Pangu is uh I think an example did the memecoin afterwards and so they already had this existing IP as an NFT collection biggest NFT collection I think in crypto like well known by millions of people around the world have their toys selling in Walmart and all these things. So people know their IP and their brand, but there was no direct way for all these millions of people who know this brand to participate in the upside of it continue to grow to something uh possibly like Disney or something like that.

And what memecoins allow uh that to happen is because anybody can hold a dollar, $10, $100 of the coin. So it allows you to grow your community um like a lot bigger in that way. And let's get a little bit into like the alpha section. And I mean there's thousands of people. Everyone's buying meme coins.

You guys are some of the, you know, world experts at this. You've actually managed to do some good trades, I think, along the way. Um Joe, I know you've you've talked about some of those. And it's lucky, man. Just get lucky over and over.

Look, the volatility of meme coins is it's it's part and parcel. Like, you know, that's the best part for some people. Um, what that means though is like it'll go up and then you'll have this upn and if you don't realize it, it's it's down. and what's what's going on through your uh decision- making process when you try to figure out what's the time horizon of this meme coin because you have something like a JibLi where everybody probably jiblified themselves and you know somebody made a token and okay there's something going on versus you know um like a whiff that just has legs or you know it's very relevant to that cultural moment or fartcoin um how do you look at your horizon yeah I I mean, so there's there's two ways. One is from, you know, the hedge fund side that I run, there's obviously this constraints around liquidity and size and even execution.

And then like things that I do personally, very very different risk profile, right? Because you could think of like the pro stuff, which is like most retail memecoin traders, you know, you're kind of gambling. It's kind of a lottery ticket or or you really just want to be a part of a community or something, right? But on the hedge fund side, you know, you can't buy the latest pumpf fund graduated token because, well, I can't buy $20,000 worth of something to move the needle at all at a hedge fund. It makes no sense.

That could make sense for an individual trader. The second thing though is we track a lot of what available liquidity in the pools on chain are available. And so if you look at things like Farcoin, Trump, even Popcat, these are um tokens that have large liquidity pools and a ton of trading volume. And there's a concept in investing and trading, which is that liquidity begets liquidity. And you can see this with things like Fartcoin because there's so much liquidity available that enables more and more people to trade it which then means market makers will carry more inventory to make markets in it to create tighter spreads which then means more people are going to trade it which means there's more liquidity available.

So for example, if we were to buy and sell Farcoin, we're probably trading in and out of it as a trading instrument instrument to generate P&L or alpha for the fund as opposed to having some fundamental thesis on hot air rising. That's not how we run our fund, right? So, so it is a trading instrument, but there are other mechanics at play, right? So, there are certain meme coins that will explode and it becomes almost a self-fulfilling prophecy because when a memecoin blows up really big, market makers want to make money on it, so they gobble up inventory, exchanges want to list it, and now all of a sudden there's this almost market mechanics driving the the long-term kind of viability or sustainability of these meme coins. One thing that has changed uh over the past, you know, I would say six to nine months or so is a lot of these uh meme coins get listed almost immediately on places like Hyperlquid, which is, you know, for whatever it's worth.

It's a DEX that requires no KYC AML. You can debate whether or not it's actually a centralized exchange or not. That's not the point. Is that retail and a lot of traders go there and there's tons of these meme coins listed there that you can actually short. So, the funding rates on those are super super jacked.

Like the math makes absolutely no sense to hold these things short for like the duration of a year. And what eventually ends up happening is what you saw over the past few weeks where Zero Bro and like all of these sort of meme coins that have been destroyed just ripped five 6x in a matter of a few days because of these massive short squeezes. So, the point that I'm getting to is that as I think about, you know, trading it from the fund side, there has to be ample liquidity, uh, and there there likely has to be enough trading volume to justify being able to get in and out of positions big enough. If you're just doing something that's, you know, more of a retail speculative trade, treat it like you would treat anything else that's speculative, right? Like, if you get in early and the thing doubles, maybe you want to take out your original principle and have a free trade, right?

like kind of think about it like you're at the blackjack table or the crops table or something like that. I don't recommend this from an investing standpoint, but if you're going to be trading meme coins, like let's be honest, a lot of it is entertainment and a lot of it is speculative gambling. Do you Anson, do you have to be on chain to buy the coin? Like if it's on a big centralized exchange, does it mean it's already too late? It's not early anymore.

Like um there's there's multiple different stages I think that people trade like the trenches, I guess you would call them at. It really depends. Uh there's I know people that scan literally every new pair that launches on on pump fund like before they bond and all that. There are people who are uh scanning and looking for certain attributes that these coins have, who's launching them, like what the uh liquidity like all that stuff early on. They look at that stuff and then there's other people who like will wait to in like the 1 to 10 mil range uh after they've traded for a few weeks and it's like oh like because 90% of these coins die early like before you even get to that that point.

So, if you have something that's been around for a few weeks, hanging around in like 1 to 10 mil range, um you kind of can use other metrics like their social media, like how people are talking about it in other chats. Um who the like thought leaders around these coins are, who's trying to make them go viral, how relatable they are to people, and then you can kind of make a more I guess educated bet. Why do you think like some of these uh higheffort coins, you know, like uh Queen uh you have these things sometimes the extra effort and and and the work doesn't work, you know, it doesn't translate as much. Yeah, there's so there's some there's some meme coins that have entire content teams behind the media teams behind them. Um and those are like the more I kind of said earlier like organic versus structured teams.

I think the structured teams can be good and can be effective, but your content can be cringe. So, like if your content is super cringe, doesn't matter how many uh designers. Are you saying it's cringe because they're making versions of you in these videos and they're like making fun of you or why do you say it's cringe? I I think it's like irrespective of me being in the videos or not. I think it's more how it relates to um the general populace, general people.

But yeah, I will say the the AI videos of me are are pretty weird. Um but yeah, I think it depends. It can be really good though because it good content that goes viral. Um memes that do well with that, they're going to get more followers on socials. More people are going to learn about it.

Um people external to crypto are going to learn about it. I think the the best meme coins are ones that people who have no idea what crypto is like, "Oh, that's funny." Or, "Oh, I like that." Um those are the ones that always do the best. Yeah.

Um, I know you guys are all, you know, longtime Salana kind of investors as well, but Carl, let's talk a little bit about the concept of memecoins outside of Salana, even though, you know, this this past year, it's it's obviously attached itself, but we've had base have season, especially with the AI coins. We've had um you know B&B chain I think recently trying to get that going and even were were there like some Tron memes I think uh going on at some point. Uh what what kind of allows fertile ground for these things to grow and like how do you see like uh the non-solana opportunity when it comes to meme coins? There's Salana and there is no second best. I mean if you look at uh I think the reason for that is like look we've been longtime salon investors and the reason is for many years it was the only blockchain where you could build a high performance application where transactions cost a fraction of a penny and so when you talk about meme trading very like mass amounts of volume coming in moving in and out of position it really started on um like except for Dogecoin like a lot of these on Salana because it was just so easy and so cheap to get involved um you didn't need to pay you know pay uh lots of money to create the coin and create the initial liquidity.

The bonding curve really enabled any person here in the audience to go ahead and immediately start launching tokens. So I think once you have a nexus on a platform like Salana and everything is working really well. When you have the most known person in the world, Donald Trump, launching his memecoin on Salana, it's going to be really hard for any sort of blockchain to create a vibrant ecosystem unless they radically change the playbook. And I think there's a number of ways they could go about doing that. Um, one could be creating an even better creatorcoin type economy where you can attract web two creators to come in and start monetizing in new ways.

Uh, it could be a variety of different solutions. But, um, it could even be like an enterprise like a large web 2 enterprise comes in says, "Hey, we want to like enable people to wager and invest in their ideas." Those are ways where maybe you could start to see seepage. But generally, as Joe said, liquidity begets liquidity. It's one of the oldest rules in finance and it's going to be very hard for any sort of ecosystem to break out especially when Salana is performing so well.

There's not chain issues. It's not going down. As as Joe said, um you know, I was talking to Anatoli about this uh from Salana. They had no idea Trump coin was going to launch. They didn't like prepare the wallets and prepare the validators.

It just happened and everything worked um smoothly. And so it's hard to imagine a bigger launch than that taking place and the chain held up quite well. So I it's pretty tough for me to envision any of these other ecosystems really burgeoning on another network uh at at this stage without some fundamental new principles and ideas. Yeah. Let's talk a little bit about the dark side.

Obviously um you know the Libra launch I think led to things coming out that were undercurrents that were building and I think Joe you said that you know it's it's natural you know the incentive sort of play out naturally where if there's some opportunity somebody's going to seize it and then they'll max sees it and and it sort of like plays out. Um, do you do you view these things as like self-healing where it gets too extreme and then you know things like what happened um cause some consequences of some sort or or is it just chaos? Like how do you how do you navigate I mean I just look at human history and go if there's uh an opportunity for people to make money it's going to attract the people that are going to try to do it in an honest and meaningful way. And then there's going to be people that are going to try to scam or be fraudulent. This has been going on for hundreds of years.

Uh snake oil salesmen, uh you know, even up to the point of people like Bernie Maid off who at one point was, you know, the kind of shining star for Tradfi and and in retirement accounts and investing, biggest fraud in US history, right? It's not necessarily about the platform or the technology or the the time and space. it's the person or the people and their intentions. The thing about the internet is it increases variance amongst the types of people on the internet. And to your point, you know, the dark side of this, like there's some pretty dark sides of the internet that I think most of us tend to steer away from, but it does exist.

And that's going to be the same thing when you provide a permissionless network for people to actually do things in a permissionless way if they have bad intentions. And so, do I think that uh you know it's it's wrong? Of course. Like fraud, outright fraud is wrong. Full stop.

I don't think anybody's debating that. But the notion that this is somehow representative of oh, this is all of web 3 or crypto or blockchain is nonsense because the same thing could be applied to any industry that had speculation from from the onset. So, but from the outset, like from the consumer standpoint, because you try to have one metric and it gets gamed, you're like, "Oh, let's look at the the volume." Well, there's let's look at the number of wallets. Let's look at the liquid, like even the liquidity because if they have all the tokens, they can put a bunch of them.

Um, no one really knows who's behind it until a lot later. Yeah, sure. I mean, no one really knew that Bernie Maidoff was a was a fraud either until after the fact, right? They believed him to be who he was and he was out in front. I think the other thing is though that most people that are coming into crypto through memecoins have no concept of wallets or pools or deck screener or any of these tools that are actually out there.

One of the things that I think crypto is very good at doing is saying very myopic and in this vacuum-like, you know, lens of what they see on crypto Twitter and on Telegram. Whereas when Trump launched his memecoin, half a million new people that had literally never owned crypto bought a memecoin. They didn't know anything about extraction or liquidity pools or wallets or concentrations or lockups or tokens or anything to that extent. And I think that you're going to end up still having people scam no matter what. But as long as we can actually, I think, continue to move the industry forward so that it disincentivizes those types of actors, you'll end up with, you know, greater prosperity and ultimately better innovation in the space.

Yeah. And and can I add on to that? Like the the big, you know, blockchains are permissionless networks. And so, sure, you could create a permission network where only a select few vetted individuals can create memes. But I think when we see permission forms of the internet, we actually stay away from those.

And people want more information, more truth, more ability to share your point of view. So part of having a permissionless system by definition is that there's going to be nefarious actors that can come in and participate. So it's somewhat of a cost to the system, but generally we're seeing even now like much more better screeners to help catch these types of, you know, serial fraudsters um to so that way consumers know. So permissionless systems, you're going to have fraudsters, but there's an ecosystem being built to help protect consumers. Even things like Libra, if you The thing about like pumpf fun memecoins is they're a standard.

It's like your billion tokens. It's launched on a bonding curve. So the biggest scams have been ones outside of the pump. Fund almost like safety and smart contract. That was really the genesis for it.

So part of permissionless systems that's going to happen, but by and large there's so much more positive growth than the small amount of nefarious hackers. That's And by the way, just remember, I don't know how many of you in this room were around during the 2017 ICO boom, but there were hundreds of scams that were ICOs, and no one said, "Oh, this Ethereum thing's got to end, right? It's just going to be another iteration of scammers and fraudsters when you give them some level of innovation or platform that's permissionless." They're going to do that. And so, buyer beware.

Do do your own research. We're almost out of time. I want to slip in a couple quick final ones. Ansom, you you've uh you've seen a lot of celeb coins come and go. Do you think there's one that can work?

Like is is Kanye coin gonna gonna be a buy or is it um stay away from that, right? A trap question. Um, I do think in general the the reason that a lot of the celeb coins didn't work is because they had um bad intentions from the beginning or there's a few celebrities. I think IG is a good example where she's trying to connect her coin to other businesses that are making revenue and getting attention in other ways. I think celebs that do have large fan bases and are able to do that with the right intentions.

They can do well, but it's like there's just so many bad actors trying to get them to do things the wrong way, which is why a lot of them turn out poorly. But I do think that there are good examples of them. Yeah. Cool. All right, guys.

We're out of time. Hope you enjoyed it. Got some alpha. Thanks, everybody. Thanks,