From Trenches to Boardrooms, Viktor Uzunov, UEB3 Fund | ETHSofia 2025

[Applause] So, hey everyone. Second take. Well, picture this. It's 2 a.m.

This chart's flashing and there's a bunch of tokens with names you couldn't fathom. You know, Fartcoin, Jelly, Bonk, you name it. And unfortunately, they're all drawing your liquidity into a black hole. How many of you have been in Rockpool? I'm pretty sure, if not everyone, most of you.

I've been there. And I've definitely stood at that same abyss where the meme coins can be a very dark world. But who knows, maybe by the end of uh my segment of and what I have to tell you, I'll give you a new perspective of how memecoins can be and what they can actually become. So, I've had the same fever dream as probably most of you, which is I'll buy this random coin of the internet, uh, be it Salana, Ethereum, whatever, and I'll wake up in, you know, the fever dream in in memecoins. You'll be driving a Lambo and you'll be a millionaire.

Unfortunately, with that fever dream, there's also a very rude awakening that comes. An awakening that I was a part of many times and that I've experienced myself. You wake up in your wallet's gone. it's almost at zero. You've been ruckled and you know it's u unfortunately it's a very big part of crypto.

While this whole realization was happening and while I got ruckled so many times I thought that you know a change is needed. It's kind of a shift in mentality or you know something that just generally moves the uh the industry and the segment of memecoins into a different space. that time I didn't know that I'm going to be part of one of the largest meme coins of 2025 and that you know one of uh the two founders of a coin that we took from Pump Fun all the way to a quarter of a billion dollars. A little bit more on that later. So memecoins as we all know they're a very good way for people to get into the world of crypto.

They're easy to buy. They're very relatable. Um they don't require this like very complex team or this very high tech development. you know, you don't need a VC you that is going to fund you. You don't need a big developer team.

Obviously, with the emergence of platforms like Pump Fun or Bonk, you know, other launchpads, launching a memecoin takes 2 minutes and a little bit of creativity and imagination. You need an idea. You need an idea that people can relate to and you also need an idea where people are going to be able to get fired up by. We all know they're most of them pure hype, but we've built lasting billions of dollars worth projects based on pure hype that have transitioned into way more than you just a pure memecoin. We call it a tribe, you know, we call it a community.

We call it many things in the world of crypto, but this is one of the most essential things that memecoins present. An ideology, something that people relate to and something that can ignite very, very quickly. Obviously, when we're talking about memecoins and growing large businesses, we've seen many millionaires get born by crypto. How long did it take for the first Bitcoin millionaire to get, you know, to um to develop with Salana, with Ethereum, you know, with all the bitcoins, it's taken many, many years at most times. With memecoins, we've seen this overnight.

We all know coins like Fartcoin, I know, absurd name, but nonetheless, one of the biggest meme coins in the world. Um, Pepe Jelly I I vividly remember waking up in the morning and uh couple of you in the crowd were actually with me when I realized it. You wake up and Jelly had gone from a couple of million market cap to 250 overnight. You know, that's an insane spike. This is only possible with memecoins.

No other project, no other asset class, if we can because I think we can definitely um put memecoins into asset into an asset class of their own at the moment. No other asset class has been able to achieve all of this and achieve it so quickly and with such ease. To give you a little bit of perspective what we built and again it started as a joke what memes generally are. A friend of mine called me late December of 24 and he asked me by the way do you know how we can create meme coins? Um you know I I've been in the crypto industry for a while.

Pump Fund had had its fair share of success already. So, we decided, he gave me this whole pitch. He's German. He gave me this whole pitch about how Elon Musk has a little bit of a romance with uh one of the political parties in Germany. And he thinks this could be interesting.

At the time, we all know Elon Musk has had plenty of romances with many politicians, with many ideologies. So, you know, it wasn't anything overly exciting. Unknowingly to us, a few weeks later on 9th of January, he decided to host um a Twitter live session with that same party. Obviously, here's Twitter, now X. Um and you know, for us, that meant quite a lot.

We were the only memecoin on the market that actually had any relevance between Elon and AFD. Pure luck. None of us saw that happening. None of us knew that he's going to host him. None of us knew that he's actually going to do something about it.

is as you can see from the chart that we had from the 9th a very slow growth started happening. We kind of got to about the $30 million market cap which again anyone of you that's ever done a memecoin you get it from pump fund to $30 million market cap. It's it's incredible. Around there we decided to take it serious. It wasn't a joke.

Now we started seeing as a business. my partner in this uh someone that's been into developing digital businesses for the last 30 years and myself I was an investment banker for 10 years in London. We started to see this as an actual business. Again, to me coming from traditional finance, this was absurd. It's it's a coin that has no intrinsic value.

It has absolutely nothing, no utility, has nothing to it, and it's worth $30 million. We started to take it more seriously. we started to invest the little money that we had been able to take out of the project at the very time into developing it. Um, one of the other sponsors that that is probably here in the crowd somewhere, the market maker Vortex got involved with us around that time as well. Uh, we got involved with Mixc, one of the leading exchanges in the world.

And as you can see, right around the end of January, things really started happening. We went on a at least to me it seemed at the time a meteoric rise where we went to close to $250 million market cap which to us was uh pretty insane. Um Vortex who are also going to be speaking later from what I understand are going to speak a little bit more on uh how we actually got there algorithmically but they did something very interesting for us. They gave us the idea that we can be a little bit different to other people in the memecoin space. Normally what founders of memecoins do is they get to a certain level and well as we all know they rugpool.

We could have rugpulled. Yes, it was it was very hard for us to look at wallets that are constantly growing at a time had multiple million dollar figures. Obviously liquidity wouldn't allow us but we decided to be as funny as it sounds in the world of crypto ethical. We decided that we're going to sell on the way up and our market maker let us know in a very convenient for everyone's time that we've kind of reached the top of this thing. Did we hope it's going to get to that billion dollar and we're going to see that $1 mark?

Yeah, obviously. Who doesn't? Everyone that is in meme coins. This is the main dream. You get millions of coins for a few hundred and then you sell them for $1 a piece.

They told us um around the 220 million mark that they're seeing very limited growth and we stopped selling something again something that we did not in the beginning of this journey even think we're going to do. One of the main lessons they made us realize and kind of gave us a little bit of education on one of the reasons why memecoins are not where they could and should be is a very primal human emotion which is greed. All of us doesn't matter how much money we have. We obviously we were fortunate that we had made a couple of dollars before we started this. But as time went by, it's very hard as a human being for you to control yourself and not pull the trigger and just be like, nah, whatever.

So, we stopped selling about $220 million as a team and we just let the market take over. We can all see the big red candle. It happened. Um the market did bounce back for quite significant amount of time but around the middle of February it got to a stage where a the crypto market started going down. Memecoin sentiment kind of went to an all-time low and the project quite honestly never recovered after many lessons were learned.

Quite a few people made a lot of money. We're very realistic. Quite a pe a good amount of people probably lost some money. But this is how the market works and it's a lesson for us and for everyone else. So kind of brings me to the next point.

Long gone are the days where crypto is uh and not just crypto meme coins are just these u funny pictures on the internet. They're very relatable. They're very easy to understand. Now they're very related to social causes. How many coins apart you know obviously ours even for AFD.

It was related to the movement in Germany with the AFD. There's been a bunch of coins that have supported charities, um, social causes. Even with Charlie, we saw this with Charlie Kirk couple weeks ago. The moment that, you know, I I think most of you know what happened a couple weeks ago with him. Immediately, there was a meme coin that hit $50 million market cap within less than 24 hours.

It now shows us that meme coins are, yes, a vessel, a tool for people to make money and they're an asset class of their own. But at the same time, memes in general have become this intrinsic part of pop culture, of everyday life. And they're not just funny pictures we share. They're also, you know, a tool to find to fight social injustice or shed light onto topics that are hot for that particular period of time. What they've also done is they've given birth to a lot of innovation companies and platforms like Pump Fund um like Phantom you know Phantom wallet is one of the big DEX wallets out there.

Even Twitter Twitter wouldn't be the same without memecoins and without the attention that they bring Pump Fund wouldn't be where they are. They just did a couple of months ago they did a half a billion dollar raise based on their token. And what what does their company do? Creates memecoins. Phantom Wallet for a very very long time was together with Pump Fund, one of the most profitable companies in crypto.

They were raking in millions of of dollars today based on um the memecoin hype and uh what Salana was able to do. Salana itself one of the largest coins out there. I've been a Salana Maxi for a very long time got to an all-time high because of memecoins and because of all the attention and all the volume that it was giving. So, we can honestly say that meme coins now, they're here to stay. They're going to continue to be a very intrinsic part of the market.

And you know the creme de la creme, the president of the United States created his own memecoin. We all remember that unfortunate event and we all know how that ended. But it shows you that they're way way way bigger than what we thought they're going to get to. Coming to my next point, web 3 itself wouldn't be where it is without memecoins. One of the main idea is that it brought mainstream attention to the industry.

People that had never heard about layer 1, layer 2, they had no idea what crypto was, how it works. My parents were in their 60s. They knew what Dogecoin was, what Bonk was. They've heard about Pepe. They've heard about them because they're very easy to understand and people genuinely talk about them a lot more than they talk about anything else in crypto.

The only other asset I would say is more hyped than memecoins and people normally it's kind of a polarizing opinion on my behalf is Bitcoin because again Bitcoin it was the first is the big daddy of crypto. Memecoins have had a similar rise to fame in a very in a lot quicker time. Obviously like everything else in investments doesn't matter if it's crypto doesn't matter if it it's traditional banking. to those of you that haven't been part of traditional banking and or the vice versa people that are just in traditional finance it the the topic is very is very unique people normally ask if crypto is a Ponzi scheme very often we get that question daily at the same time coming from traditional finance I can tell you now traditional finance is one of the biggest Ponzi schemes ever if we have to compare it to um the same standards that we hold crypto accountable for how many financial crisis have we because of traditional finance. Crypto being a lot smaller market than the traditional finance market.

Crypto is sitting at around $4 trillion which Apple alone is bigger than this. Has a lot of room to grow, has a lot of lessons to grow. Crypto on its own and memecoins in particular is unfortunate in a way that it's uh living in the world of social media and a world of internet obviously wouldn't be possible without it. So the the issues and the growing pains that we've seen in the traditional finance space, we just don't see those on social media because they were 150 years ago or in the 70s, in the '9s, there's been so many big recessions. Something that I touched on a little bit earlier is um we've seen many millionaires get born with obviously with uh Salana, Bitcoin, Ethereum, all the major coins, but again, they took a lot longer.

Crypto sold a dream very successfully. Memecoins got it on a completely new level. I personally know more than 10 people that made a very random investment in socoin. Couple of weeks later they were millionaires. A lot of them lost it back.

We all know how it works. But you know the dream is not um just a dream. It's a reality and and it could be. Let's not get things twisted. They've got a darker memes have a darker side.

You know, they're not all good and you know, they're as everything else in life, they have two sides. Um, we're very painfully aware of the ruck pool culture and um, how most of us have been on the receiving end of it. All the scams, everything that happened with with meme coins and all the lessons that we learned while we were developing one and later on while we were trying to build a more sustainable business kind of got us with the realization that I've now used to build my current business on. 20% of something is better than 100% of nothing. Again, one of the biggest downfalls of people that trade meme coins is that all of us kind of refresh that page and we're hoping that that profit is now double or triple or four times bigger.

Taking profits, we all know, everyone that's done memecoins will probably agree with me. We all have a million screenshots of possibilities where we could have just taken profit and move on. Most of us have more screenshots that they have actual profits. I'm 100% sure. So yeah, 20% of something is better than 100% or nothing.

This is how I manage my current business and this is how I look at life in general. So there's a better way to do things. There's a more sustainable way and I'm going to be very honest. When we started building a memecoin, when we were developing it, then when we started building the current business, which is a investment fund, we didn't do it for the better of mankind or you know, I didn't have this ethical dream that we're going to change the industry. But the more we grew and the more things developed, we started to see that it is possible and that there's many lessons to be learned from the journey meme coins have taken everyone in industry on.

The experience really helped me shape who I am as as an investor, as a trader, even as a man. As poetic as may it may sound, most of us, if not all of us, joined web 3 so we can better our lives mostly financially um to but also to disrupt the current system. One of the biggest problems we have is that the current financial system is very stale. Technological advancement is very slow. crypto has been a staple force in changing all of that.

So, just as a final remark from me, the trenches of memecoins are very unpredictable. They're brutal. Um, but they're a true training ground. They can teach you to adapt in real time and to adapt your behavior in real time. The boardroom I sit now in my office looks very glamorous and looks very, you know, very glitz and polished.

But my DNA as an investor and my DNA as a trader was forged in the trans trenches of crypto. Don't dismiss the chaos that meme coins present. Embrace it and learn from it. That's all I have to say about memecoins. [Applause] [Music] Heat