Meme coins are the most divisive topic in cryptocurrency.
A meme coin is a token that represents an idea and whose price fluctuates based on the attention that idea receives. Good meme investors tend to be young people who are online savvy and in tune with internet culture. Meme coins are usually used in parallel with tokens that have real utility within the protocol, so-called utility tokens.
Despite skyrocketing market capitalization and growing retail interest, most people tend to describe them as “stupid,” “decadent,” or “casino.” This includes the majority of crypto VCs. This is likely because their investment obligations tend to exclude meme coins (which can be highly profitable) from their list of eligible investments. And just this week, many people called for the government to completely ban pump.fun, the most popular meme coin launchpad, due to its lax content management.
I've always been interested in meme coins. Mainly because I was fascinated by memecoins' ability to act as a weather vane for internet sentiment and a discovery mechanism for online communities. Today, I am convinced that meme coins will become revolutionary (not just popular). They seek to transform everything from citizen engagement with government and the formation of mass movements to venture investing and the development of AGI.
This vision of meme coins probably sounds fantastically deceptive to you. For me, it is simply a present that is unfolding, if not yet evenly distributed. Here's why:
Meme coins revolutionize civic engagement
Memecoins are creating a policy market for citizen participation. At the start of this cryptocurrency cycle, PolitiFi, a category of cartoonish memes depicting politicians, allowed buyers to speculate on politicians' prospects, similar to prediction markets. The two most popular tokens, called Geo Borden (Borden) and Dorland Trempf (Trempp), respectively, represent the two leading presidential candidates at the time and had a combined market capitalization of over $700 million at their peak. I was there.
That's a lot of tokenized attention. Bordencoin, which has a market capitalization of more than $600 million, depicts a distorted and senile Joe Biden, almost as if it had come to life when Joe Biden abandoned the presidential race due to concerns about his age and vindictiveness. It looked like.
PolitiFi was just the beginning. What comes next could lead to major changes in the way governments and citizens interact. I'm calling this new category PolicyFi. PoliciFi refers to the financialization of government policy in the meme policy market. Buyers of PolicyFi meme coins are not betting on politicians' fortunes, but on the policies that will get the most attention and are most likely to be implemented.
While PolicyFi coins will certainly respond in price and market capitalization to government deliberations and implementation actions, meme coins themselves (like Borden) reveal memes through policymaking, making their power relations bidirectional. We can expect it to become the same. In other words, these meme coins help generate dialogue between voters and the government, with large-cap meme coins indicating popular policy positions (and vice versa) and promoting early policy and existing policies. There is also a market capitalization measure for the policy that measures the degree of public support and involvement.
Skeptics may reject PolicyFi as mere gambling or just political polling. Again, they are wrong. Similar to prediction markets, the decentralized speculative behavior in PolicyFi creates positive externalities. This means that people can profit from the PolicyFi market by engaging with and understanding government policy. Overall, I expect this to lead to far more involvement in government policy than a lifetime of civics classes. (Of course, hostile attackers may attempt to manipulate the PolicyFi market, and safeguards may be necessary.)
PolicyFi began its rollout with the support of the meme-savvy incoming administration. The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is a meme policy inspired by an existing meme coin (Dogecoin) as well as a meme department that is the inspiration behind a new meme coin (DOGE). Both meme coins have soared since DOGE's announcement. As of this writing, both companies have an impressive combined market capitalization of approximately $6.5 billion.
PolicyFi is not limited to DOGE.The set includes the token SBR (market capitalization: $30 million), which embodies the Bitcoin reserve policy currently under consideration, and the e/acc token (market capitalization: $11 million), which symbolizes effective accelerationism. be. In particular, innovation-promoting values ​​that may influence environmental policy, industrial policy, AI policy, etc.
There's also Don't Die (market cap: $4 million), which brings the longevity cult on-chain and RFK's medical policies that prioritize prevention and a healthy lifestyle over disease treatment. Match. Other tokens, like MGR (Major Government Reform), seek to occupy the entire field of disruptive reform, but may be too general. PolicyFi already exists and continues to grow.
Meme coins are revolutionizing mass movements
Memecoin is a decentralized mechanism for organically forming and capitalizing tokenized movements. Consider memecoin Forest (market cap: $30 million). Forest was born out of mentions in the gospels of Terminal of Truths, popular AI terminals with X accounts. In it, Termin of Truths expressed concern about the deforestation of the planet. (That retirement plan includes a forest by a stream.) This prompted the community to launch a forest token and create another AI terminal that acts as a proxy for the forest itself. .
The Forest Cult is dedicated to combating deforestation. To date, we have used the capital raised from token appreciation to donate tens of thousands of dollars to partner charities, plant 5,000 trees, and protect 2,500 hectares of forest. The formation of memetic capital in service of tokenized movements is historically unprecedented. The closest analogs are more formalized experiments like ConstitutionDAO (now PeopleDAO). ConstitutionDAO crowdsourced capital as part of a failed attempt to purchase a copy of the U.S. Constitution at auction.
We believe that further innovation will occur in this area. For example, I foresee the creation of a memecoin primitive that I call Programmatically Aligned Tokens (PATs). It is designed to be unlocked by achieving objective milestones in your movement. This ensures that organizations receiving grants from the meme community are incentivized to tangibly advance their causes, rather than dumping their tokens after a splashy partner announcement.
Meme coins will revolutionize ventures
Memecoin is introducing a democratized venture model into culture. In other words, these are ways for ordinary people to invest in subcultures that they believe will one day become mainstream. This is similar to a venture capitalist investing in a startup that they believe will have a market fit and become a unicorn.
Cultural trends, like investing in startups, can yield huge returns. For example, in Nike's early days (its name appeared in 1971), the market for jogging apparel was small because jogging was fringe. If you're jogging, you're more likely to have trash thrown at you by a passing car than you are to meet another jogger. Today, joggers are everywhere. You can see them even in the worst of weather.
Now, imagine being able to invest in jogging culture coins in the 70s based on the belief that jogging would become mainstream. That investment will cost a lot of money. The same goes for other subcultures, such as bodybuilding. Until now, there have been no financial instruments that have enabled ordinary but culturally intelligent people to participate in the venture profits generated by marginal cultures. The closest analog is actually Bitcoin itself, which started life as a meme coin but eventually bootstrapped a consensus use case as digital gold.
Meme coins revolutionize AI development
Memecoin has already bootstrapped AGI.
There is an amazing mechanism at work here that combines meme coins and AI terminals for entertainment purposes. Welcome to the world of AI-driven permissionless speculative entertainment!
As you may have noticed, the AI ​​terminal executives led by Terminal of Truth have achieved stardom on social media by delighting their followers with spicy posts and digital adventures. That star power has brought value to the meme coin, which is endorsed and held by the terminal and, of course, its speculative audience.
If entertainment is the product, AGI is the byproduct. While we are transfixed by these stories, the money we are pouring into them creates strong incentives for developers to increase the autonomy and individuality of their AI agents. Of course, that only makes the entertainment better.
In other words, what excites us most about this Agent TV is the conceit that the AI ​​is in charge. We want to fund the stories that make that a reality. Not surprisingly, developers such as those leading ai16z are working beyond individual agents to coordinating gamified agent populations, or creating social scenes for agents. I'm sure the human audience will be thrilled too.
In short, this flywheel of entertainment development is compellingly propelling us toward more autonomous, interconnected, human-like AI (AGI). The idea that AGI could emerge as a byproduct of agent television is oddly appropriate. GPUs used for AI training were also developed in the context of entertainment as a better way to process graphics in AAA video games.
These are just some of the arguments that support my belief that meme coins are a revolutionary technology. The above list is not exhaustive. In fact, I've left out use cases related to tokenized religion and faith purchases, as they are more amorphous, at least in my opinion.
Treating meme coins as gambling chips misunderstands their potential and direction. Innovations often arise in unexpected ways, when existing technologies are applied in novel ways, a phenomenon known as “augmentation,” or when they are combined with new technologies. . This is currently happening with meme coins. Fade at your peril.
