If you’re a celebrity, Bored Ape Yacht Club is out — and memecoins are in.
BAYC has been a project that was successful in gaining traction among the general public. But they’re passé these days, as shown by flatlining floor prices.
Celebrity memecoins are gaining popularity, a trait that is not found in most cryptocurrency.
Memecoins have a lot of value. Memecoins are critical benchmarking software for blockchains — placeholders for “real” The economic activity which was once a part of the traditional financial system could be transferred to blockchain. To make this happen, the rails need to be capable of handling more than just a few hundred thousands people at once trading memecoins.
Even if some people respond better to ridiculous and useless projects, refusing to engage in the memecoin discussion risks misunderstanding the crypto community’s most passionate members.
Twitter, Telegram, Discord, and cheap blockchains are all places where celebrities can meet crypto.
You can’t find many faults with this if you don’t pearlclutch.
It’s not at all cringe-worthy that Iggy or Caitlyn have their very own memecoins. It’s not as cringe-worthy as Katy Perry’s CrYpTo ClAwS, Kim Kardashian’s Instagram ads for SafeMoon’s clone EthereumMAX and Rand Zuckerberg’s WAGMI song video.
Those stunts felt far more “how do you do, fellow kids” Jenner and Azalea’s camps haven’t done anything like this.
Where countless memecoins have pumped, dumped and flatlined — the classic rug pull trajectory — Caitlyn Jenner’s Ethereum memecoin is chugging along.
Even her memecoin was flipped to Solana. Jenner released the Ethereum-based version just a few weeks after launching the Solana coin. Solana JENNER’s market capitalization had just reached $30 million after an increase of 1,000%.
Jenner’s camp was said to have been scammed by an alleged serial fixer of memecoins, and that the Solana variant should never have been promoted. That made the Solana token — which was now rapidly losing value — an unofficial dud.
You can read more in our opinions section. What is the most significant trend in cryptocurrency? Memecoins have always been the most important trend in crypto
Jenner has pledged that a 3% tax will be paid by the Ethereum JENNER (current market value $5.8m compared to $3.6m in the original) to Trump campaign should the token reach $50m.
Tens of thousand of addresses currently hold celebrity memecoins. These aren’t big cryptos, but they do exist. Memecoins overall — including majors like dogecoin and floki — have over a $52 billion market cap, but still make up less than 5% of the crypto market, excluding bitcoin.
Jenner’s tokens are less than 1%, along with Iggy Azalea MOTHER, and Andrew Tate’s DADDY.
Vitalik’s grumpy take on memecoins is a good example. He has certain rules regarding celebrity involvement with crypto (they should be long term public goods). Or, memecoins make crypto look immature, and are extractive in a way that detracts from investment in more legitimate, technologically-sound projects with venture capital backing.
To true crypto believers, it means the world, everything from solarpunk to anarcho-capitalism, or the biggest value transfer of all time.
However, crypto means also nothing. It’s agnostic. Free-for-all. What we do with technology is what gives it its meaning.
Without overintellectualizing the warm, fuzzy community feeling attached to buying and selling memecoins alongside internet strangers, memecoins do have technological utility: They stress-test blockchains in a way that few token classes have ever done.
CryptoKitties (a game on NFT) taught us how to scale Ethereum with layer-2s. Ordinals demonstrated that any EVM can easily be overwhelmed by sudden popular demand, while memecoin showed that Solana’s transaction routing needs improvement.
We welcome you to the new meta of celebrity crypto. The celebrities may not be aware of it, yet their enthusiasm for memecoins launches could give the crypto industry the necessary boost.
David is an editor based in The Netherlands who has a focus on data driven journalism. He previously wrote for TheNextWeb’s cryptocurrency vertical before launching Protos, in 2021. He is a former hardline Bitcoiner who’s passionate about permissionless networks and decentralized systems. Contact David at [email protected]
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