Memecoins: The Legendary Investment, a Deep Dive Discussion
Disclaimer:
Everything below is a mix of what I observed and heard during the event. The goal isn’t to pinpoint "who exactly said what," but to share (usually) an outsider's view and overall perspective on these industries. I’m not here to act as a definitive firsthand source—readers should do their own research. I hope this inspires you to attend events, explore new industries, and hear what leaders are presenting. These notes combine my observations with thoughts on how things could run smoother and how ideas connect (IMO). I’m not an expert, you know? Just hanging out in the room with them. Enjoy!Topic Covered: Meme Coins, Investing, Crypto, Level 1 and Level 2 Cryptos, Volatility Chasing
My goal was to figure out if memecoins are less of a scam than I kinda think they are. Lately, I tried to be open minded and then got rug pulled (even though the memecoin originated out of a community leader I’d naively grown to trust). So, I wanted to attend this event and hear more unbiased opinions on this… and see if there’s any reason to pay more attention to these things. (Spoiler alert: if you’re wondering… well, after this event, I feel even LESS likely to buy more, for now… but I’m happy to learn more!)
Why Attend? Meme coins have been popular on and off for a few years now (some even say Bitcoin is the OG meme coin, some say dogecoin). Whatever you wanna say about it, they are here and making a few people a LOT of money… so, it’s at least worth looking into and trying to see what’s going on. Are there potential great perks to meme coins? Or are they a just a trend?
Event Review Ratings: Venue (5/5), Food (4.5/5), Speaker Content (4/5), Networking (3/5), Likeliness to Return (5/5)… (more below)
Photo Collage and Commentary:
Notes from the Event:
Disclaimer #2… a lot of this I don’t exactly know what he said. Both of these guys talk so fast (hahahah and I talk so fast so now, while taking notes, I see the disadvantage of people tailking so fast. It’s hard to keep up, especially in niche topics. So, I tried my best, but know my notes were especially unclear in some parts cause I’m like, what??? They’re begin really niche and using a lot of lingo and referring to coins idk the exact spelling or name of.)
Disclaimer #3… I want to give you my spoiler alert and I dont’ know if this is even a disclaimer or not. I was originally swayed into buying the coin that I got (not too rug pulled, but enough to be done) but the reason I got in was cause it was sold as something that would grow with the community over time - and - work as like an “entrance ticket” to future events. You need a certain amount of tickets to attend the event. I find that very interesting as a business model (though idk how it would go in the future, if many things were that way!! fluctuating based off number of shares not value. wild.) But I felt a lot of trust in that community and feel a unifying thing to stand for is holding and being strong together. So, when the coin didn’t last and then people were able to follow and see that he’s sent coins to accounts that immediately sold, it was surprising. that and then some rude comments (and playing stupid) while talking to people I’d met IRL and spent time with, I realized enough was enough - i’m out. So… you know, it makes you reconsider a lot - and understand a few things more, a few things less haha.
SOOOO my point is… I like the idea of a community coin, maybe… I think its similar to investing in a business.. the idea of investing in a community (though you’ll hear it hashed out below, it typically doesnt’ last and lately the trend is a quick up and down by influencers! WILD to hear!). Etc etc.
- I would like some aspects of “memecoins” if they had more stability. At heart and at practice, I’m a fundamentals investor. I’m a longterm holding investor. I have no problem holding for years, decades. I mean, for real!! It’s my mindset. So, I liked the idea of a community coin or even seeing how things can develop. But my own experience, having my line crossed and getting myself in/out of memecoins within 48 hours… this event was curious to me. I wanted to see if there were sectors that are stable.
- But my biggest takeaway is that memecoins make money for just a very few:
The exchanges make a bunch of money off of fees (the guy said, “they don’t care if their customers get rug pulled”) geeze.
And their way of sending you money back is so sketchy if it’s through PayPal. like you have to just trust/send them money and hope they send it to you (they did for me) but still. its so like “trust basis” at one point and I really was like, wow. This is off. hahahaha. This is wild and you don’t even realize it till WAY later. Till you’re selling. And then, how tf are they going to keep up with demand if some big event happens? (I guess they did with trump coin?). Idk. Crazy.
The leaders behind this all (you’ll see the guys who are into crypto use lots of lingo and words I usually don’t use, especially to describe groups)… so… enjoy this blog. It’s a surprising one.
The influencers
The people in private chats - the BEST ones, who hear it first
The people in private chats/discords, groups who are able to pick up on trends quickly
Besides that… so many people lose money - its how those above make serious bank.
Arrival:
So happy to have food here: caesar salad, sandwiches, bread, meats
I talked with people (who is here at this event?)… people who work in crypto startups
one guy just learned of meme coins a few weeks ago and flew here just for this talk!!
He’s a youtuber from China who livestreams on YouTube and calls himself “Crazy Crazy”.
One guy been into crypto for numerous years.
One guy said it’s no surprise to meet crazy people at an event like this :)
Super stormy night though - the power flickered
Speech Begins:
One of the speakers flew here from Vietnam to speak with us. He’s a crypto influencer, super educated on memecoins.
Big fan of these peopel, so get hyped for the guests
This investing influencer started in dogecoin, then early FTX era when etherium was leading everyone eventually went to avalanche, etc.. memcoins were called “poo coins” at that time. No one would even call them meme coins. But now Degen Trader hosts a lot of events in Asia these days.
Developers behind a lot of “memecoins” he’s friends with and was involved with many other projects early on. The space is moving super rapidly now, especially with all these celebrity endorsements.
He’s been attending and speaking at events for a long time, the guest here. He’s not just some anonymous guy out here, and then people know he’s a reliable voice here.
-How has attending events helped with his growth and understidng the market?
He hosted “decentral” events in the USA, Singapore, and other countries… he wants to get to know peopel and meet projects out there. Meet different players in each different crypto/blokchain hub.
In 2021, 2022, safe moon, other coins, and other scams… they were interseting concepts at the time, and he got to meet them at that time, and it depends on your perspective if they’re really scams . I liked to host events to have different categories of understanding. Now I’m not a single chain maxi, now I’m just a degen… I don’t care what it does or what the token does, it doesnt need a purpose… just as long as there is an army and people excited for it (even the chainlink army, despite the tokenomics). Having a lot of early roles with consulting on projects.
Bitcoin maximilists call any non-bitcoins shitcoins.
If you’re into a basket of crypto, you may consider Solano or etherium to not be shitcoins,
-So how do you decide what are shitcoins? Anything without utility
But there was a time of this cycle and runup.. the meme coins were outperforming the market. All the alt coins were exploding. The reason that got people excited was cause of the gains and the trading. Another perspective was also these “so called layer 1 utility coins”… they had a purpose but they all became shitcoin rugs because of how much they crashed. Solana going down to $10.
The meme coin run of this one, why it became so popular, people were tired of the BC rugs that happened… a lot of these “projects” that came out from previous cycles backed by pantera, etc… they’re all VC heavy, the tokenomics favor VCs. Once the token launches, we call it dumpementials. The VC’s get the fastest cheapest price, then the price jsut keeps going in a downward spiral.
But the meme coin era now, people were saying we can do a community coin… dogecoin came out for the same purpose. It was kinda a chain reaction of being tired of Solana, VC coins, and march first still has the biggest unlock fro Solana happening, but its just VCs dumping (so its people not wanting to be the backholders when a huge percent of supply is being unlocked there.)
- That’s why its getting more popular nowAnd now the greed is taking over in crypto super fast as usual.
Even the most recent launch with the Argentina coin was the perfect example of very sophisticaed collaboration of Solana players doing max extraction. They turned it into a factory of doing that, and all the online on chain investigators saw the same formula as Melania. More professional players came into the space combined with market makers to really take over the place.
When you look at all of the different topics, the meme coin cabals get together… what does that do to the market? It’s monetizing attention, when you think about it at the end of the day. It’s why they go up so fast, it’s where the attention is (to an extent of course).
Then the tokenimics is how they structure the circulation. There’s a lot of gamification that makes it kind of scarce.
Ponzinomics or tokenomics get reapplied back into memecoins and get people super excited.
But as layer 1’s aren’t performing as well all the attention goes to chasing memecoins.
In the previous cycle, summer or June of last year, many developers were launching memecoins, and what happened in the community back then which was more positive than now was that it was self policing. They didn’t do the full crazy instant rug like you see now… their goal was to grow their chart and place and continue to grow the value collectively. If there were developers rug pulling, a lot of the people on crypto twitter were calling out those bad developers. It ended up being that everyone was ignoring the scammers and riggers out there. It was like good teams who lasted pretty long and well, a couple coins. They had a consistent group that launch, get in early, let it grow, get influencers involved… if it keeps going down, influences will goal post about try to push it back up
- thats what separated the memecoins, some didn’t get influencers, market makers, and whales to help the chart…
- they see 50k, 100k and then rugpull (vs the experienced cabals can do this more elegantly, they don’t need to rug pull when they can push it up to a multibillion market cap and get rick)
This is what happened to me lately. I was like, wtf?? he built up this community for YEARS and cashed out on like a few grand? 120k at most? Idk…
Last cycle, which memecoins did it right?
- Dogecoin obviously
FlokeEnu (another dog with a viking hat) that was supported heavily by finance chain… in terms of memcoins it was only etherium and binance launching. The rest (polygon, etc) they thought so much was scammy. So many of these guys sit on a high horse and think it’s a full rug.
It was a little Wild West of binance to accept memcoins, but it is what it is - that’s the decentralized market.
Focus on distribution count, not whale heavy, and onboarding more peoel on chain more than any other real L1 or Defi out there.
Lots of wallets were being driven by these memecoins. They allowed both the sophisticated user and the brain rot gen z retail buyer to participate, again. Just show someone a cute dog or a chill guy, it’s easy for them to buy it and relate to it.
The fact dogecoin never died throughout the cycle just shows the power off community and the longevity of it, and many of the other coins that didn’t do anything but still are alive right now.
And now the government entity, DOGE
NEXT GUEST JOINS DISCUSSION / Solana Employee
Guy who works at Solana, worked there for 4 years
Career in Ai, machine learning, and games
Started two blockchain and technology startups
This cycle a lot of memecoins are on Solana.
True. It’s where I got rug pulled hahaha.
What’s it like seeing all of that activity?
The ecosystem has grown a lot. It sorta stated 2 years ago when Bonk did an air drop.
- Early on the market cap was like 10M… they did a curation of different developer discords or telegrams and you can airdrop to those (something like that)
Then fast forward to a few early things that picked up a little over a years ago…
We didnt know much about it, it was cool to see people excited about things on chain.
We see what everyone else sees, stuff on chain. But then people started building businesses around it.
Volatility is the product, in some sense.. it’s been a wild time and a lot of people are getting a little weird with it.
It’s a mix of randomness with actual figureheads and people.
For a long time we saw celebrity coins not go anywhere, but when you get the head of state, things change a little bit.
The other chains keep trying to copy this with memecoins… but it’s the onboarding experience to get people onboard to the chain, it’s very difficult.
Many times you have terrible experiences buying coins… but new things like moonshot are onboarding peopel much faster.
From Solana’s side, it’s awesome to see what enormous volumes are.
Any given day, we usually have 1/10th the normal volume of Nasdaq, 200,000/second… but a few times the ecosystem went wild
When the chain updates it updates the cache.
Solana we get excited as engineers and nerds to see stuff come in from all over the world and different sources and see if we can process it.
It seems like there are so many memecoins now.. now the expectation is that it’s going to pump and dump - FAST. Or are theres till lingual new coin opportunities?
The waves come in and out (though hopefully this Argentina things helps things reset, though the Kanye coins will probably kick things off, too)
Let’s breakdown some of these coins that have recently come out…
All of the sudden Trump coin out of nowhere 3-4 weeks ago. Runs up high and now it’s back down.
Trump coin was no utility, just celebrating trump before he got into office.
Melania, same kind of things.
Argentina coin
Male didn’t approve it per’say, but he tweeted about it. It was launched by a group, he reshared it, and then it went down very very fast getting peopel upset and suspicious about how fast it all happened. Typical memecoins mostly have a gradual buildup. When you start getting that much attention and involvement, idk idk.
Maybe Barstool coin
They’re a legitimate media company, and then apparently they didn’t buy one… he just bought into one he likes. He likes the meme so much he posted about it. People can see his wallet now, and then he himself launched a few. But he’s just a gambler and he’s gambled on thing multiple time, so this is just one thing.
Now Kanye coin
Kanye has said he is launching it, though it’s unclear of any of the mechanics. Obviously he’s running with an existing cabal or something, I was reading he is giving away the access of his twitter for managing the token. The memes are funny cause people say, “oh, I’ll never buy the Kanye Coin” and wink. Some peopel won’t ‘buy it, some will chase it no matter what.
That’s the narrative and nature of the memecoins.
If one coin does very well in a weird category or meme, it could be something sexual, racist, all variations… gen z TikTok it just did well… it just shifts.
The cool process is that people can launch it and it’s just up to the internet culture to adopt it.
If peopel like it and its funny, its the flavor of the week
Even South Korea launched a meme coin. Anyone can make their own coin.
Ai and agent memes are beginning to overlap too… the attention span of the crypto traders is the fastest in the crypto span.
okay, so now I (kelly) realize this. It’s like sometimes you only see things in one isolation and so it feels special and wild. But then you realize it’s a trend WAY outside of this (even like internationally you may see this, or realize that songs are just copying other songs, etc). These “similar Ai bot accounts”. These are really popular on twitter, these meme-related-agent bots. I didn’t even realize this is such a huge thing, like all internet wide, till this conversation.
What is a layer away from memecoins? What attributes do you use to differentiate?
The industry is figure it out… at the moment everything is in the same distribution mechanism
Sometimes everyone thinks its funny so they buy
If you put things on a curve, then you have a hyper event on twitter…
If I but it and make a funny meme about it, will more people buy it?
- But now people in power are not sharing all of the information and not being transparent. So it’s unfair.If you are trying to not just be a meme, have fundamental properties of your product, as an industry we need to go to more transparent less hype cycled moments.
Categorized differently if they’re pump.fun or cabal centric, anything with extra information should have more transparency in the price discovery period
And the meme coin cycle has been totally destroyed at this moment.
There used to be bluechip memecoins… and you could follow trains of coins, if one did well, another did well
Big community coins you can hold… but now everything has been tested or drawn down 90%
It used to be big size communities, the big blue chip - high big market cap, on all exchange listings, coinbase even… all the legal diligence was passed
Then there are coins that are just flavor of the week based on an event or specific thing that happens, short term (Super Bowl Inu), (World Cup Inu)… they just play a game of chicken, who will pull out first? The charts keep going back and forth with how that goes.
And then straight derivatives. Once PNUT did well, people was more animal coins. Little variations like “baby” or “whatever” being creative. The nature is to rapidly evolve.
People want to capitalize on that attention… if they missed the first pump they want to find the next one as well
This happens a lot this whole cycle, all these animal coins - they start following the main ones, then a few other ones, playing off these meta ideas
There was a time that the cabals were making a whole line of fury coins, but that all got thrown out too with whats happening recently.
This is wild to me, cause i’m pretty sure the theme song of the scammer I followed by mistake is the song for fury… or he said that often, I didn’t verify. But if so… wow. It’s all related on different platforms. This scamming of people with brands.
You can see distribution on chain of how things are. Fair launch coins (open launch and people can buy it up)
Preselect coins (get 50 wallets or bots to buy up or control or give out the coins)
Community takeover (dev or team quits but so much free floating supply that someone buys it up and takes it back over again)
Dogecoin is that, that’s the OG story of community takeover. After he quit, the coin exploded without him. The whole community took over.
But now people just want to stop caring about mechanics that people used to worry about… now they just want to chase the gains.
The exchanges are in it for the money, too. They want to list these coins, which gives a lot of legitimacy to these ideas
Exchanges don’t care if retail gets wrecked cause they make money off transaction fees
VCs are getting mad cause their narratives were all getting tilted.
The Ai, gameify, everything wasn’t… all the Cabals weren’t letting all the VCs come in and buy
But now some of these more sophisticated liquids pool rugs are heavily involved, they can market make, paint the chart, pull liquidity out, and execute mass extraction events like we’ve seen recently.
It’s rapidly evolving, we saw a lot of L1 coins pop back up, but I think it’s going to get reset again when Kanye launches his coin again this week. We’re going to see more chaos in the market.
Some cabals have launched the meme coin successfully and if you hold that one up and don’t rug pull, you can make a 2nd one… then everyone will buy it and the community gets rich together.
Like one guy launched 6 coins and all did well at that time.
At that time, it was an experienced team, and it shifted the community back to that level of devs and projects
But then greed came back in and everyone was rugging and dumping people.
Pumped up Fun is very pretentious. There is a lot of volatility and people lose a lot of money and make a lot of money. The livestream can create some horrendous things, and they took that down. Revisiting that product. But the mechanics were fair, when you launch the token, you use Solana just to set up, and as people buy in, the dev can’t even hold the sol.
But if the dev pulls the sol, that’s generally considered a rug. The most common one.
But pump.fun it can not be done
It’s not a perfect system but they do try to give constraints and transparency for customers.
At least you know the mechanics, that’s the problem with the other one.
No consumer has the time to go to the chain and read the nuances of the details.. thats how the insider information of these cabals can stack the deck in their favor.
I’m a UI/UX designer, lots of pepole in the tech sector are having a hard time finding work, a lot of us feel forced to become meme coin traders. What software do people use to do it quickly and stay up to date?
Crypto twitter means you’re too late. If you hear of it first on Twitter, you’re too late
How do you stay updated without joining a cabal?
Lots of private groups… (you can see what influencers are involved with based on what they call in the past)
They may have a paid telegram channel, some have good access and are in Dubai… a lot of the cabal guys are in Dubai
Try to get early calls from telegram chats (and look at the telegram channels… their charts) look at the history
Other tools (sniper tools) dash wards, kaito can show narratives and sentimate and mindshare.
Other sophisticated tools (bubble maps) have lots of ways to help discover different memes
Watching things in real time: dexscreener, On chain view of relationships
There are many jobs in blockchain. A whole emerging market called “deepens” - deepen day in the east side... tons of businesses are hiring.
Payment companies are doing well, cross from business to consumer. Lots of nuts and bolts
Blockchain works well with these memecoins cause data moves so quickly. If people assign value to it, you can use it for tons of things.
Most is open source, open environment… you can just get in and start building something.
Look at something and give it design critique… a lot is out in the open.
Dev blockchain is very different than consumer blockchain
I spent my day looking at core dev protocol optimizations.
OVERALL EVENT REVIEW / Further Details:
Venue: (5/5)
Allow me to Elaborate: This was a perfect size venue for this event, with great vibe, great feel, and incredible views. I’d love to return to this place.
Food (4.5/5)
Room for Improvement: I was so thrilled that they had dinner and the variety was pretty awesome. I loved the salad, etc… but it was a little “lunch” feeling, with bread and sandwiches supplies. But at the same time, i’ll take it! It was healthy and filling and I was so happy to eat. I thought I’d just be hungry
Speaker Content (4/5)
Room for Improvement: The only thing was that these guys spoke pretty fast so I had a hard time keeping up with the super niche stuff they were talking about (part of you feels more entitled int his industry than others cause it’s simply just the names of coins that they’re talkignabout, not some crazy Ai feature or math calculation haha) but these names are tough to keep up with and know their layers, functions, non-functions, etc. So it was just like one level higher of intelligence than I preferred but still liked it!! I had a lot of good takeaways.
Networking (3/5)
Room For Improvement: There was a lot of time to network before and after the event, but also it was easy to talk to almost no one. I am a fan of that haha.
Likeliness to Return (5/5)
Allow me to Elaborate: This venue is great and they have lots of interesting events here. I’d be really happy to return and hear more from the experts in tech, information, and more!!
