Search Engine - Planet Money: The Memecoin Casino

Episode Date: March 28, 2025

Reporter Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi has the story of an unusual website you’ve likely never heard of. A website that has been responsible for rapidly making the world of Dogecoin and other memecoins become even more unhinged, all while generating small fortunes for foul-mouthed children. The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin Support Search Engine To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Hi, Alexi. Hey, PJ, how are you? I'm good, I'm good. I'm enjoying the very beginning of spring. Yeah, me too. Although I'm already schvitzing. You're schvitzing already? You're schvitzing in mid-March?

I don't know what climb my people evolved around, but I still haven't found it yet. I'm so sorry to hear that. Yeah, it's okay. Everyone should have at least one season they enjoy. That's true. I'm still in search. This is Alexei Horowitz-Gazi.

He's a reporter who's work I very much enjoy. He's also one of the hosts at Planet Money. Does that show need an introduction? They're a long-running, very smart NPR show that explains, week by week, the world of things driven by markets. So just a couple of weeks ago, we actually did a story with one of your NPR colleagues,

Bobby Allen, that was about Doge the Government Commission. Yes, the legend. The legend. Today, we're doing a story with you that actually, weirdly a little bit it's like almost lore or backstory to Doge. Like, it's in part about Doge the meme coin. Yeah, it's like about like the other branch of the internet butterfly effect of the Doge meme.

Who would have thought that like that would be the meme that has far-reaching legs into American culture? I know. That changed world history? I didn't expect it. Yeah, it's funny. I mean, Planet Money, your show, which when we were beginning to pilot search engine, we talked a lot about Planet Money and how. at its genesis, we were like in the mortgage crisis

and everybody was looking for explanation and Planet Money kind of like arose to make sense of something that needed sense-making. I feel like we are now entering once again a moment in which the economy is both confusing and somewhat terrifying. And it's like, I'm very glad Planet Money is here. I'm so glad that we're still managing

to explain the bewildering moment, even if it's as silly as meme coins. Yeah. It feels like it's becoming more and more impolving. to avoid, even if you want to. This whole question behind crypto the whole time is whether or not there's actual utility to it, whether or not it's actually a kind of utopian world-building project or it's just a kind of nihilistic, irreverent cesspool.

And I feel like this moment with meme coins is really like getting to the heart of that question. I really had not understood how much meme coins had evolved since I was last seriously covering crypto. but that world has gotten much stranger and wilder, even compared to just 2022, for a very specific reason. This is a story about why that happened.

I first heard it on Planet Money, but I liked it so much, I wanted to share it with you here. I'm going to let Alexi take it away. On the night of November 19, 2024, this baby-faced kid, looks around 13 years old, used a new online platform to launch a brand-new cryptocurrency into the world.

We're not using his name because he did all this anonymously. The cryptocurrency he created is what's known as a meme coin, which is a kind of joke currency, something that doesn't hold any inherent value besides what other people on the internet are willing to pay for it. The kid named his coin Gen Z Quant. He spent a few hundred dollars to buy up about 5% of the total supply of his new coin, and then he also started live streaming on the platform. Somebody else recorded the live stream, which is why in the video you can hear the kid in a couple of other voices. Are we bonded yet or what's good? In the video, you can both see the kid's face

and a chart showing the coin's price. Within seconds, the list of people buying the coin starts to stream in, and the little green price line on the chart starts shooting upward, like a rocket ship trying to reach escape velocity on its way to the moon. At first, the kid seems surprised. Wait, what? You said, wait, I'm so confused. But then he gets this kind of devious grin on his face. His cheeks start to get a little flushed. He moves his cursor over to a sell button on the website. And with one click, he cashes out the entirety of his holdings in Gen Z-Quant. Some 51 million tokens for a cool $20,000 or so.

There's a murmur of surprise from other people watching the live stream. In the chat, a little burst of fire emojis starts popping off. And the price of Gen Z-Quant then immediately collapses. The green line on the line on the show. the price chart turns red and takes a nose dive. And for a moment, the kid, again, seems shocked at what he's been able to do. Holy fuck! Holy fuck! And then the kid makes it clear.

He is not, in fact, so confused. He seems to know exactly what's happening. He extends both of his middle fingers to the camera and utters a line that's become kind of infamous in the crypto world. Thanks for the 20 bandos. Thanks for the 20 bandos. Thanks, in other words, for the 20 bandos. $20,000 or so that this group of total strangers on the internet had just transferred right

into his account. The kid then stands up, starts tugging at his hair, and just takes a moment to revel in what he's pulled off. Yo, yo, yo, yo, what the fuck? And I think maybe the most absurd part of all this is that the kid then goes on to pull this exact same move two more times with two other meme coins he created that very same evening, betting over $50,000 in total. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, bro. And when you take a step back and just think about what's happening here, it's kind of wild, right? We're living at a time where a 13-year-olds can create his own cryptocurrency,

successfully hawk it to a bunch of strangers on the internet over live-stream video, and then rip them off for tens of thousands of dollars. Not once, not twice, but three times in one night. all from the comfort of his own home, and all before bedtime. If someone pulled this move on a market like the New York Stock Exchange, they might have had government regulators knocking on the door. But meme coins are kind of a wild west. And the thing is, what this one kid did is just a tiny glimpse into this much bigger economic story.

Just one example of a transformation rippling across the internet. There are thousands of these meme coins being launched every single day now, involving everyone from literal children to social media sensations like Hoctuah or Moudang, the Pygmy Hippo, to the President of the United States. It's the kind of thing that makes you wonder. How in the world did we get here? Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Alexi Horowitz-Gazi, and I'm joined by freelance reporter Nick Nettness. Hello, Alexi. Hello.

Yes. Over the past few months, you and I have been on a deep dive into the world of meme coins. We've been spalunking in the crypto mines. We've been getting lost in them because over the past decade, meme coins have gone from a one-off joke to a speculative frenzy worth tens of billions of dollars. Today on the show, the story of the meme coin casino, how a few technological leaps and cultural shifts helped turn a seedy internet backwater into a giant cryptocurrency gold rush. Owning a home is full of surprises.

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Great brands, great prices. That's why you rack. Right now we are living through some of the most tumultuous political times our country has ever known. I'm David Remnick, and each week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, I'll try to make sense of what's happening, alongside politicians and thinkers like Corey Booker, Nancy Pelosi, Liz Cheneyne, Tim Walts, Katanji Brown Jackson, Newt Gingrich, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and so many more. That's all in the New Yorker Radio Hour, wherever you listen to podcasts. Okay, so in order to tell the story of how we got to this moment, where we are constantly awash in new meme coins, we have to begin at the beginning. And in the beginning, of course, there was Bitcoin.

Bitcoin was launched in 2009, and it was pitched as a sort of utopian alternative to government-backed currencies. It was a way for people to pay each other without having to rely on the existing financial system. But in the years after its launch, there was also this whole wave of often sketchy new Bitcoin copycats. And this is where you start to see this pattern develop that's characterized the world of cryptocurrency ever since. A cycle of grand utopian promises, followed by a period of frenzied speculation and outright fraud. And this was the seedy state of crypto that inspired what is widely considered to be the first meme coin, doge coin. The story starts back in 2013 with a guy named Jackson Palmer. Palmer was an Australian product manager at a tech company,

and he believed that there was something fundamentally useful about what crypto promised to do. But when he looked around at some of these speculative, cryptocurrencies, he saw that people seemed to be using crypto as a kind of cash grab. Basically, some people were running what are known as pump and dump schemes. Here's how it would work. Some programmers would create a new coin. They'd hype it up as the next Bitcoin, and maybe do some sketchy stuff to fake demand, and get people to buy in, all to pump up the price.

And when enough money had flowed in, they would sell off all their coins. They would dump their holdings. The price would collapse, leaving everyone who'd bought in holding the bag. As Palmer looked around, he thought crypto was turning into kind of a joke. So, why not turn it into an actual joke? He described how we came up with the idea in an interview with our daily podcast, The Indicator, back in 2018. I'd come home for the day, and an Australian kind of tradition cracked open a beer, and I was just sitting around.

And the way it kind of came together was that I had one browser tab open with this article about Doge. And right next to it, I had coin market cap, which is a very popular website for checking the valuation. of cryptocurrencies. So my tab names kind of almost spelt it out for me in a way. And I just thought Dogecoin. That's hilarious. Doge, you may remember, was this super popular internet meme built around the image of a dog, a quizzical-looking Shiba Inu. And it was paired with these kind of grammatically challenged captions, like such wow and much amaze. Palmer and a friend coded up a new coin, and in doing so, they married the world of memes

with the world of crypto. For Palmer, Dogecoin was an attempt at convincing the crypto-curious to make more rational investment decisions. But instead, the good people of the internet decided to pull a giant, irreverent yes-and to Palmer's joke coin. They started buying more and more of them. Palmer was surprised, and at first he went along for the ride. He in a community of fellow crypto-jokesters donated their increasingly valuable doge-coins to charity. And for a while, things were going well. But...

Whenever you have something that's going really successful, you have a successful community like that, and there's a monetary element to it, it's like blood in the water, right? Like sharks can, like, smell it from miles away. And pretty quickly, fraudsters started to use Deutschecoin in the kind of pump and dumps it was meant to critique, which was exactly the opposite of what Palmer had intended. Yeah, tell me about it, right? The irony is definitely not lost on me. You know, I feel guilty enough for creating Dogecoin, which I'm sure that people have,

you know, I know that people have lost money on in the past, and that pains me. In the years that followed its creation, Dogecoin ended up spawning dozens of copycat cryptocurrencies, or copy Doge's, I guess, in this case. But the number of these new meme coins was still limited by the technical expertise someone needed to make one. You needed to be able to essentially copy and tweak Bitcoin's underlying code. And to understand how that barrier to entry started to change, we called up Zeke Fox. Zeke is an investigative journalist at Bloomberg and author of the book Number Go Up, Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall. What do you do when you're not digging into the smarmy back corners of the crypto world?

I've got three little kids, so I like to hang out with them, and I hope they never get into meme coins. Yes, keep them quarantined. Zeeke says that first revolution that helped spawn our meme coin-filled moment, was a cultural one, the one where Dogecoin helped marry the world of memes to the world of crypto. But the second revolution was a technological leap. It came a few years later with the invention of a brand new blockchain called Ethereum. So a blockchain is basically a ledger that everyone can see, and it keeps track of how many tokens someone has of a given cryptocurrency. You used to be that in order to make a new cryptocurrency, you had to code up

a new blockchain. So Bitcoin had its own blockchain. Dogecoin. had a different one. But Ethereum made it so that you could keep track of multiple cryptocurrencies on the same blockchain. You could just create a new coin right on top of Ethereum's underlying infrastructure. And this new Ethereum blockchain helped set off a massive surge in new cryptocurrencies, starting around 2017 or so. They were called initial coin offerings or ICOs. And these coins were often framed as useful new technologies, cryptocurrencies that would have some sort of real-world utility. This was the time when people were still really pitching blockchain as like the solution to all the world's problems. So in general, these ICOs were like, it's the blockchain for

dentist or this is going to be the blockchain that helps track agriculture. It's Bitcoin for farmers. Yeah. But people are basically trading them just on hype. And studies afterwards found that Something like three quarters of all the ICOs initial coin offerings were scams or fraud. You can see that same quintessential pattern playing out again here, an era of utopian promises turning into a whirlwind of fraudful deceit. Yet, Zeeke says, this round of crypto speculation was also limited in its impact, because the majority of investors just did not understand the basics of transacting on the blockchain, like how to set up your own crypto wallet or trade coins.

But then came the third. revolution that helps explain how we got to our current meme coin moment. And this one had both a cultural element and a technological one. The cultural part happened around the time of the COVID-19 lockdowns when a bunch of bored day traders stuck at home started banding together to buy meme stocks, companies like AMC and GameStop. This was the marriage of meme culture and the entire stock market. The technological part was the rise of mainstream crypto exchanges like FtX and Coinbase. These platforms made it easier for retail investors to buy and sell cryptocurrencies, and that helped swell the market to new heights. During that huge crypto bubble of like

21, 22, there certainly was some meme coin trading, but it was not the focus of cryptocurrency traders. The rise of the meme coin was still to come. Most crypto bros were still focused on mainstream cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ether. And the most radical speculators were obsessing over things like non-fungible tokens or NFTs, like those weirdly expensive board ape cartoons people were buying. But as we have learned in the cyclical history of crypto, number that go up must eventually come down. Which is exactly what happened in November of 2022. That's when it was revealed that the founder of Crypto Exchange FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried, had been secretly using billions of dollars of customer funds to make mass. risky bets.

In winter 2020, FTCS collapses, and that's like the nadier of the crypto market. Crypto winter, some might call it. Yeah. So how do we go from crypto's Dark Night of the Soul

to an era teeming with more meme coins than we can keep track of? And who are the winners and losers of this brazen new world? That's coming up after the break. Hey, business owners. The NFL season is a big revenue driver. Now there's a smarter way to get ready. Everpass is the only authorized commercial

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And some of the worst people, horrible ideas and destructive companies in the history of business. We struggled to come up with a name, decided to call it, business history. You know why? Why? Does this show about the history of business? Available everywhere. You get it. Your podcasts. Okay, so at this point, we've seen the same pattern play out over and over in the world of crypto.

There's a rush of utopian promises, followed by a speculative rush of shady investments, followed by a sobering collapse as all the sketchy stuff is revealed. Dogecoin, you'll remember, was first invented as a cheeky response to the wave of sketchy Bitcoin copycats. And you can think of the current meme coin moment as a sort of like doubling down on the joke. When crypto exchange FTX collapsed, bringing down the whole crypto market along with it, it was like the ultimate Emperor's New Clothes moment. Even Sam Bakeman-Fried, the person who seemed to be the face of crypto going legit, turned out

to a committed fraud to the tune of billions of dollars. In light of that, some crypto traders stop believing in any promise of the technology's underlying value. They started to see it as pure, irreverent speculation. And early last year, that sort of nihilistic feeling fused with yet another technological leap forward. Zeke Fox says, this time, in the form of a new website. The latest meme coin craze was really enabled by this new trading platform called pump dot fun that made creating a meme coin, a point-and-clicker. experience. And more than 5 million coins have been created in like the year that it's existed.

Pump. Dot Fun is a bit shadowy, but as far as we can tell, it was created in January of 2024 by three entrepreneurs in their early 20s in London. We reached out to Pump. Dot Fund, but they didn't get back to us. And the idea behind the platform was basically to demolish the barrier to entry for people making new meme coins. To create a place where people could launch and then promote their own coins as a sort of social media experience. Let's go to pump. Dot Fun. Will you give us a little safari? Yes, definitely.

Zeke took us on a little tour of the Pump. Dot Fun website. It looks a bit like a throwback to the flash websites of the 90s, all bright neon text and jpegs of memes. I know. It seems like something that only a child could enjoy. Maybe a manchild. I think there's a lot of kids on there. Some who've made a lot of money.

Pump. About fun has made it so incredibly easy to make new meme coins that the home page is just constantly updating with images of coins that have just been born, coin after coin after coin. I'm looking at their most recent coins and, you know, there's, what if we all hold 27 seconds ago? Doge Noyte, 46 seconds ago. Leader of hats one hour ago. What's the kind of meme coin leaderboard today? Some of these ones just sort of become like classics and they keep trading. like doge coin is still top dog i'm sorry

uh top doge that was completely inevitable uh shiba enu which is like a doge coin ripoff is very high up there pepe dog with hat has proven to have some staying power but i think fart coin is the hottest meme coin right now fart coins going to the moon yeah i mean fart coin to me it's like how is this even funny and so i was

I was asking my favorite meme coin trader source about this. I was like, do you think it's funny? And he said, sometimes the fact that they're not funny is what's funny. It's like horseshoe meme theory. Yeah. Pump. Dot Fun is a place where the newest juvenile inside jokes of the internet can be transformed almost instantaneously into tradable financial instruments. And so you can see the stream of new coins on the site as the cutting edge of what, What wannabe meme coin millionaires think might go viral.

Irreverent internet culture meets the market? Could anything possibly be more Planet Money than that? Should we make a coin and find out? Let's go right to the edge of making a coin and then hover on the edge. What do you think should it be a cute animal? Yeah, I mean, our mascot is the squirrel from the T-shirt project. Oh, where can I get this squirrel? I brought a picture of my cat, but we can use a squirrel.

Yeah, just type into Google, type in Planet Money Squirrel. Uh, is this, it's got a martini? It's a squirrel with a martini glass. Wow, this seems like it has a lot of meme coin potential. Definitely. So, what should we call it? Well, there's either animal spirits or there's PM squirrel coin. PM squirrel coin.

Okay. So the ticker will be PMSC. Naturally. For the description, this is the planet money squirrel. Does that sound good? Oh, God. We're playing with fire. We could launch a corn.

that just gets out of our hands. Just so you know you can never take it back. We did not, in fact, launch the Planet Money Squirrel coin, not today, Satan, but it was a shockingly easy prospect. By filling out a few description details and uploading a copy and pasted image from the internet,

you too can be the proud slash parified parent of a new meme coin. But raising that coin to a monstrously profitable adulthood is not so easy. Because you can think of Pump. Pump. Fun as this hyper-literal attention economy. If a coin creator can't generate enough excitement around their meme coin, they won't be able to ensnare enough buyers to get it to take off. It's very easy to create the coin, but what's hard is attracting attention for it.

Now, there are three basic ways people garner attention in this world. It comes down to how much clout the person might have. For the first group, for the people who are cloutless in CryptoLand, pump.combe. Fun offered a solution. It had a live stream feature. So a no-name new coin creator could try to build a following by basically carnival-barking the merits of their meme coin in real time. So Pumpdaw Fun had like a built-in feature where the creators of the tokens could live-stream themselves to promote their coins. And this went downhill fast. People were doing like really gross things to try to get attention.

There was someone claiming that they had kidnapped the device. developer of the coin and would torture them. Oh, God. Somebody killed a chicken. Dark. Somebody held a gun to a fish. A kid had his mom flashed the live stream. When that was a little sillier, this kid created a coin.

He was live streaming. While he was streaming, he took the money. And then gave the camera double middle fingers and said, thanks for the 20 bandos in a high-pitched voice. That, of course, is the precocious and a little devious 13-year-old. from the beginning of our story. Thanks for the 20 bandos. Pump.com. Fun eventually took down the live stream function from its website

in response to all of this mayhem. Sort of a classic case of this is why we can't have nice things. So that's the first group. People without much clout who have to find some way to grab attention for their meme coin. Now, there's a second group of memecoin creators

and their big strategy is to already be famous. And we've mostly seen kind of like sea listers do this. Iggy Azalia launched a coin on PumpDop Fun, and that one for a long time I was seeing people, I guess maybe mostly Iggy Azalea herself, tweeting about her mother coin. Caitlin Jenner had one. There was the ill-fated Hocktua coin, which crashed just hours after it launched. And perhaps the most famous or infamous of all the new meme coins was the one launched by President Donald J. Trump. But the third and final group of meme coin creators,

are the real power players. These are the shadowy groups of well-resourced insiders who know how to play the game. Because there's this whole ecosystem of crypto influencers on places like Discord, X, TikTok, YouTube. And if these influencers start talking about a coin, their followers will start to buy because these people have a track record

of talking about coins kind of early on and the coins going on to attract even more attention. This meme is so fired. It's been a burned inner. that down. Guys, I think this mean coin could pull some crazy numbers. And now today this coin is already about to hit 800K market cap and break through a mill. And in crypto, these influential people are called KOLs, which stands for a key opinion leader. And those people are often paid to promote the coins. And some people will tell their followers, I'm getting paid to promote this

coin, and other people will not. Zik says there is one key leader whose opinion seems to be valued above all others in the world of meme coins, a man who has taken the joke so far as to helm a controversial new government entity named after that original Doge meme. What is really ideal is if Elon Musk will talk about whatever the coin is about? Like, one of the big reasons Dogecoin is still the most valuable meme coin is because Elon Musk started tweeting about it in 2019. But it's not just Dogecoin.

A lot of the most successful coins have had some connection to Elon Musk. Elon Musk is like the meme coin market mover in chief. Yes, because the people who are trading these are watching patterns and they're saying hey, last time Elon Musk talked about

something that coin went up, so maybe it'll happen this time. And then that kind of becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Now, regardless of which kind of meme coin creator we're talking about, The goal on Pump.combe. Fun is generally the same. Whether you are a 13-year-old boy or a C-list celebrity or a crypto insider, what you want is for your meme coin to blast off.

You can think of the site as a kind of massive launch pad, like a giant Cape Canaveral. But a lot of it is filled with the skeletal remains of meme coins that have failed to launch. Something like 99% of coins are dead on arrival. Which means they basically have zero buyers. Right. Like, I bet you a lot of them never sell a single token. But if a coin creator can get enough key opinion leaders on board, they might get some initial price lift-off. Because this whole horde of key opinion followers might hop on the rocket in the hopes that they can hop off before the price collapses.

And if they can get enough price lift-off, their coins will graduate from Pump.com to bigger platforms with whole new groups of potential buyers. Like one platform, aptly named Moonshot, to the biggest exchanges, like Binance and Coinbase. The hope for the truest meme coin believers is that their coin will somehow manage to reach escape velocity and make it all the way to the financial moon, maybe even Mars, to join the doges and pepe coins of yore. But regardless of whether a coin dies on the launch pad or makes it to the moon, there's one group that makes money no matter what. Because pump dot fun gets a 1% cut of every trade made on the platform. Right. And Pump.com fund this platform, in just a year or so, Dune Analytics, which is a blockchain analysis company, says that it's made $400 million in fees. So just like as in a casino, on Pump.com fund, the house also always wins? Yeah.

But if you are somehow coming away from all of this with the impression that Nemecoin millionaires are being minted all the time, Zeek says that is exactly the fear of missing out that fuels this whole market. What everyone wants is that next one that's going to go up 10x, 100x, a thousand X. And there are the stories of people who really have made a million bucks because they bought Dog Whiff hat early. And when somebody hears that, it's pretty powerful, creates this sense of fomo, but Dune Analytics studied blockchain data and found that only 3% of traders on pumped up fun ever made $1,000. And keep in mind, meme coin trading is a zero-sum.

game. Every dollar someone makes on a meme coin mathematically has to come at the expense of someone else buying it, which means that this tiny minority of winners, that 3% of traders, is making their fortunes off the vast majority of meme coin investors. Which raises the enormous question. Why do so many people continue to invest in a system that feels so clearly rigged against them? Why do people still invest in meme coins? In your mind, is this, is this all just a giant casino? Like, is this just like, is this just like an ancient practice of sometimes irrational gambling, like just updated and put onto the blockchain?

I mean, I definitely would say this is just gambling. Everyone involved would agree with that, I think. But it's a really weird form of gambling. And oftentimes, by the time that you or I hear about any coin, you know, the insiders have probably accumulated a big supply at a low price. And they're just waiting for losers like us to hear about it and buy some so that they can sell theirs and get real money. In a way, a lot of what's going on here feels like a new twist on the classic pump and dump scheme.

But instead of people promising financial gains based on some underlying value, these days, many meme coin boosters are just promising that there will be enough other chumps out when the time comes. Call it a chump and dump. No, I think that most of the people who buy this, like they're not being fooled by the coins. They just think that, hey, I am not the last person who's going to buy this coin. Someone else will come along later and buy this coin for more. Has anyone made a greater fool coin? A guarantee that they have. And in fact, when we checked the Pump. Dot Fun registry,

there turned out to be no less than 12 competing greater fool meme coins. Half of them with the ticker sign, Fool. So that was Alexi Horowitz-Gazi with Nick Nevis. If you enjoyed the story, there's a second part. It's called The Parable of Peanut the Mem Coin. You can find it now on the Planet Money feed. We'll also just have a link in our show notes. Also, if you haven't just tried Planet Money as a podcast, I really think if you enjoy our show, which tries to make sense of a confusing world, you'll probably enjoy theirs, which is on a similar mission with a similar bent towards curiosity and fun. That Planet Money episode you just heard was produced by Willa Rubin. It was edited by Jess Jang with help from Keith Romer, fact checked by Sierra Juarez, and engineered by Neil Rauch.

Alex Goldmark is Planet Money's executive producer. And we will have a new episode of Search Engine hosted by me next week. We'll see you then.