Unchained - Why Memecoins Have Been 2024's Most Profitable Crypto Trade: Ansem and Kelxyz - Ep. 641

Episode Date: May 7, 2024

In this episode of Unchained, memecoin traders Ansem and Kelxyz unpack everything about memecoins, discussing what makes them valuable and how they evaluate their investment potential. They also address the criticisms and controversies surrounding them, including racism and sexism. (They have a surprising reaction to the latter.) Ansem and Kel argue that memecoins have substance and value, largely due to their popularity and the attention they receive on the internet.  They also discuss the importance of distribution and virality in the success of a memecoin, how the chain any coin is on affects its value, and give their opinions on Runes vs. BRC-20s vs. Solana and Ethereum.  Plus, they talk about their wildest memecoin stories (think: Dogwifhat) and provide their insights on what they think memecoins will become in the future. Show highlights: Ansem’s and Kel’s investment theses around memecoins  How Ansem and Kel got into trading memecoins and how they evaluate their potential Why the coin distribution matters and whether tokenomics is important with memecoins How to discern between memecoins with genuine vs. fake interest  How memecoins differ across blockchains such as Solana, Ethereum, and Bitcoin Ansem and Kel’s responses to the criticisms of memecoins Whether and how memecoins could become safer for users  Kel and Ansem’s surprising reaction to racist and sexist memecoins  Ansem's story on WIF and how a female friend of his fueled its popularity  Whether Bitcoin is “the original memecoin" and how they define memecoin The future of memecoins and how they believe all memes will become coins Thank you to our sponsors! Polkadot VaultCraft Guests: Ansem Kelxyz Links Culture: What else could memecoins be? by Vitalik Buterin How bad policy favors memes over matter by Chris Dixon  Cointelegraph: Meme coins: Betrayal of crypto’s ideals… or its true purpose? CoinDesk: The Memecoin Grift and How It Threatens Ethereum Culture  Investment: CoinGecko: Top Crypto Narratives Gained 39% to 1313% in Q1 2024  Messari: Navigating Memecoin Mania Kelxyz investment strategy Decrypt: Crypto Influencer Ansem Explains His Meme Coin Thesis and Why He’s Bullish on Bitcoin Runes  Unchained: What Is Dogwifhat (WIF) and Why Is It Up so Much?  Safer memecoins Unchained: Half of Solana Presale Tokens Rolled Out Between November and February Were Malicious: Blockaid Study Cointelegraph: 1 in 6 new Base meme coins are scams, 91% have vulnerabilities Andre Conje’s proposal Racist memecoins Unchained: Offensive Memecoins Proliferate on Solana, Sparking Debate Crypto.news: Ethereum's Buterin slams Solana's racist meme coins, urges better projects Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I go live on Twitter, just randomly. I'm like talking to my boy. We're talking about crypto. I'm talking to crypto Twitter and all that stuff. And I asked on live, like, yo, like, what's your favorite meme? Like, what meme should we buy? My boy goes bonk. My other friend goes bonk.

I don't know what I said. I think I might have said bonk, too. And then the girl I was with goes dog with hat. And I'm like, wait, what? Because in my head, I was expected to like those or something. But she's like, no, dog with hat. And I turned the camera to her. I'm like, wait, say that again.

And she's like, dog with hat. And it's a clip on my Twitter because immediately when she said that, everybody who was watching the live stream went and looked at the coin and started buying the coin. Hey, all, I'm excited to share some news with you. Unchained is launching a crypto and macro podcast. On May 8th, we'll publish the first episode of Bits and Bips, exploring how crypto and macro collide, one basis point at a time. I've been wanting to do a show like this for a while,

and I'm happy it's finally coming to fruition. throughout this episode, we'll play moments from the most recent rehearsal. The first clip is from host Joe McCann, founder, CEO, and CIO of Asymmetric, speaking about the recent Fed decisions and their impact on the crypto market. There's a lot of path dependency here, which is why it's on the tail. But if we enter an easing environment, if, you know, QT accelerates, excuse me, the tapering even gets accelerated or ends, which I don't foresee. But let's assume some of these things happen.

and you have an election year, you know, maybe stock markets juice into Q4, Q3, whatever. Who's to say that Ethereum isn't at 10,000? Bitcoin's not at $2.50. And Salon is not at 1,000, something to that effect. I don't think it's, it seems crazy because of the pain and the drawback that's happened in the market over the past five weeks. But, you know, Solan was $8 at one point and ran to $125 in a matter of months. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Unchained, your no-hype resource for all things crypto.

I'm your host, Laura Shin, author of The Cryptopians. I started here at me crypto eight years ago, and as a senior editor at Forbes, was the first Mainstream Reader to cover cryptocurrency full-time. This is the May 7th, 2024 episode of Unchained. Deploy custom crypto strategies and boost your yield with perpetual options on VaultCraft, the universal defy adapter for supercharging your crypto. With version V1.5, users can now earn options on optimism and arbitration. while also rebalancing multi-strategy yield products all-in-one vault.

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That's why CBC News is putting more journalists in more places across Canada, reporting on the ground from where you live, telling the stories that matter to all of us, because local news is big news. Choose news, not noise. CBC News. Everyone needs help with something. If investing is your something, we get it. Cooperators' financial representatives are here to help.

With genuine advice that puts your needs first, we got you. For all your holistic investment and life insurance advice needs, talk to us today. Cooperators, investing in your future together. Mutual funds are offered through Cooperators Financial Investment Services Inc. To Canadian residents except those in Quebec in the territories. Segregated funds are administered by cooperators' life insurance company. Life insurance is underwritten by cooperators' life insurance company. Here's another clip from one of the rehearsals we did for Bits and Bips, the new podcast coming

to Unchained on May 8th. This features host Alex Kruger, founder of Asgard, on why he's bullish on risk assets. On the Bitcoin side, I think we're going to go into a market where we're trading mostly liquidity on stop runs. So what in the crypto market people call these liquidations. I call it just simple stop rents. So I think it makes sense for the next. say month beyond that is is uh simple um fortune telling uh to to be trading liquidations both sides

right now uh right now the the logical next move is basically for for btc to go run over 60k solana sold to get to like you know at least 10 percent higher from here um then i don't know then then i think we're going to be shopping around for a little while. There's a lot of people that need to get out of positions above us. So that's going to put pressure. But eventually, I'm very bullish into risk assets into year-end for so many reasons. Today's topic is meme coins. Here to discuss are Zion Thomas, aka Ansem, and Kel El-G, aka Cal X, Y, as you probably know him on Twitter. Welcome Ansem and Kel. How we doing? Thanks for having us.

This cycle, which kind of seemed to be catalyzed by the Bitcoin Spot ETS, is now known for also being memecoin mania. The current market cap for all meme coins is at about $50 billion at the time of recording. And in Q1 of this year, Coin Gecko reported that they were by far the most profitable crypto narrative, with returns of more than 1,300 percent on average across the top tokens. And yet, meme coins are somewhat controversial. I think both of you actually think that there is some substance here, though, in meme coins. So why don't you just start by laying out kind of your best case or best thesis for meme coins. And why don't we start with you, Ansel?

Cool. Yeah, I would say that I think a lot of people just, like, think really too hard on memes and meme coins in general. Like, why, like on how they don't have value or, like, have, like, have, less value than other teams with like real protocols and like real revenues. If you just think about the internet, like crypto and crypto natives are very, very, very internet native people, just like have always been since its origin. And if you just think about how memes get popular on the internet, on social media, across all these different channels, it would be crazy to say like, yeah, I think memes are

going away on the internet. Nobody would really say that. But if you take that and then compare them like the financial, aspect of them. It's like, oh, they don't have any value. But I think that there's definitely value in memes and culture on the internet. Like, if you look at TikTok and see how viral these trends go, if you look at, like, the influencers associated with these social media apps, when they get to like millions and millions of followers, that actually converts into real money for them. And I think the memes in the same way is like when they get extremely

popular, it's a ton of mind space and a lot of different people, which is how to have they get like that value. Like if say there's like a hundred million people who recognize this meme like instantly like that, if a hundred million people are like buying what $1, $10, $100,000, $1,000, that's a lot of buying pressure just on whatever meme or meme coin, whatever you want to call it. I think it's more of like an attention thing and like an internet thing than it is really like thinking about teams that are building out products. If like the trend of people being more online and more on social media, um, you know,

I think if you would ask like a zoomer, like the younger generations, like if I could bet on things going viral, that would immediately make sense to them because they do that all the time on TikTok. Oh, I see this is about to go viral. I'm going to do this trend. I see this is about to go viral on Twitter. I'm going to retweet this. I think this is a good tweeter, like all that. I'm going to follow this guy. And now we're just kind of like financializing it.

And crypto allows people to do that extremely easily, which is what people are realizing now. Kel, what do you think? I think he hit most of the major points. ultimately, you know, the winning trade business idea, crypto or otherwise in the last, you know, 20 years has been on attention, right? All of these trillion dollar businesses, be in Facebook or whatever, a trillion or almost out a trillion, what do they do? They facilitate the, like, directing attention, right? And the way that they've done that super successfully, you know, has been often. times via memes. You know, one could even make the argument that memes are the core engine

of the entire internet. And so it makes sense that, you know, with crypto and the ability to tokenize anything, financialize anything, makes sense that, you know, memes would end up capturing a lot of that attentional flow and in turn, you know, some of that value as well. Yeah, just hearing you guys talk, I was thinking like that, that, Drake meme, back when that started, like, whoever created that could be a gazillionaire now. So, you know, both of you are deep into the space. So why don't you actually both talk about how it is that you got into meme coins?

Yeah, I can. I mean, I've been trading crypto for like a really long time now, I guess, since like 2017. And every time, like, you have, like, Bitcoin does well, then all to do well, different market segments of also do well. kind of just how the money flows throughout the market. But Doge is like one of the best indicators always every single cycle for like where retail is back. Those is one of the coins that's been around since like in 2012, I think, or whatever, or maybe 2014. But like those is one of the coins. It's still in the top 10. And if you look at the top 100 coins for the past like 10 years or so, almost like 99% of

them are not there anymore. Like year over year, it changes a lot just because like of how rapid the pace of innovation happens in crypto, but Doge is always there. Like, it comes back every single cycle. And the reason it comes back every single cycle is because it's so like ingrained in crypto natives, like their mind, those is like those questions never going away. It's basically like one and two like Ethereum, Bitcoin Doge or like the three most known, I would say, coins to people. So just thinking about that, it's like I trade L1s, L2s, D5, all that stuff. But when you bridge to a new L1 or on that chain, you have like, say you bridge to Salana, you have Salana. And one of my better trades this year was Bonk in the early days because there wasn't a lot of activity or other alts on chain that you

could buy. So it was like, you bought Salana. And then it's like, okay, what else I buy on chain? I want to get beta to Salana. So I was like, okay, Bonk is one of the only other coins on chain. It just happened to be a meme coin. And with and like the same way, it's done really well. I think it's more of like looking at where you think the market's going to go. and how you think the market's going to trade. Like if I see Pepe did really well last year in April, so people saw Pepe do well. And it's like, oh, that was a meme. So if another meme comes out, that's similar popularity to Pepe, I know people are already

going to be like one and two and just draw the parallels there. And that's kind of how I make like a lot of my trades. It's just like seeing how the market did things in the past and then trying to predict on what's going to do in the future. Wait, right there where you said if you see another coin that's similar to Pepe, like how would you define that? Do you literally mean like another frog coin or like what, what does that mean to you similar?

I just mean in the same like market segment like Pepe's a meme. So like other memes that are that are popping up on different chains. It's like, oh, I saw Pepe go from zero to two billion in like a month. It's like, okay, now that's possible for these other memes that start super low vowels. And for people who are trading with smaller portfolios, it's like that's their whole thing. They're trying to hit 100x,000 X on these coins. but you can't really do that on coins that are already at a billion, 10 billion market cap. Whereas if you're betting on memes, they're obviously a lot riskier than everything else in

crypto because they're a lot smaller and can go to zero a lot easier. But you also have that upside of being able to hit 1,000 X on those coins. So I just think I'm thinking on how retail is going to trade this market. It's like makes a ton of sense to me that that continues to be a trend. Okay. So by similar, you mean kind of like the culture around. Okay. So, Kel, how about you? How do you get into meme coins? So I started trading crypto probably around 2020, like after the COVID crash. And I wasn't big into memes or anything like that at that time.

But I distinctly remember this guy who had turned, I don't know, like, Q into millions by just getting every dog coin he could find and putting it into a spreadsheet and just buying every single one, right? And the majority of them go to zero, but then like in there is Doge, in there is Sheeva Innu, and that just like returns the fund, if you will. Yeah. And this just like upset people heavily, right? Because you have all these people who are dedicating hours upon hours, nights and weekends of their lives researching, you know, this tech versus that tech and, you know, this nuance versus this interest rate. and then you just get drastically outperformed by a guy who just bought every dog. It's like an index fund for dog coins. Exactly, exactly.

And so that was like my kind of awareness moment, but I still wasn't mentally kind of ready. I was still too, you know, to mid-curve, I guess, to be like, I can't buy these, you know, I got to buy this more serious stuff. And so then fast forward to, you know, 2023, 2024, seeing the Pepe thing. And I was still kind of mid-curve about it. Like, you know, this is too much. It can't certainly can't go, you know, 100x after it just went, you know, 10x already, right? But then it does.

And so then in my mind, I'm just like, okay, there's something different about, like, why does this keep happening? You have to, you know, when you're in the market, you have to take the time. time to really assess why these different things occur because it's likely that similar dynamics will happen again. Right. And what I realize is that ultimately all of these memes, especially, they have unbounded upside. They have unbounded downside. But ultimately, the valuation is limited only by what people are, you know, there's no

discounted cash flow that says that this is overvalued. it's simply do people want to buy this because they like it? Yes or no. And it can become very self-fulfilling. And so after Pepe, I was like, okay, this is a real thing. Like, this is going to keep happening. Let me try and keep my eye out for that. And then going into like the success of Solana where I had been like focusing a lot of my research.

I'm sorry, I just realized, you know, Salana keeps going up, keeps going up. this is going to create a kind of massive wealth effect. And typically what we see, be it on Salana or Ethereum in 2021 or even just with Bitcoin prior cycles, is that when this wealth effect is generated, people tend to flock into one kind of narrative or one kind of downstream ecosystem. And when I was looking at Salana, kind of similar to what was you saying, you know, you have very few coins, very few types of coins that people can even buy in the first place. And then within that, you can narrow it down to what are people actually going to, you know, get excited about what can a large number of people all get behind?

It turns out that the simplest answer to that question is the correct answer, which is stuff that makes them laugh, right? It's a lot easier to say I'm going to punt $100 or $1,000 or if you're one of these whales, you know, $100,000, whatever the case may be, or even more on something because it made you laugh than to try and sit there and analyze something rigorously for two-week period before deciding to buy. And so that's what led me to really start looking into meme coins pretty heavily. So my next question for you was, what are the factors you look at one of the evaluating a meme coin, but is it really just that simple? Like, are there other things you guys look at?

Yeah, I think there's a few different things. I kind of came up with a somewhat sort of objective process for it, but I realized I was doing the same thing over and over. I was like, okay, what am I doing when I'm actually looking at these and thinking which ones are going to go up? I kind of like centered on three main things, I would say. I say the first thing is like the relatability. So how relatable is the meme to,

anybody in the world, regardless of if they know what crypto is, like, whatever their background, like, what doesn't really matter? How relatable is this picture or video or whatever it is, the meme to somebody? I think one of the reasons that Doge was like did super well when Elon was pushing it crazy hard last cycle is because it's just a dog. Like it's just a dog coin. It's a dog coin and a dog. Like it's very easy for anybody to understand and make the connection there. Even if you didn't know a crypto is, okay, Dogecoin, I'll buy 10 dogs with a Doge Corn. That's why you always see these memes of animals. It's because everybody loves animals. It's like you don't need to understand what blockchain is, what like L2 is.

You don't need to know any of that to under like, okay, it's a cute picture of whatever. So I say relatability is really important because that like the total addressable market like of holders is that you want that to be as wide as possible. And then I would say second piece of it is the distribution piece of it. So a lot of these coins, they all have devs launching them, right? the ones that do really well are typically the ones where the dev either sold all their coins or the team who launched a token early sold all their coins really early. The reason that is a common denominator with a lot of the memes that go to billions plus is because there's not an overhang of supply with people who have way more than everybody else.

So it's like if you have a very wide distribution where there's nobody who holds 10% of the coin or like 20% of the coin and everybody owns the max is like 1, 2%, you can. can't have like one individual basically capping the upside of the token in its early days, which is the most important period for any of these memes is like the early, uh, the early period where you form the community, get X amount of holders. You want as many holders as possible in as early as possible because that's how you have like this cult community form around whatever meme. Um, and you've seen it happen with like you've seen it happen with Pepe. There's people who literally bought 100K, 200K mark cap. They're just like, oh, I'm not selling. I've been in

forever. I've taken some profit on the way up, but I'm holding my portion of the supply that I have. And then the third thing, I would say is like the virality aspect of it. So even you have something that's really relatable, you're somebody that has good distribution. There still needs to be a way that the meme goes viral and other people learn about it. And I would say a lot of times, that's when you have like these, the KOL influencer, like all that, like people have a ton of followers. it's because that's how you get distribution to a lot of people, like, really quickly is because a ton of people just see it. Like, a lot of more people just have eyes on it immediately.

And I think the reason Doge went to almost $100 billion market cap last cycle during COVID is because Elon is literally the richest person on the planet. Everybody knows who Elon is. Elon's like, I'm buying those. Like, I love those going, like, nonstop week to week. So everybody saw it. Like, everybody on Earth saw that. So it was just like the potential for it to go viral was just massive.

So I was like those are like the three main things. And like after you trade, trade memes kind of for a while, you kind of just like get a knack for figuring out which ones do well. And also like looking probably the fourth, I would say, if I had to pick one, it was like how the community organizes like on socials or like on Twitter or whatever other platforms. Like one of the reasons that I saw with super early is because people were just spamming me with the like dog editing the hat or whatever else on everybody's profile pictures all across crypto Twitter and in my telegram like all over the place or a ton of people just not stop doing that.

I'm like, okay, I keep seeing this. Maybe I should buy some of this coin. So I'll say those are like the main how I think about it generally. Yeah. One of the things you said about how if the founders have walked away and then like, you know, you just want to give the coin away to as many people as possible. Olaf Carlson, we said the exact same thing, but not about meme coins, just about, you know, when like VC coins are trying to figure out distribution. And it is true that, you know, like we've seen this debate for a long time between like

fair launch coins and whatnot. And yeah, just like, honestly, if I think about even the first thing you said, which was like total addressable market, it feels like both those things are just the wider the distribution and the wide, the, the, the, the more people that can kind of understand the meme or grow up the meme or get into the meme, like the better it will do, like the wider the appeal. Kel, why don't you talk about how you evaluate meme coins? It's crazy because, you know, me and Antom almost come to a very similar conclusion, just completely independently.

It's actually so crazy. Because I always have like the exact same criteria. I think the one thing I'll add on the morality aspect is what I'll call for like lack of better term. the amplitude of each person's ability to be viral. So I'll break that down a little bit. With With, one thing I thought was very special was that anyone could take this meme and easily remix it and repurpose it

to basically add it on to any other meme. And so that allows it to spread far wider than something maybe that is more difficult for each individual holder or whatever. you know, you didn't have to be a career artist to put a hat on something and then just like send it to someone. You know, it's like kind of simple. And so each individual person, regardless if they have $5 in WIF or $500,000, they could spread

it to a nearly infinite number of people because any meme could become a WIF meme. And so when you're evaluating like the incremental, you know, the next meme investment, The question you might ask is how easy is it for any given holder not only to relate to this to answer your point, but to then also extend upon this? And I think that can give you insight to the degree of upside that this meme has, at the very least, from how many people will like this or use this perspective. and whether or not that translates financially is a different question. So it's so interesting that, you know, you guys are talking about all these different ways to evaluate mean points, but you have not at all talked about tokenomics, which is I'm sure you're aware of something that in, you know, more traditional crypto people talk about.

You know, the price of Doge was really high when Elon Musk mentioned it on Saturday Night Live. And it's way down now. I think it reached kind of more around maybe like $20-ish dollars and now it's more at like, oh yeah, 14 cents or wait. I think on SNL, I believe it was like 75 cents and then not some. Yeah, sorry, I was looking at the wrong thing. I was looking at volume. Like $20, yo.

That'd be crazy, yeah. Yeah, me crazy. Oh, my God. Anyway. So the point is just that, you know, like a normal, or I don't want to say normal, but like a traditional crypto person would say, oh, this is because, you know, Doge coin has this like high rate of inflation, blah, blah, blah. Like, so do you guys ever think about things like that?

Or, you know, like, why is it that you think the price of Doge is down so far from its high? That's kind of like baked into the distribution piece I was talking about. It's like also on how the coins are distributed. Like so I'd say the ideal scenario is that you have 100% of the coins in circulation. Like the team didn't hold back any. And then the meme just gets popular by being whatever on social media is when people pick it up. And the more people pick it up. And then you have some people who like have bigger followers that pick it up or like celebrities or whatever else.

And then everybody just somehow finds out about the meme. So that's how I generally would say. But I mean, these these memes typically don't have anything like inflation or anything like that because they're usually. not their own L1s, like those is kind of different in that way. But yeah, a lot of these memes are usually tokens on other L1s or other networks. They don't have like inflation or staking or any of that stuff. I would do say there's kind of like two different groups of memes now. It's like you have the more fair launch meme coins, which are more community driven.

Basically, a team has none of the supply. And then you have the kind of more like orchestrated meme coins, which is stuff like Valk, which has a team. and they build out a ton of products that are useful for the Salani ecosystem. They have a bot. They have some other things. But because of that, you have to pay all the devs related to the project. So it's like the team has, I think, 20% of the supply or whatever it is.

So it's kind of two different buckets. I mean, I think both do well. But that's, yeah, how I think about it. And, Kel, what about you? Yeah, I mean, ultimately, it's just less of a consideration given the fact that the majority of the memes will. be like fully circulating. The real question is just you know does the team obviously or covertly own like a gigantic portion of the supply kind of yes and no much more of a binary thing compared to when I'm evaluating a defy protocol not only is the supply an open question but then on top of that

you have to consider like how does a token fit into this protocol is it like a back stop for this protocol, like, loser, you know, all these other kind of questions that are that are there, but those are just not really present for memes generally. Okay. So, Kel, I know that you also break meme coins out into what you call kind of like large cap, mid cap, small cap. And I was curious to hear, like, you will, you'll like project how far you think they could go. And so I wondered how you determine which bucket you think any particular meme coin will land in. I think to some of the earlier points we were talking about,

about the scope and intensity of the appeal of a meme, kind of determines how far it can go. So if something is only really interesting or funny or generally attractive to a small subset of people on crypto Twitter, then its upside is pretty tap to the small percentage of money that those people are each individually willing to put into that meme. And so maybe it can only go to 10 million or 50 million or 100 million market cap. Whereas, you know, stuff like Doge, which has appeal to anyone who likes dogs generally,

is much more unbounded to like, I mean, coins like Doge and Cheba, I'm pretty sure they have, like, you know, millions of holders, right? So it's tough to imagine some of this more crypto-tweaternative, very, like, etheteric, had to have been there kind of memes, getting to a million holders. Because there's nowhere near a million people who even understand this meme, let alone have been there to, like, you know, speculate on it or whatever in a case would be. Yeah, and actually, the examples that you gave, like now that, you know, you're kind of flushing this out, it's so obvious. Because you, you know, gave Doge as an example of a large cap. And your midcap ones were like Trump and Bowden, which you're right. Like the universe of people that likes dogs is way bigger than the universe of people that

are interested in politics. And then your smaller cap was like Zin, which Will Clemente had talked about on a previous episode here. You know, it's like, I don't even know because I'm not Gen Z or whatever. But I guess it's like some kind of nicotine-ish something or other, like of a something or other, I don't know, but it's related to that. So, it's, obviously, I'm representative of the universe of people that will probably never learn more about that than what I just mentioned here.

But one other thing that I wanted to ask, too, is, you know, I've noticed that I think this area has a lot of bots and stuff. So how do you guys separate kind of like bot interest versus organic and genuine interest? What do you mean by bots? You mean bots talk or? Like on Twitter sometimes, you'll see for specific coins that then there can be a lot of replies and it makes it look like there's a lot more activity or hype around a specific meme. Yeah.

I mean, bro, my account is like the home for all of that. It's insane. I mean, it's pretty clear that you can tell like when it's manufactured and when it's real, though, because a lot of the, a lot of these accounts also talk about. other things in crypto. So it's like if you have somebody like a group of accounts talking about a meme, they typically have other tweets that are like normal and natural. Whereas if you have bots talking about a meme, it's usually like that's just their only replies. And there's like spam replies typically with the same like copy paste, whatever. And that's really all they do. Whereas like

with is a really good example because there's a ton of people that bought when it was just like basically at zero. They all a lot of them have the PFP's like different with PFPs and they have other trades that they take and like other memes. that they look at. I think that's probably a good example, like really good community because they're just active in other areas and they're not just spamming the replies. But yeah, I'll say generally, you can tell pretty easily.

You usually can tell early too. Like, Mici's another good one that kind of has a similar like vein of with or like they can edit a ton of things on the cat. And you also have a ton of people that are just like replying, reply and replying all over CT. Okay. And then one other thing that I wondered about was, is, you know, we have these different chains that are home to different meme coins.

You know, this trend probably started on Ethereum. It's moved to Solana. Now, Bitcoin is having its own moment as well. So how do the meme coin communities differ on the chains? And like, do you have a preferred, you know, chain? Yeah, I definitely have a preferred chain. So, Atlanta, for sure. Slightly biased in that respect because I bought it super early.

But I think that there is, I've never really thought about that. There definitely are probably different communities on different chains. I think Salon is really good for retail in general because it's super cheap for anybody to buy. Like, you can, there's really no obstacles for anybody who can buy and sell memes on Salana. Whereas, like, with Eith, I remember when I was selling Pepe on chain, like when it was close to the top, I was paying like $100, like $200, like every transaction just to push them through because it was so much activity, so many people buying and selling. so much on so much volume on chain. Whereas with Solana, um, you don't really have those issues.

Like I've seen people literally dollar cost average one dollar buys for like days on on coins. Because I mean, they don't even have that much money, but it's like they're trading nonstop. So it's just like there's a lot more people who can trade on on Seoul versus trade on ETH when it's congested. Um, and then I think I think Bitcoin is really interesting. I honestly missed a lot of the Ornose stuff early on. I bought, I think, OXBT is the one that I bought and said a lot of the other ones that literally did a thousand X. Bitcoin is interesting because there's a lot of old crypto money, I think, that like holds BTC doesn't really get as active in defy in other areas. But I think they may be considering doing that now if there's like alt coins on Bitcoin or like

JPEG's on Bitcoin. So I think like compared to Ethan Salon, the wealth effect is just massive on Bitcoin if you can tap into those like people who have been in crypto for a really long period of time. And that's like kind of why I like Wizard and I like Pups, because I think if you can get those people interested, then the ceiling obviously is just going to be higher because you have a ton of money on Bitcoin. That's generally how I think about it. But I'll say the DGens are active on every single chain. Like if you're a good trader in crypto, you're on every chain like regardless. And wait, one one quick question about Bitcoin.

I know it's super early, but obviously BRC20s last year was kind of the tech behind the meme coins there. And now with the launch of Roons, are you noticing like, are they both kind of competitive? Or is it really that Rooms now is the preferred new tech for Bitcoin for meme coins on Bitcoin? Or is it too early to say? I think it's still too early to say personally, that's what I would say. From what I've seen, people haven't seen that much of a day. difference in the experience trading, Bruins versus BRC20s. I still think there's a lot of developers working through that and trying to get the best UX for trading on BTC. I think there's

a lot of people still working on that problem. So I don't think it's in the final state yet, for sure. Okay. Kill, what do you think about the different chains and their meme coin communities? Yeah, I mean, there's always opportunity to be found, but just like any other market, those opportunities tend to kind of get power law distributed in cluster in certain spaces. Obviously, we've seen the scope and lasting nature of the opportunities on Solana is far awayed, you know, a lot of competing chains, at least with respect to the mean coins. That said, you know, I've also had a lot of activity on base. I've tried out, you know, Bitcoin as well.

I do think there's still a lot of work to be done with respect to the, you know, ruins trading or BRFC20. I think people's expectations of the U.S. unlock of ruins weren't really met at least yet. But it is so very early days. You know, this is still quite new tech. So definitely optimistic down the line. But as of right now, I definitely say, Solana, by far out with. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, because I guess since the protocol just launched, then, of course, all the other bells and whistles are not really available.

All right. So in a moment, we're going to talk about criticisms of meme coins, which I'm sure you guys have dealt with a lot. But first, a quick word from the sponsors who make this show possible. Deploy custom crypto strategies and boost your yield with perpetual options on VaultCraft, the universal defy adapter for supercharging your crypto. With version V1.5, users can now earn options on optimism and arbitrage. while also rebalancing multi-strategy yield products all-in-one vault. You can also gamify your experience with Voltron, Volcraft's NFT reward optimizer, to earn even more XP points. From institutional service providers to defyDgens,

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discusses the launch of Hong Kong's Bitcoin Spot ETFs. Remember, the first episode of Bits and Bips dropped. on May 8th. So turn on your notifications and follow us on social media so you don't miss any updates. The first thing is that like this is just the Hong Kong market. So mainland Chinese cannot invest in these products, which a lot of people didn't understand coming from outside the ETF world. There's a reason that it's a smaller market. It's because it's restricted to who can and cannot buy. And they're not really any ways around it. Like this is the Chinese government. Like this is, it's not like you could just go into VPN and do this. Like there's a lot of processes in place.

And it's not going to be accessible from the mainland Chinese. So that's the other. But the other thing, I talked about the minimal trading, they did line up a bunch of assets. So the Bitcoin ETFs have $248 million and the ether ETS have $45 million. So the one thing that the U.S. does differently is like if they line up assets beforehand, they have it come in on day one or day two. What these Chinese issuers did is they basically put the money in the fund before it launched. So the assets look pretty good right now.

It's just that there's not as much trading. And we don't expect there to be that much trading, to be honest. Like, it's just a smaller market. Back to my conversation with Anselman Kell. So, as I mentioned before the ad break, there was a ton of criticism of meme coins. One of the most memorable that I've seen is from Paulina, who's the anonymous commentator, known for their like pointed blog posts that are little diatribes of commentary on crypto. And Polina decried meme coins as, quote,

merely a vehicle to transfer wealth from the many to the most obnoxious people on the planet. Oh my God. That's crazy. That's a lot. That's awesome. Sorry, that's just so funny. What's your response to that?

I mean, I think meme coins have made people a ton more money than, like, people have lost on memes. If you literally just look at Doge, that's the biggest example. It's still sitting right now. I think it like 10 billion or it's higher than 10 billion. It's like 20 billion or something like that. Like that's 20 billion dollars in value that like came from zero. So whoever bought those in like 2013, 14, 15, 16, they're still up 10,000 X. Like a ton of people are up a lot on Doge. It's 20 billion, by the way. 20 billion, yeah. A ton of people are up on Doge in the same way that

they're up on Bitcoin. Like for somebody who bought a hundred dollars worth of Bitcoin and a hundred dollars where the Doge in 2014 or whatever it was, it's really no difference to them, like, what they made or like what the coin is, they made as much money on either of them. I think a lot of people kind of miss, miss that. Like, these things actually hold value. Doge's was top 10 in the bare market. And it did a lot better as far as like returns. And then all the defy coins did, which people think are like a lot more serious like than the memes. It outperformed a ton of other like, serious projects. But it's kind of hard. It's hard for people to get in like that mental state, like framing like that these memes have value. It's easy for me because I've been

on the internet forever. Like I've been looking at memes since I was like eight, nine. Like it's memes have always been around. Out of curiosity, what age are you? But you don't have to give the exact age, but like roughly. I'm 29. I'm 25. Okay. Yeah. So you guys, my God, like Bitcoin started when you were like 10 and 14. Yeah. Yeah. I should have been buying back then.

Right. I know, bro. I was on the other than shit. Oh, crazy. Oh, crazy. Yeah. So maybe it is like partially a genital. We don't know what age Polina is, but, I mean, the one thing I would push back on is probably some huge number of people

bought Doge when Elon Musk mentioned it on Saturday Night Live. And so they're definitely underwater. For sure. There's definitely people that bought the top on Doge and other memes. But I don't think it's really that different from people who bought Bitcoin at like 69K and then with the 15K. I mean, basically the same thing. People bought Doge at 70 cents and it went to 20 cents. Criticism, I think, around memes, I don't think the purely price, like looking at price, is valid because anything that people can speculate on, whether it's like stocks, crypto, altcoins, Bitcoin.

coin, any of those things, people can buy the top and lose money. Like, that's not really a specific to meme coins thing. And even, like, how far they go down, like, a lot of the defy coins went down 90%. Same with it, memes went down a lot. I would say, like, a better criticism around memes is, like, the shady behavior with, like, teams launching them, controlling a ton of the supply, and literally just, like, P&Ding them as soon as they launch. You launch a coin, show it to some people, literally sell like 50 plus percent of the supply immediately on launch and then it just goes to zero.

I'd say that's like the better criticism because that happens a ton with these projects that literally start from zero. There's no really rules or anything around like how you launch. Whereas with these like coins were backed by venture capital, they're like obviously a lot more structured and you're not going to have like P&Ds really with those types of coins because like they have vesting. they like have teams building out like actual products and all of that. So it's like different in that regard.

I would say the better criticism is like around the shady behavior with watches. So Anselm, as you mentioned, there's all these scams. And back in April, Andre Cronium made a proposal for what he called safer meme coins. And he suggested that there be like a bunch of conditions to make them safer. For instance, that 10% of tokens could be allocated to marketing, but they had to be kept in a multi-sig. 5% of the tokens could support the team's expenses. Again, need to be locked into a multi-sig. The remaining 85% would be put in Phantom or token LPs, and the token would not have minting or ownership capabilities. You know, he suggested, I noticed on the tweet thread,

people criticized it for it being centralized, but I don't know if you saw his proposal or what you generally think of this kind of idea or even generally think of the idea of trying to prevent these types of scams. Yeah, I mean, I do think it's a good idea. Like, to have kind of like some kind of rules around it. I think like one of the reasons that Pump. That fund has been doing well. It's like it allows anybody to launch a coin immediately like that, like made a ton of revenue

in the past 30 days because literally just upload a picture, give it a ticker, give it a description. And then it lands on this bonding curve. And then like once enough people buy on the bonding curve, I think they take a cut of that and put it in liquidity pool. and they launch it on radio or whatever it is. But the good thing about those coins on Pump.com, is none of them can rug.

Like, you can't rug any of them because it, like, immediately locks the LP or whatever it is. I think that's why, like, one of the reasons they've done pretty well is because they know if it comes off Pump. That's like, I don't have to worry about that. That's scenario. But yeah, I think Grangey is smart for doing that with Phantom because he's kind of realized that memes are not going away in the market.

So he's like, okay, we might as well. give people some sort of framework and then also we can make money off it as well and like kind to decrease the amount of people that are like purely just getting rugged on on the news. And one other thing that I wanted to ask about was I'm sure you're aware there was this disturbing trend recently of these racist meme coins. You guys are laughing. You guys are so tell me why you're laughing. That was a surprise reaction.

to a surprising reaction. Because, I mean, I've been on the internet for, like, forever. Like, I've been playing games on the internet forever. I've been in the cod lobbies. I've been in, like, NHL, like, all those stuff. Like, the racism online from anonymous people is, like, a constant. It's not, it'll be surprising. It's surprising if that didn't happen, honestly.

Like, it's just, it's constant on the internet. When you have people who don't have to talk to you to your face and they can say whatever behind their keyboard, you're always going to have people like that. Just how the world is. I'm not really surprised at any of that at all. I'm not surprised. It's just the internet. So, okay, but I mean, were you unhappy about it?

Or like you just seem to be very blazze? Yeah, I mean, I mean, some of the stuff, like, it can get under your skin sometimes. But for the most part, you just have to kind of take the good with the bad. Like, if you have these decentralized, permissionless systems that allow anybody to transact globally, build whatever application, on all these smart contract platforms, you're also going to get that on the bad side of that. It's like permissionless for anybody to launch anything on chain at any point. It's just kind of like if you got to take the good with the bad with crypto,

you can't because if you were to put kind of like, I don't know, restrictions on it. Like, oh, people can't do these things. You can't you kind of mess up the entire framework for crypto. That's why I mean, I just laugh about it. It was not really much else you can do. Really? And Kel, why did you laugh? No, I just like, like, you know, like Z said, ultimately it's just the internet, right?

Like it's just people, you know, from since time, since I've been on the internet, this is like a, this is just how these things kind of play out. And for me, it's just funny to see like people on Twitter and they're betting like the, you know, material sums of their, you know, life savings or whatever on. some just dastardly kind of token, saying. It's just like, it's like comedic relief to me, you know. It's not something that I like, oh, like, you know, this is a massive step backwards for race relations in the world, you know.

It's just like, you know, people kind of being done with their money. So I just take into something I laugh at and kind of move on. Yeah, I guess in the scheme of racist things that one could do, This is way more innocent than some of the other things, which we won't name. One thing that I wanted, yeah, to say the least. But to connect the Andrei Konya proposal with this, like, do you feel like what he suggested there could prevent these kinds of meme coins or racist mean coins? And there were sexist ones too. Or, you know, do you think there's other things that you would also, you know,

propose to try to prevent that kind of behavior? I mean, yeah, I probably could help. I'm not exactly sure what you kind of propose to stop people from doing it. You can't really stop people from doing it. I think like what people could do on crypto Twitter is like when you do see stuff like that, obviously don't draw more attention to it and be like, oh, this is funny or this is hilarious. Like you don't, you don't have to like talk about the things that people launch. Because even if it's bad attention, it's still attention.

Like if you just talk about it, people are going to keep. it. Like, oh, I did this. And then a lot of people talked about it and it made this many people mad. Then they're just going to keep doing it. Whereas, like, if they launched these coins, nobody pays attention to them. Nobody says anything about them. They just let them go. They just go to zero. And it's like, they'll stop doing it because they're not getting a reaction to people. So I would say that's the biggest thing like the community could literally just ignore them. And then it would stop happening as frequently for sure. Huh. Okay. Kel, what do you think? How would you prevent people from doing this kind of thing?

It's just like any other troll kind of situation. You know, the more attention the troll gets, the more power and stuff like that. So the less attention, you know, and like that's why when this whole thing started, maybe that was a month ago or so. Yeah, I got some attention as people were buying into these tokens. But ultimately, once people stopped kind of buying these speculating on them and they all go to zero, like, you know, there's just no incentive anymore. and you don't get any gratification because no one's talking about you doing this stuff anymore,

it just kind of naturally dies out. I feel like that's the best. It's almost like an antibody response by the community in general. It's like, all right, we're not going to talk about this. I'm not going to buy this. So this is really not going to go anywhere. So it just naturally falls away. I think that's like the best you can really.

Oh, okay. Yeah, this is so interesting because earlier you were saying that what makes meme coin successful is attention. and now you're basically saying, yeah, starve them of the thing that makes meme coins popular. So, well, I imagine that you guys have like some crazy stories. You know, I mean, even just like as a follower of this news, like if I look at kind of what happened with Bonk and the Saka phones where the Saka phones sold out when they realized that like the Bunk AirDrop would be would make it more valuable than the cost of the phone. And, you know, before then the phone, you know, the sales for that had been flagging. So there's that, there's the whole dog with hat thing on the Las Vegas sphere, Anselm you were part of that.

I don't know. I just kind of want to hear some funny like war stories. Like what are some of your favorite moments that you've had with meme coins? I have so many. I feel like now at this point. Yeah. Whiff is honestly a really good one because with like the story of WIP is kind of funny. So that WIF launched on Salon, I think, in December.

I want to say the dev and like the team sold all of their supply literally like under 100K or like around 100K market cap. So it was like just a community. And basically like the Twitter meaming the like dog with fat on everybody's posts, everybody's tweets nonstop. So like when Bach did really well and then like some other memes started popping up, like randomly tweeted one day. I was like, yo, I'm going to retweet the best meme, like the best meme basically edit who put

something on my friend's profile picture. So my friend that I was with. And then like the with Twitter account like edited her profile, like put a hat on her profile and then a ton of people commented under it and it like blew up and went pretty viral. And I commented like replied to it and like retweeted or whatever. So it was like a 100k market cap. And then I asked like the girl I was with I was like telling her about crypto. Like she doesn't know anything about crypto. Talked about crypto, talking about crypto Twitter, telling about my account and how like this stuff I talk about on there like people like get a lot of attention on it and I'm talking about all these memes on salana and I'm asking her like which one does she like the most out of all the memes with like have a list

of all of them I was like which one do you like the most and she's like whiff is literally like at a 100k mark cap so I'm with my boy with her and we're just like walking around chilling and that and that posted in um I think my telegram somebody was like asked me what memes are by like like pinging me nonstop and I was like somebody said like posted whip and I was like yeah with is funny like I think it's a funny meme. And then that weekend, we like go out and we're like drink or whatever. I think it was for, uh, what is it? The like, not the caroling. Santa Con. So Santa Con in New York. We're like out for Santa Con in New York. It's like going from bar to bar drinking or chilling, walking down the street. I go live on Twitter just randomly. I'm like talking to my boy.

We're talking about crypto. I'm talking to crypto Twitter and all that stuff. And I asked like on live, like, yo, like what's your favorite meme? Like what meme should we buy? My boy goes bunk. My other friend goes bunk. I don't know what I said. I think I might have said bonged too. And then the girl I was with goes dog with hat. And I'm like, wait, what? Because in my head, I was expected to like do like those or something. But she's like, no, dog with hat. And I turned the camera to her. I'm like, wait, say that again. And she's like, dog with hat. And it's a clip on my Twitter. Because immediately when she said that, everybody who was watching the live stream went and looked at the coin and started buying a coin. And this was, I think it like a million market cap or whatever it was.

And it like went like 5x that day. I go to sleep, wake up. And then the next day, people like all over Twitter spamming me with the video from live, the girl being like, yo, dog with hat, that's the meme like we should buy. And then like from there it went just crazy. Now it's like $3 billion or whatever it is, $3 billion market cap. So I literally went from $100K market cap to a million mark cap, like 10 million mark cap, like two weeks, and now it's a three billion. That's just from December. But it was random because it was just like the girl I was with was like, yeah, I like this, I like that one out of all the other ones. And now we started talking about it on Twitter. Wow. And wait, just out of curiosity. So had you bought with? I hadn't bought it 100. I didn't

buy it 100 gay. I like, I saw it. I knew what it was. And I think I bought like later, like slightly after that. But yeah, I hadn't bought it yet. I just looked at it. And then she was like, yeah, I like that one. Oh. And then one other thing I wanted to ask about is your telegram because you, you mean, like you have some kind of private group or something where you talk about meme coins or something, right? I mean, I guess it's private because I have the link to like share it. But it's like 25,000 people in the telegram.

It's a lot, a lot of people. Yeah, it's a lot of people. We have a ton of different channels where people just talk about trades. There's one specific to like microcats. There's one for research. where people post like deeper long-form research on projects that they're researching. There's one for like charts. There's one for all the different, like, there's different channels for the different

ecosystems. Essentially, it's just a community, kind of similar to what Wall Street bets is for stocks. It's kind of like that, but for crypto. And it just lives on Telegram. I have like a Q&A channel in there where I pop in and answer all the questions. People are asking about the market. Just like hang with people. But it's insane that the like speed of messages in there is insane because people are, you

You know, crypto trades 24-7. So people are going 24-7 talking about coins nonstop all day. But it's funny because a lot of memes on Solana now kind of like originate in that telegram because everybody's there trading is like, oh, which means we buy in this week? Like, what's your favorite coin, like whatever? So yeah, that's the telegram. It's not really private, but like I post a link every once in a while. It's just there's so many people there.

I had to like literally get some people to help me mod it because it's just like sometimes it can be a lot of spam. But yeah, it's cool. Yeah, that makes sense. Actually, Kel, before you answer the question about your war stories with the meme coins, you have tweeted frequently about Ansem's influence in the meme coin market, and I wanted to just get your take on what you think his influence is. So I think it's interesting because people have this perception that, like,

oh, like, there's some secret cabal that, like, tries to push these memes and all this kind of stuff. And in my experience, that's actually not true whatsoever. Of course, there are people who have, like, it's almost the opposite of true. I see people try and do this very frequently. And they almost exclusively fail because to our earlier points about broad of relatability and virality and stuff, you can't really manufacture that. People think you can, but you can't. So I think, like, with respect to Anselm's chat and stuff like that,

I think because you have a group of 30,000 people in one place, that is like, you know, it's just like a breeding ground for, like, ideas to proliferate. But is it something that people can, like, coordinate around easily? No. And, like, anyone can go into that chat. You know, if you're listening to this or you see this, I implore you, you go into that chat for one day and then you tell me whether or not you think, like, people are super coordinated there.

And the answer is, like, obviously not. But it's funny, you bring up the whiff story because, you know, I have the exact same story, but from the opposite angle is just like a randomly market participant kind of seeing this all go down. And I'll never forget, like, because, you know, the volatility one must endure on the route to success in these memes is not for the faint of heart. To say the least. So, you know, I remember being. like super, you know, like in this chat, thinking like, you know, if something sticks out of this group of like 20,000 degenerates, you know, it's going to be super successful and thinking that if whiff was that coin. But having to endure this like up and down, up and down and going from like the classic meme of like, you know, we're so back. It's so over. We're so back. It's over and over and over again.

but I knew I was right, funnily enough, when the video with that, the girl who had said, Dog with Hat, whoever that girl is, shout out, shout out her because I knew, once that video hit, I was like, Crypto Twitter is a place where, for better or worse, a lot of these guys, they have a lot of money and not much experience actually speaking to women of any kind. So to have, like, a woman validate a token is that it was actually like a breakthrough moment it's reflected in the chart to as an earlier points. So it was kind of funny like seeing that story from that angle.

This is so interesting. So your theory is that part of the reason that that worked is because it was a woman who was saying that. 100%. 100%. Oh, my God, because that's totally the attention thesis, right? Like, you know, if, yeah, if it's, yeah, right? That's the thing. Like, she didn't know anything about crypto, like nothing about crypto. She just knew, like, she liked the meme. That's what we're saying. Like, if it's relatable to anybody, it's a really good test. If you could, like, ask people who don't know anything about crypto, which memes they like, that's a really good test for, like how well they can do because they don't have any frame of reference. Like, they don't even know you can make money on it. They don't even know you can make money on it. They just know, like, the picture. Like, they're not even thinking about this speculation aspect of it at all. It's just, like, how, how, like, how much people like it.

It's kind of like a score, like a retail score. Whiff is a 10 on the retail score. Oh, right. There is, yeah, there's some metric out there where, yeah, I think they call it, like, net promoter score or something. So, and so, Kel, is that your war story that you want to share? Yeah. I mean, just like the whole whiff experience is, so earlier on I had mentioned this whole, like, there was these wealth effects and then that kind of goes, that trickles down into the ecosystem. So Ethereum goes up a lot. Then you have D5 summer and you're in finance and a ton of stuff come out of nowhere and do super well.

And with Solana, you know, Solana's going up a lot, but nothing in the ecosystem had really performed super well. and so that's what I had been looking for is like the second order trade going off of Solana and then within that I'd come to the conclusion that the most likely place for that to emerge would be Antsams Telegram because it's a built-in group of 20,000 people, right?

And so my war story is literally just like 16, 17 hours a day just watching what these people are talking about for days on end to no result, just watching scrolling, like losing sleep, like sleeping two hours and showing up to the, at that time I was still, I'm sorry, and like showing up to the office on like two hours of sleep. Like, people being like hell like, why are you not sleeping? And I'm like, bro, like, I'm searching, dog. Like, just let me search.

And then, you know, eventually, you know, found the, found the one. And then the whole come up story and gaining conviction. losing it, gaining it, losing it, and all that is just crazy. I feel like you're dropping serious alpha here, but I don't know if it's one of those things where once it goes public, then it will be less helpful. But anyway, so now I want to get a little philosophical. You know, we've been using this word meme coin throughout the show, and we've just been using it in like the most kind of direct colloquial sentence.

But I'm sure you've heard this expression, Bitcoin is the original meme coin. So I wondered if you could, first of all, just for the audience, describe what that means, but then also, like, just to explain, like, do you agree with that? Or, like, you know, when you think of what a meme coin is, like, what's your definition? Yeah, no, I definitely agree. I actually did a thread kind of on this the other day. I think it was, like, last week or so when I was out on Dubai. So I think, like, the reason I think you can say that Bitcoin is the original meme

coin is because, like, the whole definition of meme coins is that, like, the only value is derived from the community and like how like either how meaningful it is or like how much attention it gets like basically what the community decides is worth is that's what it's worth so when bitcoin in the early days of bitcoin people were just mining it there wasn't really even a price attached to it because it wasn't trading on exchanges it was just people mining it and setting up the network so when you have like that bootstrapping phase of all these people like that was the distribution so bitcoin had really really really good distribution early on but it's also like the community of people around Bitcoin just refused to sell it. Like the people who had all the early supply, they just didn't

sell it. And that's why it was able to reach escape velocity because like a lot of those early holders in Bitcoin just had such strong conviction, like almost to like a religious extent that Bitcoin was worth way, way, way more. It would be worth way, way more in the future. But like if you ask anybody what Bitcoin's value was back in 2012 or whenever, they would say the exact same thing that people say about meme coins now. Like the quotes would literally be the exact same quotes. Like, oh, it's just fake internet money. Like, it's just made up. It's not worth anything. It's like rat poison. And all of those quotes that people say about Bitcoin back then are what people say about memes now. But you wouldn't say that about memes on the internet.

Like nobody would say, yeah, I think memes are never going to exist on the internet in five years. Like, that's just a ridiculous statement. But if you say the same thing about mean coins, then somehow, like, people agree with it. That's kind of generally how I, how I, how I think about it. It's just not, not in the mean coin sense that it doesn't have value. I do think Bitcoin has value. But the only reason that has value is because of like large community of people basically decided that it had value in its really early days and when they were bootstrapping the network. If they didn't, it could have just went to zero. Like literally. Kel, do you want to add anything? Ultimately, I think a meme is just an idea, right? You know, and there's different

ways to express an idea. Dog with hot, you know, the idea is expressed via pictures. right and you know depending on how abstract you're willing to get with things you can say you know bitcoin is ultimately just an idea it's an idea secured by itself right the miners they're not paid in gold coins or dollars or or soybean futures you know they're they're paid in bitcoin so it's a self-fulfilling kind of idea and you know again what we've said several times the the scope of a meme is defined as how broad, how relatable it can be, and how strongly people are going to feel about that. Well, turns out, you know, if you give people this idea of the hard money, which changed by over, over the years, right? First, it was an electronic cash, that it's, you know, the idea can morph over time just like any other movement or any other kind of idea.

Ultimately, at its core, though, it's still an idea. And so, you know, phrasing it as Bitcoin as a meme coin is obviously a way to like, you know, it garners the most attention around the topic, which is, you know, to our earlier points about, you know, attention is currency. It's like a smart way to do it. But, you know, ultimately, they're all ideas, right? So I think I agree with that same. Yeah, yeah. It's like this whole thing about how money is a social construct, you know, like I have a lot of people who are like, oh, but you know, the, you know, the, you know, the U.S. dollar is backed by the U.S. government and blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, yeah.

And, you know, we also used to transact in seashells. So, you know, it's like, it's not any different or special. So let's now talk about the future of meme coins. You probably have heard this theory that Chris Dixon says that new technologies always start off as skeuomorphic. This reminds me of when I started in journalism back in the late 90s, which is probably when you guys were all born. And the Internet, with the Internet, like just becoming a thing at that time. And so literally my first few jobs in journalism was largely composed of me putting the print edition of, you know, like the magazine or the newspaper, whatever, online. Literally that's like what the web used to be. So I wondered, you know,

just what you thought the future of meme coins would look like. Like Lee Jin wrote a fasting post on how meme coins can be used as go to market strategies for businesses. And she talked about about how this Bunk bought does so much volume. At the time that she wrote about it, this, you know, this bot and this telegram chat for buying Bunk. It was doing $200 million in daily trading volume, which she said at that time was the same amount of volume that BASE was doing every day.

And then Vitolic also wrote about how meme coins could be used for charity or for doing other kind of social good type things. He called one of his ideas Robin Hood game. which you could probably figure that out. But yeah, just generally, like, what do you think of some of these different ideas? Or, like, what do you think the future is for meme coins? I'm not really sure. I think I definitely think that they're going to continue to exist

and people are going to continue to build on them. Just, like, as I said, anything that was a meme, like, or is a meme on the internet can be turned into a coin. And I think people are just going to continue to do that. Like, one of the most recent ones that's kind of a really crypto-native meme is the wizard one. So Wizard, which is like the magic internet money, that slogan, that like original meme that was posted on Reddit back I think in like 2012. Literally Bitcoin was trading at like $30. It's this MS paint meme that went super viral on Reddit.

And then like I think that year, Bitcoin went from $30, like $1,200. And that's actually the meme that like the Doge founder, that's how he got into Bitcoin and got interested in crypto. So that's like one of the really early memes that like it didn't have a coin. It was just a meme. Now it has a coin attached to it. And it's like has hell of providence in crypto. So I think you're going to see things like that. Like there's kind of these historical like artifacts type of things like memes on the internet that are going to get turned into coins. That's one of the things I think is going to continue to happen because people are kind of realizing now that like that has value to some amount of people.

But that value is not currently able to be speculated on. Now let's figure out how to let people speculate on it and where like that gets priced at. Oh, and wait, and one other thing to ask you about is just because the Front Tech airdrofts happening the day we're recording. So wanted to put that out there too. Cool. Yeah. And I think one of the other other things I think is going to happen is like NFTs last cycle were really big for retail. And one of the reasons that NFTs were big for retail is like the community aspect of them.

Like everybody who own this NFTs, part of this community. Then you have this community where you can like give all these like give things to like set up events for like. like organize around. And memes are very similar in that everybody who holds this meme feel like they're part of this community. Like make it their profile picture. Like with WIF, like it's not an NFT project, but their profile pictures are the WIF meme across all the different spectrums of edits.

So it's very similar like NFTs and memes now. I think what's going to happen is you're going to have NFT projects, which are just like also memes. And you kind of seen this a little bit happen with the 404 standard. on ETH, I think, where it's like you have the JPEGs, and then when you fractionalize the JPEGs, you just get coins. So it's like you can either hold one of the JPEGs or you can hold like a fractionalized version of that JPEC as a coin.

I think that standard, it may not be four or four specifically, but that trend, I think is going to continue to be really popular because you have the aspect of alt coins where it's like you can have a ton more holders. So your community is like a lot bigger than it would be with just like an NFT 10,000 collection project. But then also it's like you have the picture image aspect where it's like something that people can relate to, make it their profile picture, like all that, all those things, which is like a lot of the benefits of the NFT side of things. And then you can get really creative with like how you organize community, like what you give to them like I think in a lot of different ways. So I think

that's another thing that's probably going to happen. Yeah, I'm not sure what else it's going to be interesting for sure. Kel, what do you think? I think in a terminal state, I think all memes will become coins. So I think, you know, if I imagine social networking in 10 years, I would not be surprised if the creation of a meme was natively financialized just because, you know, the trend is just towards increasing financialization of things. And crypto makes that trivial from a tech perspective. So now it's just a question of like, how do you package that tech in a way that galvanizes people to do this?

And like with crypto-native memes, we're already at that point, you know, some random thing happens on a Tuesday. Within five minutes, there's going to be 10 coins on Pump.com. I'm trying to like capture this moment of this meme. So I think that's only going to continue it or at the very early stages of that. I don't know exactly like the form or method that it will take. But if you ask me, you know, bet yes or no on this, 10 years from now, I definitely bet yes. And, you know, I think communities of all types on the internet will have their own like meme coins in the way that we do in crypto, you know.

With is a sort of community, right? It's beyond just like, you know, it's an idea, but it also attracts a certain type of person in the same way that a social club in New York attracts one type of person and a country club in the Hamptons attracts a different type of person. And I think, you know, for example, Balaji talks about network states and all this, I think in 20 years and all the internet network states will all be centered around sort of memes in a way. So those are my two boldface predictions, you know, 20 years and after, right? Someone pull out this clip and if it's wrong, you're going to forget about it anyways.

So don't even know. And what about something like friend.com where it's like more around like some person? I don't know. Yeah. I like I like Friends Tech is interesting because it kind of taps into the social tokens kind of lane of things, which I think is another interesting area. Like a lot of the reasons, like I talked about those. cycle. It did well because it was kind of just like a social token for Elon. Like it was it was

basically just like people like Elon Doge Doge Elon. And I think nobody has really explored yet that social token like trading of literally individuals and like their attention, their influence. Nobody's really figured that out yet. But Friend Tech is kind of trying to do that. I think one of the good comparisons that I make is for that app is like it's the uniswap for social token. So it's like any celebrity, any athlete, any creator, artist, whatever, musician, anything, like, you can trade them in their popularity or, like, their access on, on Frontec. And then, like, now with their V2 launch, I think they're doing some other things with, like, money clubs, which is like you can have multiple people form a club that people can join. So say you have, I don't know, like your

favorite artist is Taylor Swift. And she's like some, she makes a club for people to join. People in that club get access to like BIP concerts, meetups in person, all these different things. And in that she also adds some of her friends of that club. And it's like a multiple like group of people that people want access to. See, I think I think friends like is interesting. Also what they did with the distribution is interesting. It's kind of more similar to how the meme coins have distribution because they just literally gave 100% of the token supply to the community.

So instead of giving VC coins or giving the team coins, um, they, just gave everything to the community, which is very similar to how the meme coins do all of their distributions. I think the reason they did that is because they make a lot off the fees, so they really don't need access to the coin anyway. That's how they make money on the app. But it is similar in that regard where it's like, okay, everybody on crypto Twitter or who was active on Frenzac got their equivalent share of the coin. All right. Well, Kel, unless you have something to add with that, I think I've asked all my questions. Do you want to add something on that? on friend tech?

No, I mean, I guess I kind of agree. We'll have to see again, like, the form, but I agree this idea of trading attention of what individual people can do is like generally a smart thesis. It's just whether or not Frentech will be able to package that thesis in a way that and take the next step. They've done well to get a lot of the crypto-native kind of people. The question is, you know, three years from now is, you know, LeBron James going to be on friend tech, yes or no. I have no idea, right? But if the answer is yes, it's obviously going to be

shady valuable. All right. Well, this has been super fun. Where can people learn more about each of you and your work? I'm a BLK-N-O-I-Z-06 on Twitter, Anthem on Twitter. Yeah, that's where I live at. Yeah, just Kelx-I-Z on Twitter. Yeah, definitely can find me there, give me up, DM me, whatever. Shop it up. Perfect. Well, it's been a pleasure having you both on Unchained. Cool. Thanks for having us. Yeah, thank you so much.

Thanks so much for joining us today. To learn more about Mean Coins and Anselm and Kel, check out the show notes for this episode. Unchained is produced by me, Laura Shin, with help from Matt Peltcher, Wanner Ranovich, Megan Gavis, Pam Mjimdar, and Margaret Curia. Thanks for listening. Unchained is now a part of the Coin Desk podcast. Network. For the latest in digital assets, check out markets daily five days a week with host Noelle Atchison. Follow the Coin Desk Podcast Network for some of the best shows in crypto.