- Meme coins are swiftly becoming the place to earn big bucks in the crypto space
- Dog-themed coins especially are going great guns, echoing the power of the meme
- Are those who say mem coins are damaging the space being hypocritical?
Cryptocurrency has had a major respectability problem in the eyes of those outside its strange and ever-moving walls. Those who only catch fleeting glimpses of it decry it as a place where charlatans and scammers can roam free, fleecing late entrants to the gold rush or just plain stealing from them. The DeFi movement has changed the landscape somewhat, but the recent surge in meme coins like SHIB and ELONMARS threatens to undermine the reputational change that DeFi is beginning to bring round. Should the cryptocurrency space look down on meme coins or does that simply render their critics hypocrites?
Cryptocurrency Simply Echoes Real Life Trends
No one would have a problem with meme coins if they had some use, but, as is all too plain, they are nothing but memes with no underlying use case that pump thousands of percent simply because they are popular at the time. If you went back to the 1960s there would have been multiple Beatles coins, Elvis Presley coins, Boston Celtics coins, and more, none of them having any use and all simply trading off the popularity of the entities themselves.
However, this in itself underlines the power of the ‘meme’, which has, like it or not, come to be as important to 2021 crypto as partnerships were for ICOs in 2017. It is no surprise that many meme coin critics are those that have been in the space for some time, who have watched it grow into something semi-serious, and see the meme coin explosion as something that takes crypto back to the dark ages. The space has worked hard to become more legitimate in its own right, they say, only for Elon Musk to come along and undo that hard work almost single handed.
OGs Guilty of Hypocrisy?
Of course, there are accusations of hypocrisy here, and rightly so. Cryptocurrency is a space for anyone to create whatever they want, so long as it’s legal, and who is one person to tell another, in crypto of all places, that their coin is degrading the space? Is this not just the same as those outside the city walls looking over and saying that all of crypto is nothing but scams and fraud? Cryptocurrency shifts trends at breakneck speed, and meme coins are just another one of those trends that come and go.
It is not a coincidence that those doing most of the complaining are those that five years ago were investing in scam ICOs they could flip and probably yield farming during the 2020 DeFi boom. They’ve been caught totally off guard by the meme coin revolution, echoing the sentiments of those who had been in the space for years and stayed clear of ICOs in 2017 because they were clearly scams.
The children have turned into their parents and become salty because they couldn’t spot the new meme coin trend. They missed out, thinking they knew the market better, while newcomers jumped on board the meme coin express because that’s what everyone else was doing and they’ve made a packet. I know, because I’m one of those who elected not to board the train. I knew better. Hmmm.
Meme Coin Fundamentals Are the Real World
The cryptocurrency space is so fast moving that, once the bull run is over, people will treat the meme coin episode just like they have the ICO boom or the yield farming boom. Meme coins have a strong power right now, and they perfectly echo the trends present in the world.
Memes arrive, they burn brightly, they fizzle out, and they disappear. This has always been the case, it’s just that our digital world allows it to happen at a much faster rate. It is ironic then that because they are actually based on real life, meme coins probably have more fundamentals than half the crappy exploit-ridden DeFi coins out there.
Now there’s a thought.
