Meme coins, the bullmarket bonanza in bullshit

In the morning, when i hear my son brushing his teeth then spitting out his toothpaste I am sadly reminded ‘Hawk Tuah’. This kind of concerns me. My brain has been taken over by this meme. This meme itself has by now turned into a shit-coin shitshow. I felt I had to write something to get this ‘off my chest’ so to speak. 

Quick check on terminology:

Respectful: Alt-coins

Moderately respectful: Meme-coins

Disrespectful but most truthful: shit-coins

I am not talking about stablecoins, or the more entrenched ‘blue chip’ digital ssets which mostly do have some utility. I am talking about these coins priced in fractions. I mean so many zeros after the decimal it is hard to count them. 

For example ‘Monkey Shit Inu’ is currently priced at: 0.0000000319. So $1 USD would buy you 31.3 million of these fine coins. There are 3 trillion of them if you would care to buy them all for just shy of $100,000. You could potentially be a trillionaire, perhaps? Or gazillionaire? https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/monkey-shit-inu 

I have 

 If you had bought in after the ICO on July 6 at around 0.00000162,  and sold any time within the next month,  you could have made up to 300% return. Not bad work if you can get it. Unfortunately for some, the Monkey Shit Inu peaked at around 0.000000712 (6 zeros rather than 7) on August 4th last year. Ever since then except for a brief window of a couple of weeks, it has been under water, and someone buying near its peak is holding a 99% loss now. Who made the money? 

Before going any further, checkout Messari’s table of meme-coins and their marketcaps to see the scale of this issue:

To further see the madness in all of this, checkout the price changes over 14 hours, 7 days and 30 days, here, for the positive spin:

https://messari.io/assets/memecoins?sort=Price+Change+30D:desc

Now we're talking baby! At time of writing CATX is up 5,700% in the past 30 days. Woo hoo!

…but keep scrolling…..more…now go on to the next section….then the next….get to number 4, and things start to look a bit more ugly. I get to page 7 out of 14 before I start seeing anything like a positive return over 30 days.

here for the negative:
https://messari.io/assets/memecoins?sort=Price+Change+30D%3Aasc

I get it. If you are a plugged-in degen and you know the landscape, and you are hyper tuned in to the hype around a coin, and you are even one of the players behind the meme-coin scene, you can make ridiculous money. But how are you making that money? Off the stupidity of other people.  

These digital tokens, based on internet jokes and pop culture references, have been around for years but got a massive boost in 2024, the year that the world seemed to have gone shamelessly mad. Meme coins' total market value skyrocketed from £16 billion to over £95 billion in 2024, raising serious concerns about their impact on the cryptocurrency ecosystem, not just the fundamentals of market structure, but also the reputation of the industry itself. 

This is concerning as the new US administration is potentially now becoming the largest promoter of digital assets globally. 

• - Just a word on Trump’s adoption of Crypto. My view is that he took the view, or people in his team took the view, maybe due to hard lobbying from crypto investors and some ear-whispering from his campaign team, that there is a huge electorate of bitcoin and other crypto holders in the US that could be tempted to vote his way to save their portfolios. 

Security.org published a report in September 2024 showing that “40% of American adults now own crypto”, representing as many as 93 million people. CBS astutely reported at the beginning of November that cryptocurrency owners could impact the US presidential election stating that, “crypto investors are emerging as a key new voting bloc”. 

Trump and his team jumped on this potential and suddenly became, more than crypto-friendly, an advocate of Bitcoin and Crypto, culminating in his appearance at Bitcoin 2024 in Nashville, the emperor wearing new clothes. He certainly made a conversion from his position a few years earlier where he publicly stated that, “Bitcoin, it just seems like a scam. I don’t like it because it’s another currency competing against the dollar.” For now, it seems like anything goes. As Gary Gensler put his coat on to go out of the door at the crypto-unfriendly SEC, the crypto crowd is expecting a watershed moment with what comes next. 

I cannot help but feel that his crypto friendliness is nothing more than political expediency. 

So, Trump has made his bed, now he has to lie in it. But what is his approach to Crypto really going to be? Clearly his impending inauguration has lifted Bitcoin and others, but beneath all of the majors, if we lift up the log and see the insects beneath, there is a crawling mass of meme-coins and shit-coins that his administration is going to have to deal with, or at least have an approach to. 

Quite simply most, if not all, Meme coins lack fundamental value or utility. By ‘definition’ they are based on memes. They also expose the fragility and potential dangers lurking within the crypto ecosystem.

They're primarily driven by hype and social media buzz, often manipulated by influencers and celebrities in the effort to create a ‘community’. This volatile nature makes them incredibly risky for average investors who may not fully understand the dangers involved.

2024 – A bull market in bullshit

The meme coin market experienced a meteoric rise in 2024, with its total market capitalisation skyrocketing from $20 billion in January to over $120 billion by December - a staggering 500% increase. This growth far outpaced traditional cryptocurrencies and drew in waves of new, often inexperienced investors (gamblers). 

However, this explosive growth has been accompanied by extreme volatility. In December alone, the meme-coin market saw huge swings, with memecoin total market capitalization surging to a peak of $137 billion before plummeting to $92 billion by the end of the month - a loss of over $40 billion within weeks. 

PEPE

With a bit of help from AI, it is possible to see how attractive this space is. Take a look at PEPE, the coin based on the “Pepe the Frog” meme.

To calculate the total return on Pepe Coin from its all-time low (ATL) to its all-time high (ATH):

            1.         All-Time Low (ATL): $0.000000055142 (April 18, 2023) 

            2.         All-Time High (ATH): $0.00002803 (December 9, 2024) 

Formula for Total Return:

Substituting the Values:

Simplified Calculation:

Final Answer:

The total return on Pepe Coin from its all-time low to its all-time high is 508,030%. 

Five hundred thousand and thirty per cent. 

$100 ‘invested’ in PEPE coin, if you were in at the beginning, or the bottom, to the top, would have netted you just over half-a-million dollars!

The billion dollar FART Coin!

Yet another meme-coin with anonymous creator(s). I mean this one is best explained elsewhere. Take a look here for some background on this memecoin that is now worth well over $1 billion:  https://www.chaincatcher.com/en/article/2158328

I get why people gamble in this space. Look at that chart above.

However, even if you are not as uptight as Gary Gensler, aside from the fact these coins have virtually no utility, you should be deeply aware and concerned about the prevalence of scams in this sector. The unregulated nature of meme coins makes them a breeding ground for fraud, pump-and-dump schemes, and other forms of market manipulation.

The big man himself, on the eve of his inauguration, couldn't help himself. He launched Trump Coin (chart here $TRUMP), which some have over-generously called a Fan Coin, netting him and the family billions almost overnight from fans or foolhardy speculators.

Not to be outdone, Melania had the bright idea to launch $SMELANIA the very next day. Why not get what you can as a family eh? Maybe the pre-nup is ring-fenced so why not get on the bandwagon? 

But it's ok. He's the Prez. He's crypto friendly. Let's turn a blind eye to the ethics here. 

However, serious names in the Crypto Industry are now saying he has possibly done more harm than good to Crypto's credibilty with this money making grift, sorry, opportunity.

In fact this is so easy to do I am almost tempted to do this myself. My kids are now pestering me to do this after hearing that Trump did it. They actually came from school yesterday asking me whether i made a coin today???!! WTF?

Create a meme-coin! It only takes a minute of your time.

“Psst….Wanna become rich? Create a meme-coin, pump the hell out of it, dump the hell out of it, retire”. It can only take a few seconds to transform your life. There are online tools that allow you to create a meme-coin in under 1 minute. Give it a go. It could change your life, and will certainly change someone else's if they buy it, one way or another.