memecoins are not jokes
dismissing memecoins as jokes misses what they actually are: coordination experiments.
doge hit a billion dollar market cap again. the response from "serious" crypto people is predictable: it's a joke, it has no fundamentals, it's retail gambling.
they're missing the point.
what memecoins actually are
a memecoin is a token where the primary value proposition is shared cultural context.
there's no protocol revenue. no tvl. no roadmap. just a symbol that a group of people have decided matters.
this isn't weakness. it's purity.
stripping away pretense
most tokens are memecoins with extra steps. the "fundamentals" are often just narrative scaffolding—reasons to justify holding, stories to tell yourself and others.
memecoins skip the pretense. they say: this token has value because we collectively decided it does. there's no other reason. and that's enough.
this is honest in a way that "utility tokens" often aren't.
coordination technology
what a memecoin provides:
- a focal point for community formation
- a mechanism for value capture by participants
- a legible way to track belief intensity
- a low barrier to participation
these are coordination tools. the meme is the interface. the token is the coordination layer.
why this matters
if you dismiss memecoins, you're dismissing the simplest form of something important: tokenized coordination around shared belief.
this is crypto's core innovation. everything else—defi, governance, nfts—is just more complex versions of the same idea.
memecoins show the idea in its purest form. that's why they persist. that's why new ones keep emerging. that's why they occasionally reach absurd valuations.
the joke is on everyone who thinks they're just jokes.