By Ray Chan, CEO, Memeland
Make money with your friends while laughing at an inside joke? What could be better than that?
Memes are taking over finance. And, behind the community forums, comical volumes of wealth emerging within days, and sometimes-crude humor, something tremendous and meaningful is happening.
Memes: More than JPEGs
On the surface, memes are just photos and video clips that zip around the internet in text messages, social media timelines and community forums. It’s easy to overlook them and dismiss that they may carry with them more than a humorous reference. Memes transmit subtle but powerful cultural meaning in a digitally-native way. A meme that is popular to a community or a culture often signifies something about that group and their values in that particular moment in time.
Blockchain technology has offered the capacity to financialize nearly anything that is digitally-native, so it’s only natural that crypto has captured meme culture over the years. However, meme-ified finance is not unique to crypto. Across traditional and Web3 finance, meme-ified finance has brought together powerful online groups. And now financial gamification, though still in a rudimentary state, is revealing a new path forward.
In TradFi a fringe Reddit community in 2021 became a harbinger for the type of community-first, anti-institutional, anti-sensible finance that is deeply and inextricably linked to the intersection of gamification and humorous meme culture. The r/wallstreetbets community “stuck it” to traditional finance, gaming the traditional stock market and reveling in their success with facetious online posts.
In crypto, memecoins have always played a major role — appealing to the type of community-first finance that typically spreads through the power of memes and market gamification. Early memecoin iterations like DOGE were followed by use-case-specific versions like NFT collections, and today are accelerated by next-gen, low-cost blockchains like Solana.
This raises an ongoing debate: Do memecoins need intrinsic value to be successful, or does the enthusiastic support and participation of their communities suffice? When we talk about “value,” are we referring to a solid roadmap and utility, or is the real value in the vibrant communities and the culture they create? Perhaps the true worth of memecoins lies in their ability to unite and engage people rather than conform to traditional financial metrics.
Read the full op-ed here.