Opinion: Vitalik is wrong, the crypto space really needs "stupid" Memecoins

Written by: David Canellis, Blockworks

Compiled by: Felix, PANews

If you are a celebrity, participating in the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) is no longer trendy; Memecoins are in vogue.

BAYC can be considered the most successful project, embraced by mainstream society. However, the floor price of BAYC indicates that it has become outdated.

Meanwhile, celebrity Memecoins have generated cross-industry appeal, which most cryptocurrencies lack.

The notion that Memecoins have no utility is shortsighted. Memecoins are a key component of blockchain, serving as placeholders for "real" economic activities that may shift people from traditional financial ports to blockchain ports. To achieve this, these ports must be capable of handling hundreds of thousands of users trading Memecoins with silly names simultaneously.

At this point, even if some crypto enthusiasts are more sensitive to absurd and meaningless projects, their opposition to Memecoins may misinterpret the most active group in today's crypto space.

Celebrities are meeting cryptocurrency: fast DEXs, cheap blockchains, gambling applications, Twitter, Telegram, and Discord.

Without pearl clutching, it is hard to find any flaws in this.

So, it's not surprising that Iggy Azalea or Caitlyn Jenner has their own Memecoin. At least it's not as awkward as Katy Perry's CrYpTo ClAwS, or Kim Kardashian's promotion of the SafeMoon clone EthereumMAX on Instagram, or even Randi Zuckerberg's WAGMI music video.

Compared to anything done by Jenner or Azalea's teams, these stunts seem more like saying, "Hey kids, how are you?"

Countless Memecoins have experienced surges, crashes, and stagnation (the classic "rug pull" development trajectory), while Caitlyn Jenner's Ethereum Memecoin has been soaring.

Jenner launched on Ethereum just days after going live on Solana. After rising over 1,000% on Solana, JENNER's market cap has just reached over $30 million.

It is reported that the Jenner team was deceived by a suspected serial Memecoin manipulator, and the Solana version of the token should not have been recognized at all. This has rendered the Solana token (which is rapidly depreciating) an unofficial useless item.

To help boost interest in the new token, Jenner promised that if the new Ethereum-based Jenner reaches a market cap of $50 million (currently valued at $5.8 million, while the original token's market cap is $3.6 million), Jenner would impose a 3% transaction tax to the Trump campaign team.

Currently, tens of thousands of addresses hold celebrity Memecoins. But it should be clear that these are not high-market-cap cryptocurrencies. Overall, the market cap of Memecoins, including Dogecoin and Floki, exceeds $52 billion, but their share in the crypto market (excluding Bitcoin) is less than 5%.

Jenner's two tokens, along with Iggy Azalea's MOTHER and Andrew Tate's DADDY, account for less than 1% of the entire Memecoin market.

Memecoins are criticized by crypto enthusiasts, and even Vitalik has opinions about celebrity involvement in cryptocurrency. In other words, Memecoins make cryptocurrency appear immature and, to some extent, speculative, thereby reducing the attention and funding that more legitimate, well-funded projects receive.

The Current State of Celebrity Memecoins

For true believers, cryptocurrency means everything, from the largest historical value transfer to the solarpunk revolution and anarcho-capitalist coup.

But cryptocurrency also makes no sense. It is agnostic, chaotic, and technology gives it meaning.

Although the warm, fuzzy community feeling generated when trading Memecoins with strangers on the internet may not be rational, Memecoins do have technical utility: they stress test the blockchain in a way that few token categories have done.

Past NFT games like CryptoKitties showed that Ethereum needed to scale with Layer 2s; Ordinals demonstrated that almost any EVM chain could crash due to sudden popularity, and the Memecoin frenzy proved that Solana's transaction routing indeed needs improvement.

Welcome to the celebrity crypto metaverse. These celebrities may not realize it, but their embrace of the fun of Memecoin issuance may actually provide the right push for crypto, improving infrastructure in the long run.