Gambling on sports parleys on an app not risky enough for ya? Attention span too short for day trading? Time to get into memecoins! They’re not regulated by the financial industry or the gambling industry. They’re sort of like buying stock, except that there’s no actual company that you’re investing in, there’s no stockbroker or broker’s license involved, and you don’t even have to be 18 to do it!
Heck, why not make your own memecoin? It’s easy to do!
First you need a meme, and a snappy symbol for the exchange platform. Make it memorable and cutesy, like Wonkcoin, or $WNK! Next, pick a blockchain to slap your brand on top of, like Ethereum, Solara, or Binance. Then, make your token. No programming skills necessary, you can punch the details into a token generator, like this one. Figure out what your supply of tokens should be. We suggest lots of zeros, because extra zeros mean extra fun! And fun is all you can sell, do not call it an “investment,” or you risk those party poopers at the SEC sniffing around.
Next, tie your coins to a digital wallet, like on Coinbase or wherever. Select the platform you’d like to use to sell your fun, a decentralized exchange, aka DEX: Uniswap, Kraken, or PancakeSwap, say. And you will need a liquidity pool, a token or two of your own. Then launch that $WNK, and, most important, hype it to your suckers friends! This thing’s going to the moon, baby! We’re all gonna be rich!! Welcome to decentralized finance, or call it DeFi if you want everyone to think you are in some kind of know.
If baking up your own artisanal memecoin is too much work, check out pump dot fun, (warning, nauseating graphics), the fastest-growing crypto app ever, which has brought in more than 300 million actual US dollars, mostly from coins with market caps under $10,000.
The low, low barrier to entry is one reason why all the memecoins in the world were worth about $20 billion in the beginning of the year and are now worth $118 billion, almost half of an entire Bezos. Dogecoin, the original memecoin, has a market cap of about $58 billion, bigger than Ford, Delta Airlines, or General Mills.
Marvel at all the meme-y things you can not-invest in! There’s a Saint Luigi coin! Horny Frog! About 100 memecoins that involve hairy, droopy balls (type “balls” in the search bar)! And so, so many Pepes, Trumps, and Elons. Eeeek, some are super racist, anti-Semitic, and/or downright gross. The place definitely attracts a type.
Pump.fun is so easy a young teenager in California made $30,000 in 10 literal minutes on a Tuesday night last month, releasing 1 billion memecoins, buying $350 of tokens of them, then cashing out to the screams of suckers on a livestream, who then doxxed and harassed his confused parents with nonstop phone calls.
The cashout, the dump part of pump-and-dumping, is called a rug pull, and there is nothing illegal about it in itself, though it will sure make some people exploding-head-angry emoji 🤯 enough to threaten your mom! In an actual stock market, that would be insider trading, but in the memecoin-o-verse, getting financially Kevin McAllistered by someone not old enough to drive yet is just part of the thrills.
Still, some dumbshits are currently mad and complaining to the SEC about Hailey Welch, aka the Hawk Tuah girl. She christened a memecoin of her own, $HAWK, and it rapidly tumesced then shriveled. Sobbed a sucker on Xitter,
$HAWK was indeed an eruptive launch, exploding to a market cap of $490 million, before withering to $60 million in just 20 minutes. But it’s not clear yet if Welch did anything illegal, or even owned any of her own coins. It could also be that the chumps who’d pumped simply abruptly decided to dump of their own accord. Apparently 96 percent of the $HAWK coin was held by 10 addresses, but there’s no evidence those were connected to Welch or her team, wallets being anonymous and all. The blockchain analysis company Chainalysis says that 54 percent of Ethereum’s ERC-20 tokens show patterns of pumpy dumpy schemes, because, like, DUH.
Claimed Welch on Xitter:
Team hasn’t sold one token and not 1 KOL [key opinion leader] was given 1 free token We tried to stop snipers [people or bots who buy as soon as liquidity is added] as best we could through high fee’s (sic) in the start of launch …
There are some things that you can do with your memecoins that will attract the attention of the SEC. You can’t pretend like you’re selling crypto assets as some kind of investment. You can’t compensate celebrities like Kim Kardashian, Logan Paul or Hailey Welch to promote your invisible electric magic beans without being transparent up front that they are getting paid to do that. Don’t do what Justin Sun done did! And you can’t intentionally defraud people who buy your droopy balls coin or $HAWK coin by promising them bonuses they never get, or claiming their money is safe when it isn’t, like saying that the coins are locked away when they actually are funding a fleet of McLarens instead. You can’t conspire to pump and dump with the intention of fraud. Otherwise, that’s about it, though New York and California and a few other states now have some rules if you want to run an entire crypto exchange or platform, and New York doesn’t allow tokens with circulating supply less than 35 percent of its total supply, aka “Sam Coins,” after Bankman-Fried, who created tokens then used them to move customer assets to his own hedge fund.
Memecoin, it’s like stocks without the stocks, or sports betting without the sports. Makes playing blackjack in Reno look like a safe retirement plan! At least in Reno you’d get some free rail drinks, and the company of some lonely truckers, if you’re lucky.
PREVIOUSLY!
[Guardian/ Wired/ Vanity Fair]
Follow everybody, why not!
