Memecoins May Be Giving Birth to a Future Where The Lines Between Digital and Real Are Blurred

Gamification and the future of culture.

Memecoins are cryptocurrency tokens inspired by internet memes. By now, you’ve probably heard of $DOGE coin, the first-ever memecoin launched in 2013 as a joke about Bitcoin. Billy Markus, the co-creator of Doge, sold his holdings for a modest $10,000. Today, the market cap of DOGE is $52 billion. If Billy had held onto his DOGE coins, they’d be worth almost $20 million today.

Dare I say, memecoins are here to stay. There are probably hundreds of thousands of unique memecoins in existence today — some have gone to zero, others are dormant, some are still in flux, and a few are seeing steady growth.

I have done freelance work in the crypto industry since 2018, but I never fully ventured into memecoins. I thought Bitcoin, a more established cryptocurrency, was volatile enough. When you’re just getting used to the concept of volatile markets and digital, invisible money, diving into something even less established, more volatile, and based on a meme seemed reckless. Why invest in a joke? At the time, it all seemed shady. It took me a few years to truly understand the appeal of memecoins.

The surge in Bitcoin that followed Donald Trump’s win in the 2024 presidential election gave me perspective. BTC hit $67,000 on November 5th, 2024. After Trump, a self-proclaimed pro-Bitcoin president, was declared the winner, the price shot up over 39%, currently sitting at $94,000. This is an insane amount of growth — a new all-time high for Bitcoin. As the crypto surge unfolded, I noticed that memecoins were surging alongside Bitcoin. Google trends for crypto-related searches were going up, and people were claiming massive 300x returns on memecoin investments — truly life-changing money.

The prices of these alternative coins are incredibly volatile. For example, take $PNUT, which is based on an internet-famous squirrel that was confiscated and euthanized by the New York government. Its price has shot up 1692% since November 4th, after Elon Musk tweeted about the late squirrel, saying, “America was saved by a squirrel and a meme coin!” Of course, the tweet boosted the price even further.

I decided to buy some Solana since many memecoins use the Solana blockchain due to its fast transaction speeds. Hundreds of coins are created every minute on the Solana ecosystem. You can easily and quickly send and receive Solana to buy many popular and rising memecoins. I traded, made some money, and lost some too. But I learned something that, perhaps, many already in the trenches of memecoin trading have long known: there is an insane amount of money to be made very quickly with memecoins — along with a ton of risk.

Trading these tokens so quickly, tokens that are so widely volatile, is essentially a game. It’s a competition between those with insider knowledge, those without, the holders with the most assets, chart analysts who can buy or sell at the right time, those with proper exit strategies, those using bots and AI to immediately purchase new tokens upon launch, and those who can tell which memes are here to stay and which are fleeting. Memecoin trading is, at its core, about trading memetic culture.

To me, this is the future of gaming and finance — an intersection that will be the bedrock of Web3, the future of the internet. Blockchain technology allows for instant transactions and trading of digital assets. This opens up the possibility for the auctioning and trading of in-game assets.

I believe that Artificial intelligence will serve as the automation layer to facilitate the development of assets and process transactions. AI will make scouting for tradable items intelligent and efficient — essentially gamifying economics.

Gaming will be the activity, AI will be the processing mechanism, and together they will bridge the gap to massive cryptocurrency adoption. In the future, assets and money will be tokenized, and blockchain will facilitate the movement of massive amounts of data, making NFTs more accessible. Gaming is key because people already collect digital assets in video games. If these in-game assets could be traded for currency or used to bid on other tangible and digital items, we’d see a more rapid flow of money throughout the industry and some incredible “gamer to investor” stories.

What we’re seeing now are the foundational elements of a world similar to Ready Player One (2018), where the line between the digital and real world is blurred. The world is increasingly gamified. What will this mean for the future? How will people understand culture when trading culture is the future?

This is not financial advice, but I urge you to research memecoins and cryptocurrency. The world is being digitized as we speak. I believe the players need to invest and the investors need to play. Is it crazy that we may be witnessing a collision of the serious and the unserious, the comedy meme and the business world? Could this explain the relaxed attire of business moguls due to the influence of tech industry CEOs? Will high fashion and sartorial works be that of memes? Will everything of timelessness become a meme? Is becoming meme the mummification of great ideas?